Every single day we are inundated with thousands of messages; billboards, radio spots, tv ads, flyers, posters, signs, letters, phone calls, tweets etcetera etcetera ad nauseum.

It’s no wonder that your message is prone to getting lost in this maelstrom of messages. Society is so desensitised to messages that we hardly pay attention to messages that are truly important (do you listen the the safety advice presentation prior to take off when you fly?).

Where is your message?

Scientists have a term for being thus desensitised. It is downregulation. Wikipedia defines downregulation (in science-speak) as “the process by which a cell decreases the quantity of a cellular component, such as RNA or protein, in response to an external variable.” An example of downregulation (again from Wikipedia) is “the cellular decrease in the number of receptors to a molecule, such as a hormone or neurotransmitter, which reduces the cell’s sensitivity to the molecule.”

Here’s an example that may make more sense: You’re at a party, a lady enters the room wearing a very strong perfume, it’s overpowering, you can’t smell anything else. However, after a while the smell isn’t as strong and you don’t notice it as much. Eventually, you no longer notice the smell. Your nasal receptors have downregulated and your sensitivity to the smell has been blunted. This same principle applies to your marketing message.

Attracting people to your product or service is not an easy as it used to be. In decades passed it was enough to throw some money at a TV spot and wait for the phone to ring. Today, that just doesn’t work. No-one is really paying attention to the TV. The same is true of banner advertising on websites. When was the last time that you made a purchase based solely on a TV spot or clicked on an unsolicited banner ad and proceeded to purchase something?

Society is distracted, desensited and impatient but people still want to buy. This is both good and bad for the small business owner. The challenge is getting noticed. You do want to get noticed don’t you?

Let’s go back to the perfume example for a moment. If the lady was to leave the room for some time your blunted receptors would return to their normal state as the cause of the downregulation has been removed. However, when the lady returns, whammo! the strong smell is back again and you are searching for a gas mask. The cycle recommences and the lady is getting noticed (again).

So, how do you get noticed? Perhaps you could pile on the perfume. The perfume trick works for the lady in our example because she’s poured it on, has very little competition in the room and is doing all she can to get noticed. And she is certainly making an impact (for better or for worse). You could apply this to your marketing if all the other messages disappeared OR if your message is so amazing, so remarkable (a nod here to Seth Godin and Purple Cow) that it stands out and gets noticed. I am a big advocate of being remarkable but before you go head-to-head with other messages using the perfume approach you need to tighten up.

First, you must tightly define your message. It may take some time to tighten up. It is a matter of trial, error and patience. Test, test and test again. Here’s a real world example from one of my businesses:

CrossFit Victoria is a provider of fitness coaching. The fitness industry is huge. Competition is rampant. Choices are multitude and options confuse and confound potential gym goers. There is no way that this business can compete with every other provider in the industry. So, we sliced and diced until we found our niche: elite fitness. Then we found CrossFit and tightened our niche too.

Take a moment to Google “fitness”, now limit your search to Australia. We didn’t even come close to the top of those search results. You can try the same exercise for “personal trainer” and for “gym”. Same result. But if you search for “CrossFit”, you will notice a massive difference. As of writing this, we rank third worldwide (and we fluctuate from position two to three based on changes in Google’s ranking algorithm and our efforts to spread our message online).

CrossFit is a little different

We have tightened our message so much that we only aim for those people who know about CrossFit. We don’t compete with businesses providing fitness training, we compete with businesses providing CrossFit training. An added bonus is that we only attract the kinds of clients that we want to train. We call them “intelligent exercisers”.

Now, we didn’t get to this position overnight. We agonised for a long time about how to differentiate ourselves from the pack. CrossFit was our answer. The Google results are only an example of our efforts. We do a lot of other things in the background as well. Our approach to fitness training is contrary and so is our approach to marketing.

How can you apply this? By tightening your message. Next, you have to work out how to put your message out there and get noticed.

You can try to pile on the perfume. This will get you noticed. But … people will get desensitised to your message and forget about you unless you leave the room and then return (or pour on even more perfume). This approached could be very costly and possibly hit-and-miss. Maybe it’s suitable for a single product launch but I doubt it’s the right approach for getting your business noticed.

I suggest that you find a way to slowly infiltrate the maelstrom of messages. Do something remarkable. Pursue virtuosity and consistency in your message and its presentation. Give something away. Talk to people. Create believers. Find mavens (as Malcolm Gladwell advises in The Tipping Point). And be patient.

Some valuable resources:

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath