Here's the truth - most people don’t think about your brand — they avoid it. Here’s why that changes everything about your GTM strategy.
If there’s one uncomfortable truth we try to get our clients to embrace from day one, it’s this:
Most people don’t think about your brand. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid it.
It sounds brutal, but it’s also liberating — because the second you stop pretending consumers are sitting at home with a magnifying glass analysing your value proposition, your entire growth strategy becomes saner, cheaper, and significantly more effective.
The Myth of the Attentive Consumer
Inside most marketing and GTM teams, people spend eight hours a day debating typography, copy variations, and which shade of blue conveys “innovative yet trustworthy.” Meanwhile, the people on the receiving end devote, generously, about eight seconds a week to your brand. (If that — an illustrative number, but directionally accurate.)
That’s because real humans don’t experience brands the way marketers do. They experience them the way human beings experience anything that isn’t a threat or a chocolate bar:
- They put almost no conscious effort into processing it,
- They actively try to avoid your messaging, and
- They make 95% of decisions on autopilot, fast, lazy, and under conditions of distraction.
So when teams plan campaigns as if consumers are diligently decoding every message, they are designing for a brain that does not exist.
The Behavioural Shift: From “Persuasion” to “Probability”
At Wanted.Berlin, this single insight is usually the turning point in our clients’ GTM transformation: growth is not about convincing people; it’s about becoming the easiest brand to think of when their brain can’t be bothered.
That’s it. Brand growth is a probability game, not a persuasion contest. Mental Availability isn’t “recall” — it’s recognition without thinking.
You don’t win because consumers understand you. You win because they notice you — automatically, unconsciously, and at exactly the right moment.
What We Actually Do When We Rebuild a Client’s GTM System
When a client comes to us saying, “We need more leads,” they usually mean, “We’ve built a GTM system for the wrong species of human.” They’ve optimised for the imaginary rational buyer — the one who reads whitepapers on a Sunday morning and enjoys A/B testing email subject lines as a leisure activity.
We reorient the system around the actual human brain, which is beautifully irrational and blissfully lazy.
1. We switch the strategy from ‘attention-demanding’ to ‘attention-assuming’.
Most GTM plans assume attention is a given. It isn’t. Attention is the world’s rarest commodity, and the brain is specifically engineered to avoid spending it.
So instead of asking, “How do we persuade them?”, we ask: “How do we become recognisable even when they’re not paying attention?”
This changes everything — from messaging to channels to creative execution.
2. We rebuild brand assets that speak to the subconscious first.
Colour, rhythm, sound, pattern, repetition — these matter far more than paragraph three of your features list. The subconscious responds to cues long before it responds to claims.
One of the first exercises we do with clients is brutally simple: “Show us your distinctive assets without the logo.” If nothing is recognisable, the GTM system cannot scale. Full stop.
3. We simplify the buyer journey until it matches how humans actually behave.
Most journeys resemble a Swiss railway timetable. Consumers, on the other hand, navigate the world with the intellectual discipline of a squirrel in a supermarket.
So we reduce steps, reduce cognitive load, and reduce friction. A good GTM system behaves like a well-designed street — it guides you even when you're not paying attention.
4. We test the work on people who don’t care.
Because the fatal flaw in most marketing research is simple: it’s done on people who are concentrating.
But the people buying from you are not concentrating. They are scrolling, commuting, cooking, texting, half-listening, and increasingly annoyed.
If your messaging only works on attentive humans, it’s not messaging — it’s fiction.
The Use Case: The Client Who Was Invisible to Their Own Market
A recent client came to us with a familiar situation: campaigns running, sales calling, content produced — yet the market simply wasn’t responding.
When we dug in, the diagnosis was obvious:
Their GTM strategy presumed too much attention and demanded too much effort. Their brand assets were inconsistent, their messaging was overly explained, and their buy path was designed for a highly motivated academic, not a time-poor decision-maker with 60 open tabs.
We rebuilt the system with three principles:
- Make the brand recognisable at a glance — colours, shapes, language, symbols.
- Simplify the narrative to one fluent memory — “This brand = this outcome.”
- Reduce friction everywhere — process, journey, messaging, creatives.
Within two quarters, the results were undeniable: more inbound demand, more unprompted mentions, and more conversions from people who claimed they’d “seen the brand everywhere” (they hadn’t — we’d just finally become cognitively easy to spot).
The Wanted.Berlin Principle
Most people don’t think about your brand. But with the right cues, they’ll recognise it instantly — and they’ll have no idea why.
That is the real job of a modern GTM strategy: to work with the distracted brain, not against it.