Marketers Losing Ground in the Clutter War

Before we can sell, we must build the brand. Before we can build the brand, we must generate awareness. Before we can generate awareness, we must break through the increasingly impenetrable obstacle known as clutter.

Clutter is created by the number of brands multiplied by the number of messages competing for a customer's attention. The current estimate of the result of this multiplication is 1600 commercial messages a day. That's about 500,000 messages a year.

As clutter increases, the efficacy of marketing communications lessens.

The relative share of voice of any one message decreases as the number of competing messages increases. And as clutter increases consumers switch off from the message source.

Two billboards in a town square will result in half the amount of exposure per billboard than one would have gained. Put up four billboards in the square, so that the consumer is surrounded on all sides by promotion, and it's likely that none will be noticed.

Logically, therefore, one would expect the marketing industry to control clutter. Unfortunately, market forces do not always operate on a logical basis. The response from marketers to clutter has been to increase the amount of promotional materials. In recent years the number of commercial minutes per hour of television has increased. So too has the number of print ads carried by most magazines and newspapers. Worse still, advertisers have attempted to beat clutter by extending their promotional messages into ambient media. Now ads reach out to us from all directions: from the floor, from above the urinal, from someone's forehead, from wherever we least expect to encounter commercial messages (and therefore still pay attention).

The direct marketing industry tried to learn from the lessons of advertising.

Direct marketers boasted of the pinpoint accuracy of their approaches and that everyone opens a letter if it is addressed to them. Within ten years, of course, clutter had sewn an even more deadly crop within the direct industry. Mass-mailings and anodyne telemarketing resulted in an even more cluttered environment for direct marketers. The ultimate proof of this comes in the shape of the hundreds of seminars that offer 'clutter-breaking techniques' to direct marketers who want to 'rise above the noise'.

And now there is a third generation of clutter. Readers may have noticed the increase in spam e-mails they have received recently. Ten billion spam e-mails are sent every day - 25 times more spam than was sent last year. In the US, 37% of all e-mails received this year are derived from spam.

There are some small rays of hope. As the contagion of clutter increases, public relations becomes ever more important because it is, by design, immune to the disease. The value of relationships with existing customers also comes to the fore. Permission marketing, where customers accept and welcome your approaches, is not a myth. It is merely the under-used apotheosis of communication in an era of clutter.