Why you need a purpose-driven brand: the info glut

This is the first in a series that details the key factors that have given rise to the need to nurture a purpose-driven brand.

There is an ever-growing number of things that call for our attention. From the phone screen to the computer screen to the TV screen, texts, alerts, email, ads and more vie for our attention. In the book Big Audacious Meaning — Unleashing Your Purpose-Driven Story, I detail this tsunami of information that assaults us daily. As an example, a USC Marshall School of Business research study estimated that the average consumer has 74 gigabytes or 9 DVDs worth of data sent to them on an average day. And that’s from a study that’s a few years old.

How the torrent of information has affected us

With so many things jockeying for our consideration, we find ourselves becoming ever more selective with what we pay attention to. “Paying” attention is an apt description. We have a finite supply of energy. When we give our attention to something, we have to withdraw from that finite supply. Literally spending energy.

From Big Audacious Meaning:

“This massive amount of information creates a much larger cognitive load for all of us. McGill University psychology professor Daniel Levitin illustrates the point for us in…