Even after a long career in marketing, I’m still amazed at how many times I tell intelligent, conscious people what I’m saying and they don’t get it. Within months senior executives and I were taking notes on previous conversations, and people asserted that this was the first time they had heard the topic.

what was going on?

Overcome Mental Gatekeepers

The reality of communicating with customers, colleagues, friends, or family is that most of what we see and hear is not registered. It’s background noise. Attention is a scarce resource. To avoid being overwhelmed or sidetracked, you need to choose wisely how you use your assets. According to Dr. Judy Willis, a neurologist and former educator, our brains have a useful editing function called the reticular activation system (RAS), which is the brain’s response to incoming sensory information (sights, sounds, etc.). is the first filter in the , which determines: What comes in and what doesn’t.

Our mental gatekeepers limit our precious attention to what is relevant. Relevance means being closely connected to something important. What matters are potential threats (e.g. pain, loss, dire consequences), anticipation of pleasures (e.g. food, rewards, loved ones, relief from suffering), and curious new things.

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Relevance requires personal connection

The stronger the connection and the more important the association, the more relevant people will find your message. Clients who have returned to discuss with me repeatedly have clearly recognized that the topic is important and have shared social connections from previous interactions. , was not relevant enough to stick with. As an analyst, I may have been so absorbed in my ideas that I ignored the client’s mental environment. My research became more relevant when I made an effort to connect to their world.

Relevance, like beauty, is in the brain of the beholder. More specifically, I found that to gain relevance, someone had to connect to previously acquired knowledge. Otherwise people struggle to find a mental container to plug in what they just heard. If they can’t find that connection quickly, the mental gatekeeper will miss the message.

Do Marketing Business Partners Understand You?

I once conducted a workshop for a client who was looking to strengthen their collaboration with their marketing business partners (IT, Finance, HR, Sales, etc.). The client had to explain a lot about marketing. Before delving into them, we decided to discover what participants already knew. To encourage honest answers, we asked people what they thought others didn’t understand about marketing. The floodgates opened and covered the walls with marketing jargon that viewers thought would confuse them.

The client was amazed and humbled. The language they thought was simple and self-explanatory (content, leads, personas, segments) was like Klingon to his business partner. This game-changing feedback changed our plans for the afternoon, and we spent time answering audience questions rather than explaining what we had prepared. During the conversation, the group invented common metaphors to clarify misunderstandings on both sides. While we didn’t cover as much as we hoped, our collaborative interactions created a bond and a knowledge base to build from.

As new neural connections are established, previously irrelevant messages become clear. I noticed this reaction in my clients with the concept of “customer journey”. Many marketers have struggled to separate the marketing/sales funnel (the internal business process) from the customer journey (the cognitive path to buying decisions that occur in the customer’s head). Then the new experience will trigger an aha moment and the person will understand the essential difference. It is incomprehensible and requires you to come back again and again to build a richer picture.