Understanding Cognitive Bandwidth for Effective Marketing

Cognitive Bandwidth

As per George Armitage Miller, typically referred as Miller’s law, human capacity for processing information was limited to seven, plus or minus two. Research in cognitive psychology indicated that if amount of information received exceeds the limits of short-term memory, human beings experience psychological stress and their ability to understand information deteriorates rapidly. This is generally referred as cognitive bandwidth. When a human being get numerous information from too many sources, to prevent information overload, the human brain learns to filter out irrelevant stimuli so that the retains sufficient cognitive bandwidth to respond effectively to important stimuli.

Cognitive Overload of Consumers

Marketer of a particular brand should aware of the cognitive overload that consumer would face when the brand offers large number variant of the product. Due to this, consumer would likely to get confused when huge number of choices available to them and would found it difficult to make a selection. Even in the case when consumer do make a selection, it is likely to make wrong choices. Even in the case consumer finally buys a product, it could lead to the post-purchase dissonance.

Effective Marketing

Effective marketing activities rely on blending together things in such a way as to minimize the amount of cognitive bandwidth required to process and remember the information. For example, if marketer is surveying the consumers liking on a variety of sample, the optimal number of sample size should then be in the range of 5 to 9.

In light of cognitive bandwidth and overload, marketer should able to design the right size of mix whenever interacting with the consumer.