Earning the Right to Attention

I’ve been noticing something uncomfortable.

Emails I once chose to receive sit unread. Campaigns that would have caught my attention a few years ago barely register. I skim, scroll, defer not because the content is bad (sometimes it is), but because I don’t have the energy for it in that moment.

And that’s the tension.
This is exactly the behaviour marketers are paid to influence.

So, when I hear conversations about falling click-through rates or flat campaigns, often framed as “customer behaviour has changed”, I find myself questioning that assumption. What if behaviour hasn’t fundamentally changed at all? What if it’s the conditions we’ve created around people that have shifted?

Every day, we find ourselves navigating through endless notifications, open tabs, and growing to-do lists before they’ve reached a brand message. Their brains are doing what brains have always done: conserving energy, avoiding unnecessary effort, and reducing risk. The difference now is that they’re doing this in an environment that is permanently “on”.

The attention tax no one agreed to pay

As I started to question whether this was just my own fatigue, I looked to the research and found the same patterns repeating themselves.

The 2025 Optimove Insights Consumer Marketing Fatigue Report shows that 70% of consumers unsubscribed from at least three brands in the previous three months due to overwhelming message volume. Email was cited as the most irritating channel when overused, particularly when the content felt irrelevant.

This isn’t disengagement. It’s self-preservation.

We’ve seen this before. In the late 1990s, the term “banner blindness” emerged when people learned to ignore display ads. Today, the adaptations look familiar:

• People scroll faster, skim text harder, and mentally mute anything that feels vaguely promotional.

• They default to familiar brands, trusted recommendations, or the first option that feels “good enough” just to remove the decision from their mental load.

• They ignore sensible offers because the cognitive cost of engaging is higher than the perceived benefit in that moment.

People haven’t become lazy. Attention has become a scarce and guarded resource.

Digital noise, emotional overload

Other research reinforces this picture. Dentsu’s EMEA Consumer Navigator Q2 2025 report notes that while 55% of consumers use social media as a primary discovery channel, 52% feel overwhelmed by the volume of ads they see with many of them AI-generated. At the same time, consumers hold multiple loyalty memberships but often describe them as difficult to use, suggesting that complexity and clutter are eroding perceived value.

The UK DMA’s Customer Engagement: Future Trends 2024 report highlights growing concern about over-personalisation and intrusive data use, calling for more respectful, consent-based experiences that balance relevance with restraint.

Layer on economic uncertainty and a relentless news cycle, and it becomes easier to understand why buyers gravitate towards brands that feel calm, clear, and low-drama, rather than those chasing every new trend.

What this really means for brand choice

In this context, the instinctive response ‘to do more’ is often the wrong one.

The brands that get chosen are not always the loudest or the most feature-rich. They’re the ones that reduce both cognitive and emotional friction for the buyer.

In practice, that tends to look like:

• Clarity: Simple, sharp messaging that answers “does this solve my problem, and how?” in seconds — not clever copy that demands effort.

• Curation: Fewer options, clearer paths, and guided choices that reduce decision fatigue rather than adding to it.

• Consistency: Predictable, reliable interactions that lower emotional risk and build trust over time.

• Care: Communication that feels human and useful — asking less, giving more, and treating people as people rather than data points.

Buyers reward brands that help them feel a little less tired and a little more in control.

From diagnosis to action: a CALM marketing lens

I didn’t set out to create a framework. But across different clients, sectors, and datasets, the same patterns kept emerging. It led me to think about marketing through a calmer lens.

If the issue isn’t changed behaviour, but a changed emotional and cognitive context, then marketing’s role shifts from grabbing more attention to earning the right to less of it, used better.

That’s how the CALM lens took shape:

C — Cut the clutter
Run a regular message and channel audit. Map every campaign, trigger, and nurture currently in market, then remove 20–30% of touchpoints that repeat rather than add value. Consolidate overlapping emails and social posts into fewer, more meaningful updates.

A — Aim for relevance
Target by intent and context, not just demographics. In the 2025 Optimove study, consumers were 81% more likely to open and 67% more likely to buy when messages aligned with their interests and past behaviour. In Europe especially, transparency and control matter relevance should never feel invasive.

L — Limit decisions
Simplify key journeys by removing optional steps and reducing visible choices to a curated set. Use guiding cues — “most popular” or “recommended for first-time buyers” — to ease decision-making without removing autonomy.

M — Make it human
Shift from interruption to invitation. Fewer aggressive follow-ups, more genuinely useful content. Clear, empathetic language that acknowledges overload: “Here’s the one thing you need to know” will always land better than “Here are 12 updates you missed”.

Three practical next steps

For brands experiencing stagnant engagement or rising unsubscribe rates, the path forward doesn’t need to be abstract:

• This week: Pick one journey (a newsletter, webinar sign-up, or demo request) and explore how it could be simplified.

• This month: Take your highest-volume email flow and rewrite it using a simple test: Would a overwhelmed customer thank us for this? If not, cut or rework it.

• This quarter: Run a marketing fatigue audit using unsubscribe, spam complaint, and inactivity data to identify where you’re overwhelming people, then redesign those touchpoints with relevance first.

Behaviour has always been shaped by context. Today’s context is noisy, demanding, and emotionally heavy and people are responding in very human ways.

Brands that accept and understand this reality will design intentionally, gifting their audiences with calm, clear, kind marketing that will be chosen.