The Attention Dilemma – and How Brands Can Break Through It

On store shelves and in campaigns, brands find themselves shouting louder and louder to attract attention. But Inga Wolter, ECD at Peter Schmidt Group, knows that only brands who create relevance, build an aura, and spark desire can truly reach their target audience.

Brand leaders think in terms of target audiences. Then they try to determine which messages, campaigns, and channels are best suited to reach them. But increasingly, they fail to achieve the desired results. Brands have been ramping up their communication – yet their efforts fall on deaf ears. That’s because people have long since learned to filter out the vast amount of information they are bombarded with every day.

In a world of content, performance campaigns, creator formats, retail media, AI-generated assets, and a constant stream of new touchpoints, people now only notice what is emotionally, culturally, or socially relevant to them in a specific and personal way. Everything else fades into the background noise. In response to this, brands don’t need to increase the frequency of their messages. Instead, they need to amplify their meaning.

Young doesn’t always mean progressive

However, you can only achieve significance by playing an important, almost indispensable role for people. You have to be part of their everyday lives.

Brand makers and agencies categorize consumers into target audiences in order to understand them better and gain insight into their daily routines. But while target groups could still be sharply defined a few decades ago, they are far from homogeneous today. People from similar social circles can exist within fundamentally different filter bubbles and hold conflicting values or interests. This is particularly true of Gen Z – the target group it seems every brand wants to reach.

Many established brands are striving to translate their values for a young, progressive clientele. They want to become “Gen Z-ready” by adapting visual codes and tonalities, by accelerating their communication – but in doing so, they overlook the fact that some members of Gen Z don’t think nearly as progressively as one might instinctively assume. In fact, Gen Z comprises a wide variety of subcultures, interests, value systems, communities, and micro-contexts. Sometimes they’re optimistic and progressive, but at other times they can be surprisingly conservative. Like it or not, the revival of traditional gender roles is also part of this generation’s reality.

Branding requires precision

To reach such hyper-fragmented target audiences and build relevance in sometimes contradictory environments, brands must precisely understand which cultural codes, needs, tensions, and rituals are actually relevant. One way we help them do this is through “Future Readiness Audits,” in which we analyze whether a brand is culturally, visually, and strategically aligned. We also use “Brand Resonance Testing” to examine how their communication performs with micro-target audiences, relying on synthetic focus groups that we can tailor as needed with the help of AI.

The comeback of the shower gel brand Cliff illustrates the results this can achieve. The brand gained iconic popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, when its ads featuring cliff divers from Acapulco were everywhere. But society and its understanding of masculinity changed — from self-promotion to self-reflection, from adrenaline to regeneration. As a result, Cliff initially lost its position as a market leader, and later the brand disappeared from store shelves entirely. Now we’ve supported the brand in its relaunch and placed its values in a new, contemporary context. With the help of Future Readiness Audits and Brand Resonance Testing we were able to determine which values resonated with the target audience.

Sometimes we look even further into the future. With our “Gen Alpha Insights” series we help brands better understand the consumers of the day after tomorrow. The insights can be fundamental. For one of our clients, for example, we were able to demonstrate that Generation Alpha can't make sense of certain product names because they no longer reflect the reality of their lives. This allows us to draw the right conclusions for product design and marketing — with the goal of creating relevance, not just attention.

Relevance trumps attention

This is precisely the crucial shift in perspective: relevance over attention. Cultural resonance over mere volume. Efficient engagement over mass communication that falls on deaf ears. Or to put it another way: For brands, it’s about building an aura and forging emotional connections.

Aura is the perceived presence of a brand that goes beyond mere recognizability; it's what you sense before you can explain it rationally. Aura arises from a brand’s unique aesthetic, consistent codes, cultural significance, rituals, and the ability to serve as a canvas for projection. A brand with aura isn’t just seen. It’s remembered. Desired. And thereby gains meaning in people’s lives.

In the premium segment, aura can enhance the perceived value of a brand and its products. Hermès, Chanel, and Apple therefore cultivate their aura very consistently, whether through minimalism, distance, materiality, or the use of iconic codes. At the same time, however, one must not make the mistake of limiting the concept of building aura to luxury brands alone. Consumer branding, in particular, offers a great opportunity here. Even a snack, a beverage, a shampoo, or a household product can become more than just a functional product. It can be part of a moment, a ritual, or a cultural phenomenon. Unlike with premium products, aura in FMCG brands does not primarily lead to a price premium but rather strengthens customer loyalty. After all, if a product holds high emotional value for me personally, I’m not going to start comparing its nutritional information with that of a competitor’s product.

Tools for a deeper understanding of fragmented target audiences

Gen Alpha Insights
Provides confidence in addressing the consumers of the day after tomorrow

Future Readiness
Audit tests brand values for current social relevance, and brand communication for visibility to AI tools.

Brand Resonance
Testing uses synthetic focus groups to assess the relevance of brands within their target audiences

Emotionally charged rituals

KitKat, for example, demonstrates how aura can be built. Viewed objectively, it’s a chocolate-covered cookie — but for decades, the brand has consistently communicated the theme of taking a break: “Have a break, have a KitKat.” The product promise is simple, but the ritual is powerful: break it, share it, take a break. And KitKat skillfully adapts this to different contexts, from everyday work life to sports situations, and also appeals to the Muslim community. In its Ramadan communications centered on the iftar moment, KitKat links breaking the bar with breaking the fast, transforming a familiar brand code into an emotionally resonant moment.

Sprite is also a good example of how a brand builds cultural resonance not through a single campaign, but through an entire system. With its latest brand relaunch, it positions itself as the embodiment of “freshness”— and cleverly links it to music, basketball, street culture, food, and fashion. As a result, Sprite positions itself not just as a soft drink, but as part of a cultural way of life. And in doing so, it gains greater significance.

“A brand that wants to be desired always needs a dash of mystique.”

Inga Wolter, Executive Creative Director

The power of omission

So let’s try to bring some order to the system. Brands shouldn’t scream for attention, they should create relevance. To do this, they must be anchored in hyper-fragmented target groups and generate cultural resonance within them. And they achieve all of this through strong visual codes, a unique story, and an understanding of rituals within these communities. But there’s another important factor: the power of omission.

Nowadays we live in a world where everything is explained, optimized, and presented with a focus on performance. And it is precisely for this reason that the irrational and the incomplete become all the more fascinating. A brand that wants to be desired therefore always needs a dash of mystique – that small detail that can’t be neatly deduced, that secret ingredient that remains strictly confidential, the unseen element that piques our curiosity. Mystery leaves room for the imagination and gives a brand depth.

As logical as this sounds, in practice it is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks: recognizing the hidden as a value. Resisting the temptation to “spell out” a brand down to the last detail. Moreover, it is the aspect that is least amenable to analysis and control through rational models. Indeed, it requires courage and a genuine feel for the brand, and has the potential to inspire awe. And it can also be precisely the reason why brand work is fascinating and fun. Because not everything about it is predictable.

The article was published in German in "Markenartikel Magazin", issue 7-8/2026. Read the full version online.