Today’s consumers (and customers) live in a cluttered world of information overload. There is more content available than ever before, and there is more competition for the attention of consumers.

Business owners are fighting a war for attention to cut through all the clutter and drive business results. To succeed, Brands must be better at grabbing attention and building strong brand associations than competitors.

The Associative Attention framework helps brand owners achieve this. It is built on the fact that attention itself is not the end goal, but it is an important step towards sales.

To drive sales, attention needs to build mental associations. These are associations that establish your brand, product, or service firmly in the minds of your potential consumers.

This is important as consumers buy the brands that are ‘mentally available’. Meaning, consumers tend to buy brands they are familiar with and come to mind in a buying situation. If your brand doesn’t come to mind in a buying situation, it is unlikely that it gets bought.

WHAT you need to build attention for. These are the associations you need to build in the minds of consumer, i.e. when to think of your brand and how to recognise it. We call them Category Entry Points (CEPs) and Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs) as coined by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Australia.

HOW we actually get attention for our brand so we can build these associations. This includes the media that you use and the creative you develop. When we say creative, we use it as a catch-all to include advertising, POS and packaging.

All these parts on their own are important, but where the true magic happens is when all these parts are joined together. Brands that connect the dots between the different parts of the WHAT and the HOW can see transformational executions. This is what the Associative Attention framework helps to achieve.

We’ve created a quick Health Check that provides you with a high-level view of how your organisation is doing on Associative Attention and what areas may require improvements.

You can take the Health Check below

If you want to know more about the Associative Attention framework and how to bring it to life for your brand, get in touch with Max Stricker.

The framework was first published exclusively by WARC.com and has received many positive reviews. If you want to read the full article, just fill out your details to download a copy.