“The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon that describes the brain's ability to focus its auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a wide range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room”. Or when you hear the dog crying in the middle of the night (while your partner’s snoring is perfectly ignored). The Cocktail Party Effect is the epitome of selective attention, the nowadays version of Romans’ “divide et impera” motto. If it’s sad to realize that we cannot process everything… How do we attract and make the most of the portion of attention we can aim for?
Attention is a treasured resource: call it wisely
The Cocktail Party Phenomenon is one of the first notions that the young psychologist comes across shortly after starting his studies. It is the typical science fact you can quote to dinner without sounding too pleased with yourself. But if you think about it, it is quite impressive: young parents would wake up in the middle of the night if their baby’s crying, but not if other noises occur. If you are in a room full of people, you can actually “focus” on just one among the three or four ongoing conversations, without losing a single word. It's like our brain’s specifically designed to choose which bits of information to process. And it really is just like that: in every situation, there are a potentially infinite number of stimuli to process. Each time we observe something, we simultaneously choose a point of view (see “All the world’s a stage” article for more insights on this topic). Daniel Kahneman proposed a model in which he describes attention in terms, not of mere selection, but of capacity. For Kahneman, attention is a resource to be distributed among various stimuli, then an allocation policy acts to distribute the available attention among a variety of possible activities: those deemed most important will have the most attention given to them. The allocation policy is affected by enduring dispositions (automatic influences based on personality) and momentary intentions (a conscious decision to attend to something). Kahneman's model explains the Cocktail Party Effect as a phenomenon in which momentary intentions allow one to expressly focus on a particular auditory stimulus.
Is this a marketing lesson?
It is, indeed! We are sure that, to the careful reader, the symmetry did not go unnoticed. Multiple stimuli…Like billboards bombarding or social media overexposure? Enduring dispositions… Like the target's needs and values? Momentary intentions…Like the one detail that attracts your eye? Yes, indeed: very well, careful reader.
Every science is, in its roots, a psychological science: because in the end, there must be a human brain to process it.
The Cocktail Party Effect is an exquisite metaphor for advertising (in all its forms: websites, social media, campaigns…). What lies at its core are the concepts that:
1. You’re not acting solo, you’re always acting on a stage where many many actors are already playing their parts
2. What you hear, what you see, what you think, depends on all the previous experiences you have had (somebody would say that depends on “who you are”)
3. What's around you matters: all the things that will most likely influence your attention, are already there.
So, if you want to turn basic psychology into a marketing lesson, you should remember that…
In all your articles, you never go straight to the communications implications!
That’s absolutely right! We like to write what people don’t expect us to. In a language that’s not the one you’d expect from a “communication agency” or whatever you usually call people like us. In fact there’s no people like us (and everybody says that)... But we do not want to make the client happy. We want to provoke his/her company. We do not want to make big works: we want to make the ones that matter (to us, primarily).
And so, what does the Cocktail Party Effect teach us about good communication? The very same things that our Grandmas could have told us when we were littles…
1. You have to share the stage with other people: get to know them first!
2. “You just hear what you want to hear”... for sure, and that’s not gonna change.
3. You have to be careful of what's around you. And you have to use it to stand out.
If we only hear what we want or need to hear, while ignoring the rest, there is a reason. An important reason that has its roots in evolutionary psychology (but alas, this will be another lesson). For now we just invite the real or potential client, to think of his/her marketing activities as the dress and the words he would choose to attend a big party. Yes, like Great Gatsby’s ones. How to find the "right" words? And which dress would be "perfect"?
