LiSeven Marketing & Communications

There are various angles to start a story. Some start with a question: Did you know…?. The other starts with an emotional statement: Hope has arisen… Below are some of the options I have for this topic:

Option 1: Did you know that sustaining attention is as important as getting attention in gaining brand awareness and sales? However, many have missed that and only focus on spending lavishly on ads and promotion, leaving untouched room to improve in ads’ Return on Investment.

Option 2: In the consumer language research area, recent research starts investigating the importance of sustaining attention through multimethod analysis such as natural language processing methods and experiments.

Option 3: All ads can cause increase awareness. But not all ads can keep people’s attention. This article will provide anyone, who wants to hold their audiences’ attention, a true insight on how to create more engaging content. Read more to know how.

Which option do you think may keep you reading more? You can share your comment or keep it in your thoughts. What I want to convey here is that do not overlook the importance of sustaining attention. And that there are tactics to help you hold people’s attention.

The content of this article mainly comes from this research paper: “What Hold Attention? Linguistic Drivers of Engagement“, recently published on the Journal of Marketing. For those who would like to have a quick recap of this paper, here are key points that you can find in its summary:

1. Processing ease plays an important role in keeping attention. Content that is easier to be processed (i.e. more readable) can help sustain attention.
2. Content that uses more emotional language that can evoke emotions with high uncertainty and arousal (e.g. fear, anxiety, and hope) can help sustain attention.

You can stop here if you would like to. But if you are curious about how to define processing ease and how to understand specific emotions and their differing effect on attitudes and behaviors, you should continue as more compelling results will be conveyed later.

Why sustaining attention is important?

Imagine the moment you picked a movie to watch, you never watched it before but its title caught your attention. Likewise, a good title helps bring more opportunities and awareness to your brand. But good content that can sustain attention till the end can indeed help you find your true audience, who can bring benefits to your work or your business. Extant researches suggest that sustaining attention helps deepen brand relationships, encourage learning, and drive purchases (Berger et al., 2023; Schweidel &Wendy, 2016).

One of the problems I found with digital performance metrics is that people tend to focus on surface metrics such as impressions, views, clicks, likes, and shares, those that only measure how much attention the audience has towards the ads. However, can it truly convey how much people understand about the ads, especially when you want to persuade a new behavior change in your ads? Certainly, impressions cannot encourage actions when people do not actually consume its content.

So, what makes some content more likely to sustain attention than others?

Berger and his colleagues propose that processing ease and emotion both play an important role in holding attention. In their What Hold Attention? Linguistic Drivers of Engagement paper, they conducted a multimethod investigation in this regard. In Study 1, they applied natural language processing to analyze the consumption of over 35,400 pieces of articles. In Study 2 and 3, they ran experiments to test whether different negative emotional content (including sadness, anxiety, and anger) and positive emotional content (including hope and excitement) have differing effects on the article’s ability to sustain attention.

Processing ease “describes how much cognitive effort text requires to process” (Berger et al.,2023). Reading a beginner comic book is easier than reading a university textbook. It is easier because the words are familiar and more concrete to understand; because there is not much jargon used in the comic book; and because the sentences are shorter and less syntactically complex.

For communicators and advertisers, it’s important to be mindful of the effort the audiences take to read the content. Simpler content makes people comprehend it easily. Less effort means convenient consumption. Without proper consideration of the processing ease, people with mid and low reading proficiency can have comprehension problems (Eslami, 2014).

Scholars have come up with several approaches to measure processing ease. Some of them are too complicated to be applied in general. My suggestion is that we should follow these approaches to shape our content with a desirable readability level.

1. Use shorter words and sentences. For sentences, 12-13 words per sentence create simple sentences (Eslami, 2014). Sentences in academic journals usually have a length of more than 30 words, making up mainly complex and compound-complex types of sentences.
2. Try to use concrete words. For example, to describe concreteness, I can refer to an academic definition of “how palpable the object the word refers to is” (Paetzold & Specia, 2016). However, this explanation is not concrete enough. Instead, I can explain that concreteness refers to how details the word can describe (e.g. a chair is more concrete than furniture, furniture is more concrete than interior design)
3. Use words with high familiarity. Different people will have different levels of vocabularies. However, knowing your target audience’s readability level will shine more lights on how to write comprehensible content. For example, writing general content for the general public is different from writing academic content for professionals. Reading the original article – What Holds Attention? Linguistic Drivers of Engagement, you will find that its content is much harder to consume than my article here.
4. Run readability tests to understand your writing mechanism. Gunning Fox Index or Flesch–Kincaid readability test are the two most popular readability tests. These tests look at the average number of texts per sentence and the number of complicated words (i.e. words with more syllables). A grade 6-8 level in the Flesh-Kincaid test is desirable for your content as almost 80% of the general public can comprehend it.

Now we all understand processing ease and its effect on reading comprehension and audiences’ retained attention. In the next part, I will discuss about the emotional aspect of language.

Emotions are multidimensional feelings that reflect information about how people perceive their social and physical surroundings (e.g. whether it is alarming or not-to-bothering; whether it is certain or uncertain; whether it is rewarding or losing). Rather than thinking of emotion as an emotional state of negative versus positive valence, recent marketing and communication scholars are considering the discrete emotions approach. This approach is more fine-grained as it deconstructs specific emotions into a function of several information-rich dimensions to understand their essential differences among emotions and their tendencies toward people’s perceived persuasiveness, attitude, and behaviors (see DeSteno et al., 2004; Tiedens & Linton, 2001; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; Raghunathan & Pham, 1999; Achar et al., 2016; So et al., 2015).

In the context of audiences’ attention, the results indicate that whether emotional language sustains attention depends on the link between specific emotions and their associated level of uncertainty, and arousal.

The role of uncertainty

Uncertainty differentiates emotions in the degree to which individuals feel certain or uncertain of something (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). For example, anger and pride are characterized by high certainty and lead people to feel certain about their situation (e.g. I’m angry because the waiter ignored me. I’m proud of my A+ score in the final exam). On the other hand, anxiety, hope, and surprise tend to be characterized by uncertainty and uncertainty reduction (Raghunathan & Pham, 1999). To resolve this high uncertainty level, one tends to take actions that help overcome it. For example, people who are anxious about breast cancer tend to read more information that resolves the uncertainty about that cancer. This action tendency explains why the language that induces high-uncertainty emotion can retain attention.

The role of arousal

Arousal is a “state of being physiology alert, awake, and attentive” (Heilman, 1997). A great deal of research finds that emotionally arousing stimuli attract attention. In the recent research paper about the effect of arousal on Word of Mouth, the authors suggest that arousal should be described according to level of energetic and tense (Teeny et al, 2020). High Energetic is elicited after or in anticipation of positive stimuli, making ones feel alerted and excited. On the other hand, High Tense refers to the feelings of anxiety and restlessness and is usually related to negative affect. (Teeny et al, 2020).

In this sense, language related to high energetic arousal (e.g. excitement, hope) should sustain attention as it increases the state of vigilance (Pham, 2004). Besides, language related to high tense arousal (e.g. anxiety) should also encourage content consumption as people desire to find solutions that can elevate this tense feeling.

Reference list:

Achar, C., So, J., Agrawal, N., & Duhachek, A. (2016). What we feel and why we buy: the influence of emotions on consumer decision-making. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 166-170.

Berger, J., Moe, W. W., & Schweidel, D. A. (2023). What Holds Attention? Linguistic Drivers of Engagement. Journal of Marketing, 87(5), 793-809. https://doi-org.proxy.hil.unb.ca/10.1177/00222429231152880

DeSteno, D., Petty, R. E., Rucker, D. D., Wegener, D. T., & Braverman, J. (2004). Discrete emotions and persuasion: the role of emotion-induced expectancies. Journal of personality and social psychology, 86(1), 43. Download link.

Eslami, H. (2014). The effect of syntactic simplicity and complexity on the readability of the text. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 5(5), 1185. Download link.

Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level. Readable. Retrieved from: https://readable.com/readability/flesch-reading-ease-flesch-kincaid-grade-level/

Pham, Michel Tuan. “The logic of feeling.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 14, no. 4 (2004): 360-369.

Raghunathan, R., & Pham, M. T. (1999). All negative moods are not equal: Motivational influences of anxiety and sadness on decision making. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 79(1), 56-77.

Schweidel, D. A., & Moe, W. W. (2016). Binge Watching and Advertising. Journal of Marketing, 80(5), 1-19. https://doi-org.proxy.hil.unb.ca/10.1509/jm.15.0258

Smith, C. A., & Ellsworth, P. C. (1985). Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 48(4), 813. Download link.

So, J., Achar, C., Han, D., Agrawal, N., Duhachek, A., & Maheswaran, D. (2015). The psychology of appraisal: Specific emotions and decision-making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(3), 359-371. https://doi.org/10.1080/10577400701389706

Teeny, J., Deng, X., & Unnava, H. R. (2020). The “buzz” behind the buzz matters: Energetic and tense arousal as separate motivations for word of mouth. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(3), 429-446.