In an age of information overload and shrinking attention spans, getting your content in front of the reader who matters to you – for example, a potential client – has become especially difficult. Many people feel overstimulated and select the content they will devote their attention to with great care and caution. That is why it is so important to create content that takes the needs of each individual style into account.
What kind of content does Style I look for online?
Online, Style I reads E V E R Y T H I N G! Style I loves to read and watch! It reads anything it can get its hands on, and since content most easily comes our way through the internet these days, Style I knows the web almost inside out. It knows exactly where to find which kind of content and is remarkably effective at research. It moves through the virtual world with flair and ease. It is the dream consumer of every type of content. Clickbait works on it – those attention-grabbing article headlines, often published as slideshows you have to click through in order to reach the promise hidden in the title, that is, the answer to the question it poses. Often, though, that answer turns out to be deeply disappointing, out of proportion with the tension built up across the entire piece or all those clicked-through slides. These are headlines along the lines of: „You won’t believe they were once a couple,” „This woman is the sister of the most handsome man in the world,” „Woman adopts two children and makes an astonishing discovery,” and so on. Style I is not even bothered by the slideshow format of the article, though it will, of course, grumble about it a little in the comments. And it is a born commenter, by the way – it happily weighs in under all sorts of articles, and the fact that it has barely skimmed the topic in question does not bother it in the slightest.
What kind of reader is Style I?
Style I is therefore a very receptive audience for content of all kinds. The risk hanging over Style I – one it is usually unaware of – is this: in the online thicket, amid headlines and clickbait vibrating with neural neon, will Style I actually reach the place it set out to go? There is a danger of straying from the chosen path: instead of moving on to the next article on the same subject or to the next page of the article it is reading, Style I spontaneously clicks on an article that has just popped up, even though it has nothing to do with the information it was just looking for.
Behind this behavior lies the natural curiosity of Style I – in real life it shows up as wondering what lies around the next bend, and online, as wondering what is inside that so intriguingly, wittily titled article.
Style I loves surprises, and by the same token, mysteries too – including crime mysteries. The promise of a resolution contained in the clickbait is compelling to it – it wants to know how it ended, it wants to discover the solution to the riddle in the title. This gives it lesser (more often) or greater (rarely) satisfaction. As it reads such content, Style I frequently carries on a running dialogue with itself: will this story end the way I thought? Was what the adoptive mother discovered really… ? And so on. When, at the eightieth slide, it learns that the woman in the photo is George Clooney’s sister, it will feel a satisfaction comparable to eating a glazed doughnut it was tempted into by its own sweet tooth; but when, after the sixth click on a piece about some celebrity, it learns that the children she adopted are siblings, it will feel something like heartburn and mild disappointment. „That’s it?”
When preparing content for Style I, its own „user experience” – the impression it comes away with – is therefore key.
That experience is all the better for Style I the more entertainment it provides – puzzles, gamification, and the like. „Down with boredom!” cries Tytus in the Media Markt ads, and this could just as well serve as the „heraldic battle cry” of everyone with a Style I.
It is people with Style I who are most often affected by the phenomenon known as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out – the fear of missing out on important, and most often trendy, content available above all on social media).
Perhaps this is an interesting business idea – creating a portal that would be an antidote to the information noise, serving up only the content that triggers FOMO in Style I (but also in Style D).
This is also important information for everyone creating content aimed at Style I.
Creating special content for those worried about FOMO? That is quite a good idea, one that some editorial teams are already putting into practice by producing brief digests of the most interesting events of a given week. It is a good idea all the more so because, besides Style I, Style D also takes advantage of it – but each does so for a different reason. Style I wants to be up to date, or even a step ahead, because innovativeness, uniqueness, novelty, being informed, being well-versed, being able to talk to anyone about the topics that currently matter – these are all its hallmarks. Style I can even take it quite hard that, over the course of its life, it will not learn everything worth knowing, will not master every language, will not see every place. „I Want It All!” sang Freddie Mercury, whose dominant style was I, and Holly Johnson, the vocalist of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, echoed him with „The World Is My Oyster” – I want to have and to know everything that is out there on the web, because it is thanks to the web that the world has truly become an oyster… (expansive exploration of the world can, however, end tragically – both singers contracted HIV, though Holly Johnson is alive and fighting).
In the spirit of „I Want It All,” Style I will make impulse purchases in online stores, and will also be a receptive customer for all kinds of online courses, masterminds, and so on. From the point of view of online product providers, it is the dream customer for keeping their business afloat – it will gladly buy everything or nearly everything they offer, unless it happens to have no money, which is not uncommon for Style I (just as it is not uncommon for it to have a great deal of money, which it can nonetheless spend quickly, with a flair worthy of a true artist).
Style I thus vacuums up online content like a hoover, but crucially, the knowledge it acquires this way is fairly superficial. It is not followed by any deep dive into the subject or real understanding of it.