It’s impossible to deny the amount of marketing clutter out there… there is just so much stuff! The sheer volume of what we receive is overwhelming. There is a real physical heft to the volume of mail coming directly, often unsolicited to our mailbox. There’s something visceral about the “thunk” of that pile landing on the counter when you get inside and something intimidating about it that grows daily because it’s so hard for us to take the time to sort through everything. There’s something annoying about the number of immediately worn-out or broken tchotchkes taking space in corners throughout the house, giveaways you picked up one way or another. How much of all of this goes straight to the trash, already a better destination if it’s going to lie around uselessly taking up space?
There’s plenty of marketing clutter that lacks a physical presence but still takes a toll on our attention. We get just as much unwanted stuff through our email, social media feeds, and all around the margins of any website we visit as a result of digital targeting. In the attention economy, there’s a whole how-to industry around preserving your focus and directing it the way you want it to go, in other words, how not to let it get hijacked… which ironically is the point of marketing! To hijack your attention!
Why is there so much clutter? Partly this is because of the ease of delivery. Mail is cheap. Digital is so cheap it’s essentially free, at least the actual content delivery. (Name procurement is perhaps different, but even that can be free or free-ish.) Products (aka, swag) are cheap. All of this is part of the problem because the cheapness undermines the marketing.
More philosophically, a better question is not “Why is there so much clutter?” but rather “Why waste so much effort on what is just going to be clutter to begin with?” In theory, powerful and effective marketing should be engaging and useful. People take note of it, pay attention to it, keep it, remember it… precisely because it is not clutter. It’s funny or memorable. It’s useful or helpful or informative. It’s timely. It’s RELEVANT.
There is a popular marketing case to be made for advertising by sheer force of repetition. Ostensibly there is value in just getting your message out there so frequently and ubiquitously that people have to note it. Sometimes this can be effective, but even then it’s almost always very expensive; and sometimes that can be very costly in terms of impact too. People get annoyed and your marketing actually undermines your promotional efforts. This is precisely the philosophy that has resulted in an overwhelming cacophony of clutter.
So how do you cut through the clutter? The clear and obvious answer is that you cut through the clutter by not adding to it. Adding to the clutter only undermines your message. You cut through the clutter by producing content or marketing that is not just more clutter, but that is actually useful and relevant to the target audience. Every decision you make should be about increasing that relevance and utility: every creative decision, every distribution decision, every call to action, and every follow up decision.
If your work is getting lost in the crowd, if it’s not cutting through the clutter, it’s because it is also just clutter itself. If your work is effective it will cut cleanly through everything else. You can’t cut through the clutter by adding to it, you cut through by being relevant and useful.