Attention seeking is, no doubt, a phenomenon associated with many negative connotations. When used along with popular slangs of English language, it certainly becomes quite an offensive label. But have you ever wondered what attention seeking really is? Why do so many people go out of their way just to get other people’s attention?
Having an innate ability (service) or being able to create something of value (product) are the hard ways to get attention.
Well, apart from seeking acceptance, it is the desire to feel good by standing out of the crowd. While the emphasis here is on being different, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the very desire in itself is grounded in reality for a lot of people. Having an innate ability (service) or being able to create something of value (product) are the hard ways to get attention and that too in a positive and admirable way.
Attention may even come effortlessly as a by-product of doing something you really love.
But when someone just doesn’t have the right tools in the shed to project or create something that draws attention, they turn to other more trivial ways to achieve what they desire. While it does work sometimes, along comes with it a very negative repute. That’s how attention seeking gets a bad name. However, with the right skills or creativity, standing out isn’t a very difficult thing to do. It may even come effortlessly as a by-product of doing something you really love.
As individuals, we all want different things. Some of us like to go out a lot, love socializing and making friends. Others might be total introverts who may prefer to seek refuge in the open pages of their favorite book instead of being in a social setting. Being social animals, we all want to have attention in one form or the other. Some like being loved by lots of people while others remain content having the attention of their few loved ones.
Attention seeking is at the heart of business profitability.
When we apply this to a grand scheme of things, we notice that things aren’t much different on a macro scale either. Applying this analogy to the business world, we find that attention seeking is at the heart of business profitability. All businesses want to draw attention from one audience segment or the other by successfully advertising and promoting their services or products. While attention seeking on a personal level is for emotional satisfaction, in the world of business, financial gain is the primary motive.
In the business world, attention seeking sheds its negative connotations to evolve into presentation.
Since every business needs to stay afloat by being profitable, the phenomenon of attention seeking sheds its negative connotations to evolve into something different. We call it “presentation”. What seemed like an emotional desire on a personal scale becomes a conscious choice in the grand scheme of things. The basic premise, however, remains the same.
We have all heard of how first impressions are, most of the time, last impressions. This is especially true in the case of customers entering retail stores to be bombarded with tons of adverts and loads of products calling them out in anticipation. Same is true for service providers who desperately try to woo the potential customers with the right package. Being able to successfully sell your products or services is largely dependent on the way a business presents itself. It is not only about making your business look good in adverts. Everybody does that. The key is to making your business look presentable.
Besides the USP of a business, presentation provides the much needed extra push.
I will give you an example. Just the other day I was visiting a store to buy groceries. I opened the freezer to find something to drink and guess what, I saw a juice box with a really beautiful design. Now, I hadn’t heard about the brand before but the effort they had put in to make it look like a premium product really had me thinking that when a business that goes out of its way to put so much emphasis on presentation, their product may be good. With that thought, I bought that product.
However, from this example, it should not be assumed that a business needs to put all of its energy in design to compromise on other aspects of the product like quality. Every good thing about your product needs to be there while presentation is going to give you the extra push that your business needs.
For the businesses that provide a service, presentation is just as important. In fact, presentation and creative design rests at the heart of every effort a service provider makes to reach out to its customers. Since the quality of your service is in question here, the first impression you are going to make here is by presenting it the right way. While a lot of businesses like to highlight how efficient and competitive they are, others just simply appeal to the emotions of their customers by being extremely presentable.
It doesn’t matter how good you tell your audience you are. All that matters is the way you are trying to tell it to them.
Especially for those businesses that sell their services to other businesses, presentation makes a huge difference. Let’s take an example of a business that is proposing another business to buy its services. Imagine sitting in a panel in front of a huge projector while a marketing team from the seller business tries to convince you. It doesn’t matter how good they tell you they are. All that matters is the way they are trying to tell it to you.
See the slides on the projector? What are they telling you? Lots and lots of text with random images scattered here and there. You would rather dose off and have a quick nap instead of having to go through the torment of maintaining focus on the slides. On the other hand, if the slides are telling you a story with visual cues instead of being extremely text-laden, it is a lot easier to maintain focus and to relate to what the marketers are trying to sell.
The businesses that are highly ambitious are always aiming towards pitching their ideas to potential clients. Most of the time, the first step isn’t an actual pitch. Rather, you need to send a pitch deck to the relevant department of your potential client to see if they are interested in your offerings. Think about it for a bit. If you were to send a document, what should it include that compels the potential client to read it thinking they can get some value out of it? It is all about the presentation and story-telling.
Attention seeking at the personal level and presentation at the corporate level are both about telling your story to the world.
At the very beginning of this article, we talked a lot about attention seeking at an individual level. Now that you look back at it, you will realize how attention seeking at a personal level too, is about telling your story to the world. The more interesting the story, the more attention it gets.
Remember Malala? She has a story to tell and she does a hell of a job with its presentation. Same goes for businesses. Selling a product? Is it presentable? Does the design appeal to the eyes of the potential customers? Is there a history behind your product? Is it an age old secret family recipe perhaps? If you are selling a service, is your identity in sync with your story? How are you incorporating your clients in to your narrative? All of these questions need a proper address if you are to incorporate the magic of storytelling and presentation in your business.
Effective presentation, for us, is all about telling our story to the world in a way that hits them right in the feels.
So, the question now is, where do we start? We realized the need for presentation and storytelling before you did and came up with a solution to help you out. Decklaration is a design agency based in New York and Lahore Pakistan with special emphasis on presentation design and storytelling. We help out other businesses to reach out to their intended audience in a powerful and compelling way by constructing narratives that create a lasting impact. Come to us with your problems and we will come up with creative solutions to help you out. Effective presentation, for us, is all about telling our story to the world in a way that hits them right in the feels. So, what’s your story?
