You Don’t Have an Attention Problem
You Have a Memory Problem
Most leadership teams treat marketing like plumbing. Turn on spend, demand flows. Turn it off, it stops. The problem is that markets do not work like pipes. They work like minds.
If buyers cannot recall you at the moment they enter the category, you do not exist in the category.
That sentence is uncomfortable because it demolishes the comfortable myths, that quality wins, that superior product sells itself, that a great story will spread if you post often enough. In reality, buying decisions are made under cognitive pressure. People choose what comes to mind. They choose the brand that is easiest to retrieve.
This is why so many brands look busy and feel invisible.
Most leadership teams think they have an attention problem. Traffic is flat, CAC is rising, the pipeline feels fragile, so the instinct is to publish more, spend more, and shout louder.
But in most categories, attention is not the constraint.
Memory is.
Buyers rarely choose the best option on the page. They choose the first credible option their mind can retrieve when a trigger hits, a deadline, a board question, a fresh risk, a sudden urgency. In those moments, the brand that is easiest to recall becomes the brand that is easiest to buy.
If buyers cannot recall you at the moment they enter the category, you do not exist in the category.
That is why many companies can be competent, active, and even admired, while still losing the only battle that matters, being the brand that comes to mind first when the moment of need arrives.
The metric is not the strategy
In the last few years, “Share of Search” has become a popular signal, partly because it offers a simple external read of demand. IPA work on Share of Search argues it can be a useful indicator, and in many categories it can move ahead of market share, creating a window where demand shifts are visible before revenue fully follows.
That is valuable. But it is also where many teams stop. They treat the metric as the scoreboard, then confuse the scoreboard with the game.
The real question is not “How do we get more search?”
The real question is “What makes people think of us, before they search?”
Share of Search is an output. Memory is the input.
What actually drives demand, mental availability
Analyses of IPA effectiveness case studies argue that long-term brand building and short-term activation work through different mechanisms, and that durable growth needs both, not one pretending to be the other. (thinkbox.tv)
Marketing science gives us a clean lens for what “brand building” really means in practice. Ehrenberg-Bass research popularised the idea of mental availability. Jenni Romaniuk operationalised it through Category Entry Points, which are the situations that trigger category thinking, and the cues that make a brand easy to retrieve in those situations. (LinkedIn Business Solutions)
To make that tangible, consider enterprise security. Category Entry Points are not “we are secure.” They are moments like “a new compliance deadline,” “a breach at a peer,” or “a board-level risk review.” These are the triggers that switch the category on in a buyer’s mind. (Hallam)
This is not “fluffy brand.” This is how demand becomes cheaper over time.
The enemy narrative, attention solves everything
The modern enemy narrative is seductively simple: if we get enough attention, growth will follow.
Attention is not nothing. But attention without memory is leakage.
You can buy impressions, clicks, even meetings.
But if your category buyers cannot retrieve you when need occurs, you pay again and again for the same privilege of being noticed.
That is not a growth strategy. That is rent.
The economic consequences show up in three places:
CAC inflation
If you are not easy to recall, you must outbid competitors at every touchpoint.
Sales cycle drag
If prospects do not already recognise what you stand for, sales has to educate before it can persuade.
Margin compression
If you are not recalled as a category reference point, you compete on features and price, not meaning and certainty.
Over five years, this is how good companies stay stuck.
Build memory infrastructure
If you lead a business, the strategic move is to treat memory like infrastructure, not like campaign output.
Here is the executive-level playbook.
1) Map the buying moments that matter
Identify the handful of Category Entry Points that drive most category demand. Not your internal use cases. The buyer’s triggers, pressures, and “we need to fix this” moments. (LinkedIn Business Solutions)
2) Choose the cues you will repeat for years
Distinctive Brand Assets are not decoration. They are retrieval cues. When repeated consistently, they reduce cognitive effort and increase recognition at speed. (marketingscience.info)
Most teams sabotage this step by constantly refreshing creative in the name of novelty. Romaniuk’s body of work on distinctive assets and recognition is clear on the practical implication, frequent asset changes weaken recognition, which weakens mental availability. Consistency is an economic choice, not a creative compromise. (marketingscience.info)
3) Use Share of Search as a diagnostic, not a leadership goal
Share of Search can help indicate demand direction, but it should not become the objective. (IPA)
The objective is to build a brand that is distinctive and has sufficient centrality in the category to be a reference point buyers reach for first. That balance has implications for pricing power, growth choices, and risk. (Harvard Business Review)
When you build memory infrastructure, Share of Search becomes the exhaust, not the engine.
The board-level question that changes everything
Ask this in your next leadership meeting:
“When our buyer hits the moment of need, what do they recall first, and why would it be us?”
If you cannot answer that in one sentence, you are not running marketing. You are running activity.
Where to start, a practical diagnostic
Most brands do not need more content. They need fewer signals, repeated with more discipline, tied to the buying moments that actually trigger demand.
That starts with three choices.
First, name the Category Entry Points you want to own.
Not “our features,” but the buyer’s moments of need, the triggers that switch the category on. Romaniuk’s work frames these entry points as building blocks of mental availability, meaning they shape what gets recalled when the moment arrives.
Second, choose the cues you will repeat for years.
Distinctive assets are not a creative flourish. They are retrieval cues. If you keep changing them, you keep resetting recognition. Consistency is not aesthetic restraint. It is an economic decision.
Third, use Share of Search as a diagnostic, not a leadership goal.
IPA’s work and related analysis suggest it can indicate shifts in demand and can lead market share movements in some contexts. Useful. But still a symptom. The cause is memory.
The board-level question worth sitting with
The best marketing question is not “What are we running next quarter?”
It is this:
“When our buyer hits the moment of need, what do they recall first?”
HBR’s centrality and distinctiveness framing is useful here. Distinctiveness helps you stand apart. Centrality helps you become a reference point, the brand buyers use to orient the category. The strategic goal is not to be famous. It is to be the brand that comes to mind first, in the moments that matter.
And that is the uncomfortable part.
Because it means the competition is not only other brands.
It is the buyer’s default memory.
A final thought, and a different definition of “performance”
Short-term activation will always feel safer, because it reports back quickly. But durable growth is built through different mechanisms. The IPA Awards case studies argue that long-term brand building and short-term activation serve different roles, and both are needed to achieve sustainable results rather than temporary spikes.
So if your dashboards are telling you you have an attention problem, consider the possibility that they are merely diagnosing the surface.
Attention is what people give you.
Memory is what they keep.
And the brands that win over time are not the ones that shout the loudest.
They are the ones that are easiest to recall when the moment arrives.
If you want to be rigorous about this, start with a FlightCheck audit of recall, entry points, and cues. Not because it is “brand work.”
Because it is the discipline of making future revenue cheaper.
Let’s conquer together!
