Discover what expert teachers' eyes do differently, and how that knowledge can improve teacher training.

Imagine standing in front of a classroom of thirty teenagers. You are halfway through explaining a math problem when a student in the front row shoots their hand up enthusiastically. At the same moment, a student in the back corner starts loudly imitating their classmate, drawing snickers from the row beside them.

Two things happen simultaneously. Where do your eyes go?

Overstimulating your customers' brains is the last thing you want to do, yet in the pursuit of an engaging pop-up experience, it happens all the time. What does this actually feel like?

Picture yourself standing in the middle of Times Square. Giant screens flash blinding ads from every angle. Car horns, pounding music, and street noise fight for your attention, while the smell of a pretzel cart clashes with city exhaust. With hundreds of people moving in every direction, your brain simply hits a wall. Without consciously deciding to, you shut down and stop engaging.

Believe it or not, your carefully curated pop-up store might be triggering that exact same reaction. When too many sights, sounds, and smells compete at once, it creates a neurological bottleneck. Your brain loses the ability to filter the incoming data. This is sensory overload, and the worst part is, you probably don't even realize you're causing it.

Remember the 2017 Pepsi "Live for Now" campaign with Kendall Jenner? The model joined a protest march and handed a police officer a can of soda. Suddenly, the tension evaporated. The crowd cheered. World peace had been achieved by a soft drink.

The backlash was instant. It was not just anger. It was something stickier. Internet users called it a "giant cringe festival". Mentions of Pepsi on social media spiked by over 21,000%. People could not stop talking about it.

As a marketer, you look at that disaster and you shudder. You assume that negative word-of-mouth destroys brands. But new research suggests something more complex is happening in the consumer’s brain.

Cringe is not just an emotion. It is a social signal. Your customers are using your failures to boost their own egos.

It’s June 22nd, 2015. Chevrolet sends out a press release to announce the reveal of the new Cruze. But guess what? It’s all written in emojis🤔 No words, just funny pictures (some even made up by Chevy, like its own “bow tie” logo.) The goal was to appeal to the younger generation of buyers. But that backfired, as it was a real struggle to make sense of it until they provided a ‘translation’ - the standard press release using English written words.

Nobody can deny the popularity and impact of emojis in modern digital communication, from social media to email, SMS and websites. The current version 16.0 of the emoji encyclopaedia (Emojipedia.org) boasts 3790 pictographs and is constantly growing (Unicode.org 2024). In the last ten years, almost 22% of global tweets (close to 3 billion) contained at least one emoji! And 92% of the world's online population uses emojis (Daniel 2021).

Grabbing market attention with the unexpected

How many famous accidental product discoveries are you aware of? There’s plenty to fill history books.

Let’s take Post-it Notes: the result of 3M scientist Spencer Silver’s failed attempt to create a stronger adhesive for the aerospace industry. Instead, he ended up creating a weak adhesive that could easily be removed without residue. And voila! A ‘mistake’ that we all use daily.

What about the miracle ingredient in the SK-II skincare line? It was discovered as a result of a chance encounter in the 1970s inside a Japanese sake brewery.  Despite their old age, employees maintained remarkably soft and youthful hands after constant handling of fermented sake “mash”. Scientists used this observation and a naturally derived liquid that revolutionized skincare.