Oops! I Did It Again

Have you ever read something or seen something that completely caught your attention? During the past few months of the isolation period, we have all experienced that with online shopping. You see a product and you immediately need it, you read a book review and in a second the door is knocking with a shipment delivery.

Malcolm Gladwell delved deep into how we think without thinking; how in the blink of an eye, we make decisions based on the first glance. The concept of “Blink” can be applied to a lot of different areas in our lives, consequently; content marketing is definitely one of them.

“There Can Be as Much Value in The Blink of An Eye as in Months of Rational Analysis.”

Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, an author of five books, a contributor to The New Yorker, and has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list. He is best known for his perspective on popular culture.

Gladwell discusses the importance of first impressions and snap judgments and he believes while marketing any product or service, one needs to work on the first impressions to attract an audience. Content marketing, ranging from blogs to designs, is the face of any business, and where companies can lure viewers and generate leads to their services.

In order to understand the consumer, you need to put yourself in their shoes. In other words, knowing your target audience and how they think, what they like, and what they want to see; will ultimately make your content production more attractive.

Thin-Slicing an Apple or an Idea?

Overstuffing your audience with too much information is not what Malcolm Gladwell thinks is the key to successful marketing. He introduced the concept of “thin-slicing” which encourages audiences to capture the least amount of data, that would benefit them, in the least amount of time -a blink of an eye- instead of cramming their heads with unnecessary information that will not end up appealing to them.

Reading Gladwell’s “Blink” is very eye-opening; should we trust and assume that rapid judgments are better than measured ones? Is it really that the decisions that we make in split seconds are as simple as they seem?

I would recommend this book to anyone, especially to those who always have pros/cons lists to decide everything even if it only takes a blink of an eye.