Cutting Through the Clutter

In a world fighting for attention, the brands that stand out are not necessarily the loudest. They are the ones that create an experience worth remembering.

Some experiences stay with us; a song can take us back twenty years, a familiar smell can transport us to a childhood home, a stranger’s kindness can remain in our memory long after we have forgotten the person’s face. We experience thousands of things every day; most disappear, but a few leave an imprint. Why?

The human mind is constantly filtering the world around it. It cannot give equal attention to everything, so certain experiences become more noticeable and meaningful than others.

Behavioral science tells us that brand experience itself can work through sensory, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral responses. These experiences can influence satisfaction and loyalty. Every marketer should take notice and pause, because brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to get noticed. But being noticed is only the beginning. The real question is: What happens after you have someone’s attention?

We live in an environment where everyone is trying to cut through the clutter. Brands are producing more content, campaigns, reels, influencers, notifications, and activations. The volume keeps increasing, yet the human brain hasn’t changed. It still decides when and what deserves attention, and what needs to be remembered.

This is where many brands get confused. Visibility is often mistaken for distinctiveness. A brand can have millions of impressions and be everywhere, but it cannot find a place in the consumer’s mind because attention is temporary, but experience is different.

Think about walking into a restaurant you have never visited before. You may remember the food, but you might also remember the smell when you entered, the music playing in the background, the way the waiter greeted you, the unexpected dessert, or how the staff handled a small problem. Years later, you may forget the menu; you may not remember what you paid, but you remember how the place made you feel. That is an experience. And experiences have a way of becoming memory.

Also read: Why Premium Pricing Works for Some Brands and Fails for Others

Research on brand experience has long argued that a brand is experienced through much more than advertising; its design, packaging, communications and environments can generate sensory, affective, intellectual and behavioural responses. The research found that brand experience can contribute directly and indirectly to satisfaction and loyalty. In other words, a brand is not only what it says; it is what it makes people experience. This changes the question for marketers. Instead of asking, how do we get more attention? Perhaps the better question is, what can we do with the attention we already have?

Consider what happens when a brand creates participation rather than simply exposure.

At a live event, a consumer isn’t merely watching a brand message. They may touch the product, try something, photograph it, share it, talk about it, and associate the brand with the experience itself.

A 2026 EY-Parthenon and BookMyShow study of 7,450 live-event attendees in India found that 59% recalled brands they had engaged with on-ground, while 55% reported higher purchase intent after interacting with brands at events. The research points to a shift from passive audiences towards participation, meaning, and immersion. The lesson isn’t that every brand needs to sponsor a concert. It is that participation changes the relationship between a person and a brand.

When people participate, they experience; when they experience, they have something to remember. And most importantly, when that memory is connected to the brand, the brand gains something more valuable than another impression. It gains a place in the consumer’s mental world.

This is also why distinctive brand assets matter. The colour, shape, sound, character, packaging or visual cue that immediately makes you think of a particular brand is not merely decoration. Research on brand salience describes it as the propensity of a brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations, built through networks of memory structures.

Think about the red and white of Coca-Cola, the golden arches of McDonald’s, the Nike swoosh, Amul’s familiar cartoon girl and Fevicol’s irreverent humour. These brands have spent years building associations that allow consumers to recognise them without necessarily being told their names. That is the real power of cutting through clutter. You don’t always have to shout louder when you have built stronger memory.

But there is another dimension that matters even more today. Community.

The previous edition of the 9:30 Brief explored how communities turn customers into people who are invested in a brand. That investment can also become a powerful way of cutting through clutter. People may ignore an advertisement; they are less likely to ignore something created by people they identify with. A community gives a brand something advertising cannot easily manufacture: belonging, which creates participation. Participation creates experience. Experience creates memory, and memory creates meaning.

Suddenly, the brand isn’t interrupting the consumer’s life; it has become part of it. That is why the brands that truly stand out are often not the ones making the most noise. They are the ones creating the most recognisable, meaningful and repeatable experiences.

The challenge for today’s CMO is therefore not simply to win attention. It is to earn a place in memory, and that requires connecting the dots between how human beings behave and how brands behave. Understand what makes people notice, what makes them feel, what makes them participate, what makes an experience distinctive. Then build those principles into the brand consistently, deliberately, and over time, because the objective isn’t to create another moment that disappears into the feed.

The objective is to create something that survives the feed, something people can recall, they can describe, they can associate with a feeling, they can recognise even before they see the name, and that becomes part of their mental landscape.

In a world full of noise, the brands that matter are not necessarily the ones people see most; they are the ones people experience, feel, and remember. And perhaps that is the real meaning of cutting through the clutter. Don’t create more noise, create an imprint.

📚 The Library
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Why read it? Because it offers a powerful foundation for understanding how attention, perception, memory, and decision-making shape human behaviour.

The Experience Economy
B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
Why read it? Because it explains why experiences can become a source of differentiation when products and services alone are no longer enough.

How Brands Grow
Byron Sharp
Why read it? Because it challenges conventional brand thinking and introduces the importance of mental and physical availability in how brands grow.

💡 Edition Learning
“Don’t compete for more attention. Create something worth remembering.”

🏛️ Boardroom Question
“When the consumer’s interaction with your brand ends, what is left behind?”

💧 Drop of Wisdom
“To know what is wrong, you must first have the knowledge of what is right.” Brand Custodian