With so much to for consumers to focus on these days there is a great need for marketing people to be diligent in making sure that their ads and web sites attract attention. Before we go further, let's go over some basic principles about attention. First, attention is selective. Selectivity is extremely important because the number of stimuli to which we are exposed at any given time is potentially overwhelming. Of course, the fact that attention is selective means that consumers can also become distracted-focusing on something new that grabs their attention.
Second attention is capable of being divided.
Interestingly, we can only divide our attention to things that are really familiar and easy to process. Use the following as an example. If you are in a familiar store, you can easily chat with a companion about an unrelated topic. But in an unfamiliar store, we need to stop talking and take in the environment. If you are on a web-site that has lots of stuff going on, you can either focus on a lot stuff but not think about them much, or decide to focus on one thing and think about it a lot.