As marketers, we often talk about the importance of attention, and rightfully so. But we also need to talk about what might cause consumers to avoid paying attention to your message.

A lot has changed in the last twenty years. In 2004, MySpace made history as the first online networking site to acquire a total of a million monthly active users, a momentous milestone at the time.

Over the last few years, an illuminating series of studies about false beliefs and misperceptions about the state of the world has been underway. In the first of these studies (known as “The Gapminder Misconception Study”) published back in 2017, the researchers discovered that misperceptions among the general population appear to be the norm rather than the exception, especially among citizens of wealthier nations.

Towards the end of the 18th century, an ideological movement took root in the western hemisphere. Romanticism, as it came to be known, firmly associated itself with the emotional, irrational, and the imaginative parts of the human condition.

We all have our preferred way of gathering information from the world. Some of us read, many of us watch television or interact with social media, and some of us even prefer to take in our information via the structure of online or in-person meetings (remember those?).