Attention Span of Humans is More Than That of Goldfish

If you live in the marketing world I’m sure you’ve heard about the shrinking attention spans of human beings and that now the attention span of human beings is less than that of Goldfish.

The source of this data is a 2015 report by the Consumer Insights team at Microsoft Canada. The study was based on a survey of 2000 Canadians and also studied the brain activity of 112 people as they carried out various tasks. The statistic on the 8 second attention span did not come from the study. The report quotes its source as “Statistic Brain”. Statistic Brain source all their figures but the sources quoted don’t have any record of the statistic. Its literally a factoid which the dictionary defines as “unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as a fact”.

Interestingly, in the world of neuro-psychology, Goldfish are considered a model system for studying process of learning and memory formation. They actually have a good memory!!!! Coming back to human beings, psychologists will tell you that attention spans are a function of the task at hand. The attention span engaging with billboards is different from the attention span writing this blog.

This unfortunately is not an isolated incident. At marketing conferences or in marketing literature, you may have heard that the human brain process visuals 60,000 times faster than text – again there is no scientific evidence for this.

As human beings we have a tendency to over generalize and this opens up an avenue for creating new business’s and brands. Take for instance the 10,000 steps a day regime which has fawned an industry of wearable devices. The 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary number which has no scientific basis. To tap into the buzz around the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 a company called Yamasa designed the worlds first step counter device and called it manpo-kei, which translates to a “10,000 – step meter”. So the number 10,000 is nothing but the result of a successful Japanese marketing campaign in the mid 60’s!!! 

As market researchers we must resist the temptation to become instant believers in the latest headline without pausing to check the veracity of the source and the methodology. Lets take the latest headlines doing the rounds in the marketing and business press – “Nike sales increase 31% after Kapernick ad”. Lets unpeel this “growth”. 

• When did the growth happen - The articles start with a bunch of opinions on the ad (which I happen to love) and somewhere at the end will mention that the 31% increase is during the Labor day weekend (September 2^nd to September 4^th)  – really a 3 day window!!!   
• Where did the growth happen - The source of the data is Edison Trends which uses a panel to determine online sales. Online sales accounted for 6.5% of Nike sales in 2017. So we are talking of an increase on a very small proportion of total sales. 
• What is Nike’s ecommerce growth – Nike’s online sales grew by 29.7% in 2017 and is growing at 25% in 2018. The growth of 31% appears to be in the same ballpark.

So the growth is over a 3 day window, covering under 10% of the total sales and is in the same ball park as the growth over other weekends – the market researcher in me says we just don’t have enough data to attribute sales impact to the ad. I am sure Nike has information but its just not available in the public domain. And yet the marketing journals have concluded that there was a 31% increase in sales.

Coming back to the Title of the blog – there is no scientific evidence that this is true but if this blog goes viral then I would expect someone to headline this at a marketing conference!!!