How priming makes us notice more

Brand & Marketing

Have you ever learned a new word (or heard of an obscure sea mammal or an ethnic dance) and then encountered it several times in the space of a few days? You come across it in the news, you overhear it mentioned on the bus and on the radio, and the old issue of National Geographic you’re thumbing through falls open to an article on it. . .

This is priming (fortified with a few low-grade coincidences). When you skim the newspaper, half-listen to TV, or drive on the motorway, you ignore most of what’s going on around you. Only a few things command attention. Paradoxically, it is unconscious processes that choose which stimuli to pass on to full consciousness. Prior exposure to something (priming) lowers the threshold of attention, so that that something is more likely to be noticed. The upshot is that you have probably encountered your ‘new’ word or car many times before. It’s just that now you’re noticing.

Ever learned a new word and then watched the universe spend a week shouting it back at you? The universe has not launched a campaign. Your attention has acquired a new search term. That distinction matters because marketers routinely mistake “I’m noticing this everywhere” for “everyone suddenly wants this”. The dashboard version is equally seductive: a prospect clicks after seeing a search advert, so search gets crowned king while the podcast, poster and colleague who made the category recognisable receive a polite funeral.

A buyer hears “revenue leakage” in a conference talk, spots it in an email three days later and finally knows what to call a problem they have tolerated for months. Someone starts considering an electric car and, overnight, every second driveway appears to contain one. None of this is hypnosis. It is attention doing triage. Prior exposure lowers the bouncer’s rope for one idea while thousands of others remain outside.

I think that makes priming less magical and more commercially useful. Marketing does not always have to produce an immediate click like a lab rat pressing a lever. Sometimes its job is to plant a clean, distinctive idea that becomes visible when the relevant moment arrives. Measure only the final touch and you will optimise for the person standing at the till, then sack everyone who got the customer into the shop.