Clip Thinking in Marketing and How You Can Monetize It

26 January 2023
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Psychology is now an integral part of sales and promotion. Nowadays, marketing professionals are learning how to understand what principles guide consumers when choosing a product or service. Neuromarketing has long learned to divide consumers into groups according to their type of information perception. These types change over the years as channels of interaction with advertising content modernize and evolve. Clip thinking is now the most popular type of content perception among people. In this article, we’ll explore what is this, what place clip thinking has in marketing, and how this knowledge can benefit your ad campaigns.

Clip Thinking in Marketing and How You Can Monetize It

Does clip thinking come from “video clips”?

Certainly not from a paper clip🙂 To tell you the truth, the name of the term speaks for itself — clip thinking (or mosaic thinking) is the type of interaction with the environment in which a person perceives information in short fragments — clips and vivid images, which means that they are unable to concentrate and constantly switch their focus of attention. Such people find it extremely difficult to do monotonous work or to absorb large blocks of information: texts, especially books, long videos, and films.

As we have already realized, the origin of the term clip thinking has something to do with video clips. To be precise, with the video content in general and the active digitalization of everything around us. The psychological definition of clip thinking comes from the term “clip culture” coined by sociologist Alvin Toffler in 1980. 

At that time, many clips and advertisements with dynamic cutscenes on TV replaced the static picture. In order to somehow filter out this endless stream of information and visuals, people had to adapt and focus more and more selectively. Toffler saw this concept as a unique form of perception as “zapping”, where the endless switching of TV channels creates a new image built from fragments of information or scraps of impressions.

Clip Thinking in Marketing and How You Can Monetize It

How is clip thinking related to marketing?

You probably already have time to wonder what clip thinking has in common with you, because the popularity of television is declining and now the biggest segment of the audience mostly dwells online. That’s right, with the spread of the Internet and social networks, where you can endlessly scroll through the news feed and click on links, the clip thinking of a modern user is actively progressing. The success of your advertising campaigns today directly depends on the number of clicks and views. Therefore, you go to great lengths to encourage users to interact with your content as often as possible. Before starting to drive traffic, you probably think about how to make your ads stand out from other content in the news feed of your audience. This is all the result of the clip thinking manifesting itself. 

Among hundreds of other pieces of information, your content should become THE piece on which the user will focus his attention — only then you will receive precious conversions.

This is when clickable titles, bright collages, an abundance of photos and videos, and the format of short stories instead of long reads come into play. The timing of most videos on YouTube does not exceed 15 minutes, and popular bloggers actively use a quick change of the picture. It is the real evolution of the human brain, which we adapt to.

This may all sound crazy, but this is the reality of the modern webspace. According to the Marketing insider group research, 78% of marketers believe that video content helps them increase sales, and 84% believe that it effectively attracts potential customers. In addition, platforms popular in the affiliate sphere with their own short visual formats, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and others, work on this principle. So you are already part of this funnel.

Clip Thinking in Marketing and How You Can Monetize It

Practical usage

When professionals learned how to track user behaviour patterns, they began to take steps toward managing customer preferences. To turn clip thinking to your advantage, you need to provide content that is easy to digest. There is an unspoken formula for creating content for the perception of the clip mindset. The formula is simple:

Catch + Repeat the thought (blow mind) + Get action + Benefit

  1. Catch. The headline needs to be as catchy as possible, knocking people out of the flow and making them perceive your message. 
  2. Repeat. The following phrase is a repetition of the headline but in different words. It’s a blast of information so that the target audience knows it’s aimed at them. Remember, the first phrase is already out of their heads and serves only to attract attention, so we boldly repeat the same thing.
  3. Get action. The call to action must be before the benefit, otherwise, the person will forget and leave, and we cannot allow this to happen.
  4. Give benefit. Only in the last step, we give the very useful material that we promised in the title. Brief and concise, but always with real benefits for the target audience.

Clip Thinking in Marketing and How You Can Monetize It

Also, don’t forget about the main content trends for the clip thinking generation:

  • reducing the message volume
  • only one thought in a content unit — simultaneously adding an emotional experience to the message
  • multiple repetitions of the same thought within the same content unit
  • dry news content no longer works: the audience wants some kind of author’s attitude to be embedded inside
  • splitting one message into several of the same types.

And one more point, of course, it is obvious that you should emphasize visual content: videos, pictures, infographics, etc. People with clip thinking succumb to manipulation through visuals rather easily. Colour helps to achieve this effect. The more bright and contrasting colours in a design, the more visible it is. The most popular colours in advertising are red, yellow, blue, and green.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to fighting for the audience’s attention, many methods come into play. Literally. Even if you need to dig into the brains of your dear consumers. The paradox of clip thinking is considered something negative in psychology, but for marketers, any discovery is a reason to put it into practice. Any marketing specialist has no choice but to adapt to the patterns of user behaviour in order to be noticed among other fragments of the mosaic.

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