The Difference Between Attention And Actually Mattering

My new kick… with all this obsession over attention… I keep coming back to “mattering.”

Think about the news around the Cybertruck. Tesla is planning to wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas factory in 2027 to make room for more Cybercabs, though Elon Musk has since extended production through the end of summer to work through outstanding orders. I’m willing to bet that Harvard Business School will use this as one of the greatest modern marketing case studies of all time… and not in the way Musk would have imagined. Think about the buildup to launch. This truck did everything marketers have spent decades trying to accomplish. It was radically different… instantly recognizable… impossible to ignore… generated endless headlines… videos… memes… conversations… arguments and cultural commentary. Everybody had an opinion about the Cybertruck… but not nearly enough people wanted to buy one.

There’s a difference between capturing attention and capturing a market… and that’s where mattering matters.

I wonder if we’ve become so obsessed with attention (don’t forget to like, follow and subscribe!) that we’ve lost sight of what really matters (again, this is germane to why I think we’re in The Intimacy Economy… and not The Attention Economy). Being different isn’t the same as truly mattering to a customer. Do you remember when the Cybertruck was first announced? It came with extraordinary promises about price, performance and what the future of transportation might look like. Then came the delays, changing specifications, higher prices and questions about whether something so radically designed was actually practical for the people who might want a pickup truck. And, as another reminder, those questions existed long before Musk’s increasingly public political involvement complicated the conversation. That political dimension matters. When a founder becomes inseparable from a brand, the meaning of the product can change alongside public perceptions of that person. The Cybertruck was already a statement. Eventually, owning one could communicate something its designers hadn’t necessarily intended (and on a much grander scale than a bumper sticker proclaiming that the owner bought their car long before the founder went political)… and reducing the Cybertruck’s commercial challenges simply to politics and culture would miss the larger lesson.

The market can be absolutely fascinated by something it has very little interest in owning.

What makes this weirder is that fascination is measurable. We can count impressions… views… shares… comments… mentions and engagement. We can track sentiment… celebrate the conversation… and even manufacture desire. But does that desire translate into sales and from sales into something that matters to customers? Did customers love the product? Were they proud to own it? Did it become part of their identity? Did they recommend it to friends? Did they talk about it because it genuinely mattered to them? Or… and this is something to think about… was the excitement greater than the experience? Mattering is not just being relevant or trusted. Mattering is about becoming something that carries enough significance in someone’s life that choosing a brand that matters feels different from choosing any other brand.

Attention is what gets a brand noticed… mattering is what a customer gives back.

Taste is brutal (like the markets). Marketers like to believe that with enough consumer research, data, creativity… marketing sophistication, they can understand what people want and build something irresistible… and, sure… sometimes that happens. But there’s also something almost impossible to identify about why a market embraces one product and rejects another (look no further than the top of the music charts). Why one song becomes iconic while another bombs. Consumers often don’t know how to explain their preferences. Their choices involve utility, identity, aesthetics, emotion, social acceptance and countless other factors that rarely fit neatly into a marketing dashboard. And a product doesn’t have to appeal to everyone to matter deeply to someone. A niche product can be an extraordinary success. A product built for a mass market can be a disappointment even when thousands of people genuinely love it. We’ve developed increasingly sophisticated systems for understanding what captures attention… but how much of that tells us whether we actually matter to customers? Tesla seems to be shifting its attention toward autonomous transportation and robotics. Those ambitions may prove enormously successful. Or they may reveal another gap between a compelling vision and what the market is ready to embrace. I’m OK with that… that’s the risk of innovation. And there’s nothing wrong with taking enormous swings. But marketers (and business leaders) should be careful about confusing the size of the conversation with mattering.

The question I’m most curious about… how many people would genuinely care if the Cybertruck disappeared?

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.