The Executive Operating System 8 of 10 – Attention Runs the Market

I’ve heard the same sentence from too many CEOs to count. Same tone every time. Half pride. Half complaint.

“But our product is better.”

Better than what? Better in whose hands? The sentence carries a quiet assumption: that the market is sitting somewhere doing a careful side-by-side comparison, and once the comparison is done, the better product wins.

That assumption is wrong. And it’s costing companies real money.

The buyer wasn’t comparing. They were doing their job, scrolling their feed, half-listening on a call, ignoring 90% of what crossed their screen that day. They picked the company they noticed. The one that came to mind when the budget got approved. The one a colleague mentioned in a meeting last Tuesday.

That’s the whole enchilada.

Herbert Simon flagged this before I was born. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” he wrote, back when the volume of information hitting a knowledge worker was a rounding error compared to what hits a buyer today.

His point was simple. The scarce resource is attention, the buyer’s ability to take any of it in. So the real competition stopped being about product. It became about who gets to occupy the small window the buyer has left. Has anything really changed?

If you don’t win that window, the comparison you assume the buyer will make never happens. You’re losing because the buyer never knew you were on the board.

The engineering firm that was right and lost anyway

I recently worked with an engineering firm that, by any honest measure, had a superior product. Real engineering depth, bespoke builds, the kind of complex work competitors couldn’t replicate without years of investment.

They relied on word of mouth. They were proud they didn’t have to “sell.”

Then the math caught up. The majority of their revenue sat inside one customer. One conversation away from a 70% revenue cliff. They were reluctant to spend on marketing because they couldn’t see the immediate return. They wanted a marketing dollar to behave like a sales dollar, in and out in the same quarter.

Bespoke engineering doesn’t sell that way. The market they deserved to be famous in had no idea they existed. The product was correct. The business was fragile.

That’s what happens when “better” is the only argument you bring to the market.

Why “best” is a trap

Working on the product feels safer than working on the market. The product is measurable, controllable, defensible. Internal dopamine the whole way, baby.

Working on attention is the opposite. It’s external. It involves friction, inconsistent feedback, and the same long-tail repetition that distribution demands. Worse, you can’t be sure when it’s working. The first 6 months feel like shouting into a black hole. The 7th month feels like a coincidence. The 12th feels like inevitability, and you have no idea which post, which call, which board appearance actually moved the needle.

So executives default to the safer work. Tinker with features. Refine the pitch deck. Hire another product manager. The internal calendar fills up. The external presence stays at zero. And the market goes on choosing companies that show up.

This is the trap. “Best” feels productive. Being noticed feels like vanity. But the buyers keep proving you wrong.

The three levers of attention

Distribution has its own mechanics. I wrote about those last time. Attention sits upstream of distribution. It’s the question of whether you deserve any of it to begin with.

Three levers actually move it from my experience.

One. Pick a category you can plausibly dominate the attention of.

You will not win the attention war in a category bigger than your reach. The market rewards full presence in a narrow space. Fractional presence in a giant space gets ignored. Most companies pick a market that flatters their ambition and exhausts their budget. They pay for attention they can’t sustain. Then they cut spending, which proves the market right.

Narrow until you can be the most-noticed company in a defined room. Then widen, slowly.

Two. Build an identity, not a feature list.

Buyers remember the shape of a company. Features fall out of memory by Friday. Geico is the gecko. De Beers is forever. M&M’s melt in your mouth. The retail buyer remembers identity.

When the buyer’s budget gets approved, the company they remember is the company they call. That memory is built on identity. Not specs.

This is also why positioning has to come before promotion. A clear identity makes you findable in the buyer’s mind. A vague identity makes you forgettable, no matter how loud you get.

Three. Show up where the buyer is already looking.

The market isn’t going to make a new room for you. The buyer has an existing attention path. Their inbox at 9am. Their LinkedIn feed at lunch. The industry event they attend every year. The podcast they listen to on the drive home.

If you can’t name that path, you don’t know your buyer. And you’re spending on the wrong platforms.

Mental availability is the real moat

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have spent two decades arguing that mental availability, the ease with which a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, predicts market share more reliably than differentiation does. It’s the central thesis of How Brands Grow, and the data is hard to argue with.

That finding is uncomfortable for any executive who built their strategy on “better,” because usually, the answer to “Why aren’t we winning?” is that your brand wasn’t in the buyer’s head when the decision was made.

The fix is consistency. The buyer’s brain rewards repetition over novelty. Showing up the same way, in the same places, for the same audience, with the same identity, over time. That’s how the memory gets built.

Same logic as the negotiator who holds the silence in a deal. Whoever holds the floor of attention sets the terms.

Unglamorous and slow. Which is why most companies don’t do it. And why the ones that do, win.

Marketing is the cost of being chosen

Back to the engineering firm. Their reluctance to spend on marketing was a category error. They were treating marketing like utilities. Pay it. Hope to keep it low.

Marketing is capital allocation. It’s the price of admission to the room where the buyer is making the choice. Refuse to pay it, and the room makes the choice without you.

The math on a complex, bespoke product is even less forgiving. Long sales cycle. Large deal size. Small buyer pool. Word of mouth in that market is a comfort blanket. It rarely scales a complex sale. What that firm actually needs is to be the obvious answer when a procurement team finally writes the RFP. Obvious means top-of-mind. Top-of-mind means months or years of intentional presence before the buyer ever raises their hand.

For an engineered product to compound into a real business, the cost of attention is the cost of doing business. Required, not optional.

What this means for the operator

Run an honest audit of the buyer’s day. The product audit will wait.

Where does your buyer spend their attention before they need you? Are you present there? In what shape? With what frequency?

If you can’t answer those three questions in plain language, you’re not playing the attention game. You’re hoping the market trips over you. It won’t.

The companies that consistently appear in the buyer’s existing attention path are the ones that get the call when the budget hits.