Captivology: Gaining the Attention of Your Clients

For better or worse, we live in a professional world where attention is a significant driver between success and failure.  Then and now, attention has always mattered.  What is different today is that attention has become scarcer.  Your clients just can't keep up with a world burdened by an exponential growth in information - we have the same 1,440 minutes as our caveman and cavewoman ancestors - but our day is just filled with far more information and distractions.

I recently completed Ben Parr's Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention.  He breaks the heart of Captivology down into seven captivation triggers that we need to pay attention to. These are as follows:

1. Automaticity Trigger - Using specific sensory cues like colors, symbols, and sounds to capture attention based on automatic reaction to certain stimuli.
2. Framing Trigger - Adapting to or changing somebody's view of the world so they pay attention to you.
3. Disruption Trigger - Violating people's expectations to change what they pay attention to.
4. Reward Trigger - Leveraging people's motivations for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
5. Reputation Trigger - Using the reputations of experts, authorities, and the crowd to instill trust and captivate audiences.
6. Mystery Trigger - Creating mystery, uncertainty, and suspense to keep an audience intrigued until the very end.
7. Acknowledgment Trigger - Fostering a deeper connection, because people tend to pay attention to those who provide them with validation and understanding.