When Daydreaming Can Work in Your Favor

Imagine you're sitting in a waiting room, a travel brochure on the table in front of you. With nothing better to do, you pick it up. The cover shows a beach somewhere warm, and for a moment, your mind drifts there. You put the brochure down and don’t think much of it, until three days later, when you find yourself booking a holiday.

Could that wandering mind have actually made you more likely to consider the holiday?

Most marketers would say you weren't paying attention in that waiting room, and they'd be right. But new research by Lin Qiao and Xiangyou Shen suggests that, under certain conditions, it may not matter. Their research shows that mind wandering can increase purchase intention, particularly when the purchase lies somewhere in the future.

Two types of memory

The researchers distinguish between two forms of memory. 

Verbatim memory captures the exact details: the price, the room dimensions, the delivery date and other concrete information.

Gist memory captures the essence: the overall feeling, the atmosphere, the big picture impression. When you're fully focused, you tend to encode verbatim information. When your mind wanders, your brain shifts toward gist memory.

In other words, when the mind wanders, consumers may be more likely to retain the big picture than the details.

Think about a holiday. You may remember the idea of warmth, freedom and getting away from work without remembering every specification of the hotel room. That kind of broad representation is closer to gist memory.

And according to Qiao and Shen, that can matter when the purchase itself is still relatively far away.

When the purchase is far away, the wandering mind can help

The researchers distinguish between distal temporal distance and proximal temporal distance. A purchase with a distal temporal distance is relatively far in the future. In the experiments, participants considered a hotel reservation two months ahead. A proximal purchase was much closer: two days ahead. The results show a clear difference between the two situations.

For purchases that were further away, consumers with higher levels of mind wandering reported stronger purchase intention. In Study 1, purchase intention was 55.33% among participants in the high-mind-wandering condition, compared with 44.67% among those in the low-mind-wandering condition. Willingness to pay was also higher in the high-mind-wandering condition. The researchers link this effect to memory: when a purchase is far away in time, gist memory fits perfectly with how people evaluate future decisions. When the purchase is close, the picture changes, the advantage of mind wandering disappears. When a decision is close, consumers tend to place greater importance on concrete, feasibility-related information. 

Who wanders more, and when

Not every consumer drifts equally, and knowing who wanders most gives you a real targeting advantage. Research cited in the study shows that younger adults tend to mind wander more than older consumers, and fatigued consumers drift more than alert ones.

Mind wandering also follows a daily rhythm. People are more prone to drifting between noon and 4pm, and again from 8pm to midnight as fatigue builds. These are the hours when your customer's brain naturally gravitates toward gist, taking in impressions rather than processing details.

The researchers analyzed real hotel booking data from a tourist destination in China, tracking when reservations were made relative to actual check-in dates. Significantly more advance reservations were made during high mind wandering time windows (31.03%) compared to low mind wandering windows (23.93%). 

For future-dated products, these low-attention windows are actually good placement opportunities. An emotionally-driven campaign for a summer festival or a holiday booking lands differently at 9pm than it does at 9am, because at 9pm the mind is already in the right mode for it. Instead of fighting low attention, you can adapt to it.

How to write for the dreaming brain

Here's where it gets even more useful. Study 3 showed that when product descriptions are already abstract and gist-based, even focused consumers process the information at a gist level. The difference between high and low mind wanderers disappears. That means you don't have to wait for your customer to be in a distracted state. You can create the conditions for gist thinking yourself, through the way you write.

For marketers, this suggests an alternative to trying to capture every bit of consumer attention for future-oriented purchases. Instead of asking: “How do we make consumers pay more attention?” you can sometimes ask: “What is the essential idea we want them to remember?”

In practice, that means leading with feeling over function. Instead of describing what a product does, describe what it changes. Instead of listing what's included, paint a picture of what the experience looks like. 

But, if consumers need to make a well-informed decision and specific details matter, concrete information still remains important.

The research is therefore not an argument for replacing facts with emotion. It's an argument for thinking about which information consumers need, and when they need it.

The travel industry and festivals already get this right

Look at how the best travel campaigns work and you'll see the same principle in action. Airlines and tour operators running their winter campaigns don't lead with price or room specifications. They lead with imagery: golden light, the feeling of escape, the idea of being somewhere entirely different. These campaigns reach people when they're tired and mentally elsewhere, and that's precisely when they're most effective.

Festival marketing follows the same logic. When a major event announces its lineup months in advance, the first wave of communication is almost entirely about atmosphere. The focus is on the headliners, the energy, the sense of being part of something, the logistics come later. That early messaging is built for the dreaming mind, and it drives early ticket sales because the dreaming mind is exactly who encounters it first.

Take-home points

• If your product is future-dated (travel, events, pre-orders), lead with abstract and emotional content rather than specs and details.
• If the purchase is near and customers need to decide fast, go concrete: price, features, etc.
• If you're placing ads in the afternoon or evening, use imagery and feeling-based messaging because your audience is already in gist mode.
• If your audience skews younger, they mind wander more by default, and that is a structural advantage for future-purchase campaigns that you can design your messaging around.