What you don’t know about attention might hurt your marketing strategy

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Welcome to another fine edition of Marketing Under The Influence

"Over the past five years, there’s been a growing interest with “attention” in B2B marketing. We’ve been told we’re in an attention economy. Everywhere you look, someone is reminding us that attention spans are shrinking. A plethora of redundant studies have been conducted to demonstrate the fact that short-form is the new black and long-form is either dying or dead already.

But recently, B2B marketers are turning their attention to a different word, one I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot in 2025 — “mindshare”.

The problem (because there’s always a problem, isn’t there?) with this growing interest in mindshare, however, is it’s not a new term or concept. And, like so many other things in B2B, I worry that mindshare will be yet another buzzword by the time this edition of Marketing Under The Influence turns one year old.

But perhaps, just perhaps, we can rectify the situation before it spirals out of control.

Prepare to question everything you know about attention

Before we delve into understanding the true meaning of mindshare before it’s lost to meme culture, we need to address the elephant in the room when it comes to attention.

You probably think you know attention. But do you really? You might be surprised to know you actually don't. And, when you do, you're not going to be happy when you find out what it's costing you. Just don't kill the messenger, OK? OK…

So, you know the whole “attention spans are shrinking” thing? Well, it’s not really true. Yes, there’s an insane amount of demand for short-form content. But this correlation conveniently ignores two aspects of reality:

1. We spend anywhere between 12-15 hours a day consuming content.

2. We generate roughly 375 gigabytes of data (the equivalent of over 237 million years of music) online every 24 hours.

The truth is we aren’t losing focus — we’re overwhelmed by choice. It’s not about short-form content winning and long-form dying. It’s about the survival of the most considered. Because, when faced with an endless buffet, we grab what’s easiest to decide on — not necessarily what’s best.

Matt Locke at Storythings said it best last year in his newsletter Attention Matters, “we don’t have short attention spans, we have short consideration spans. There is so much content flying at us every minute, we have to make hundreds of decisions a day about what to focus our attention on.”

Got that? Because we’re not out of the woods yet.

The revelation that attention spans aren’t shrinking should makes it easier to swallow an even harder pill: attention isn’t binary, it’s a consideration journey all of us continuously loop through hundreds of thousands of times a day consciously and subconsciously.

Many people and a whole lot of B2B marketers view attention as a short-term, binary state. Someone is either paying attention or they’re not. But attention isn’t on/off, focused/unfocused, attentive/inattentive.

I call this misunderstanding the binary attention fallacy. And it’s costing you business and stunting your ability to acquire customers. In a paper published by Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute with The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, only B2B customers are more likely to do business with brands they despise than ones they’re unfamiliar with.

There are several establish theories in both psychology and marketing, particularly in the realms of customer psychology and attention research, that I can cite describing attention as operating along a spectrum of engagement levels.

But we’re marketers, dammit, not neuroscientists — so here’s a framework for understanding attention better — I call it the attention-consideration journey:

While I can frame the attention-consideration journey in the context of B2B, perhaps it’s more helpful to use a scenario we’re all too familiar with… choosing something to watch on Netflix (or any other streaming platform).

Before you even decide what to watch, you're scrolling, you're browsing the menus. The thumbnails, the autoplay trailers — they're all trying to grab you, to make you curious enough to click through to the content. This is the first stage of attention — pique attention.

Once you click on something, it has to merit your attention. At this stage, you're still evaluating, looking for credibility markers to discern whether or not the content is worth your attention. This is the second stage of attention — merit attention.

After choosing something to watch, there's still a chance for you to bail on the content or close Netflix altogether. It's at this stage the content needs to draw you in and deliver on its promise. This is the third stage of attention — reward attention.

And finally, when the payoff is real and the content met or exceeded the value expected, your interest is converted into commitment. Maybe you watch another episode (or the whole season) or decide to recommend the content to everyone in your social network. This is the fourth and final stage of attention — convert attention.

What this framework demonstrates is that, while our primate brains can easily be hacked, that’s just the first step: pique attention. From there, further attention must be merited, rewarded, and converted until it’s sustained — which leads us to mindshare.

Sign this petition to prevent “mindshare” from becoming another B2B buzzword

Now that we’re aware the traditional view of attention as a binary state has evolved and know that research indicates it’s actually a spectrum rather than a simple on/off light switch, let’s turn our attention to B2B marketing’s shiny new object — mindshare.

In addition to the growing interest in mindshare on YouTube, I’ve anecdotally started to see the term used more frequently in the newsletters and LinkedIn posts of B2B marketers.

My suspicion is this uptick is related to two phenomena occurring today:

1. “Attention” as a topic is overly saturated today, making “mindshare” a more appealing alternative among marketers seeking fresh angles to engage their audiences.

2. “Mindshare” is a much stickier than “mental availability,” a term originating from Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow” and amplified by research from Ehrenberg-Bass and other marketing effectiveness experts.

Don’t get me wrong. The growing interest in and discussion around mindshare is a good thing. Especially in B2B marketing, where customers are increasingly relying on their memory to choose solutions when faced with buying decisions. For example, when a CTO needs to upgrade the company’s cloud storage, they don’t search Google for “best cloud storage solutions” — they immediately think of Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

But mindshare isn’t a new concept in marketing. Al Ries and Jack Trout, the godfathers of positioning and authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, urged brands to seize mindshare back in 1980. And while they never explicitly defined the term for us in their work, marketers have been in agreement for decades that mindshare is built through sustained attention.

Although some marketers recognize that capturing attention is the pathway to growing mindshare, an increasing number of them are mistakenly treating them as distinctly separate concepts (e.g., “Don’t get attention, earn mindshare”) when they’re deeply interconnected.

The reason this matters has nothing to do with my ego or some innate need for correctness. In fact, I’m adamant about this because B2B marketers who move away from viewing attention and mindshare in isolation will be better positioned for the next era of B2B, where brand-building (aka mindshare) and demand generation aren’t mutually exclusive but complementary.

Pay no mind to the marketer behind the curtain

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk about attention and mindshare — two topics I’m going to be exploring even more in 2025 here on Marketing Under The Influence.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out Brand to demand: The new-ish rules for the next era of B2B marketing. The response to my summary of where this profession is heading not just next year but over the next decade has been overwhelmingly positive.

For now, though, I’m signing off until the first week of 2025.

Until then,

Ronnie

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