One of my favorite creepy moments in film is the opening scene to The City of Lost Children, by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. In the scene, a small boy is delighted to find Santa come down his chimney on Christmas Eve and present with him with a magical little toy. But when more and more santas keep coming down, the boy gets confused and overwhelmed, and soon his dream becomes a nightmare. Too much of a good thing can certainly be tiresome, and I feel that society as a whole has become inundated with new technology and is beginning to fall victim to innovation fatigue.

We now live at a time when the pace of innovation is staggering. If it’s your full-time job to keep up with all the new platforms, and apps, and sites, and devices, it’s completely exhausting, and there are still things that slip past your radar. While professionals are struggling to keep up, most ordinary people have simply stopped trying and have settled for what they’ve already got because they don’t want to start fresh again with something new. I think this feeling of innovation fatigue explains why no new offering has dethroned Facebook as the giant of Social Media. After moving from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook, and each time starting from scratch, no one wants to rebuild a new social network. Even if it’s brilliantly designed and extremely easy to get on board with, like Google+. The same is true with apartments when you live in New York. At some point you just get so tired of moving that you stick with your current apartment; it’s not because it’s necessarily the best apartment, but rather because you already live there.

So what does this mean for brands, marketers, and other professionals creating innovative new experiences for their customers? For one, it means that your audience isn’t as receptive as you’d like. And it means that reaching your audience is only half the battle; even if a loyal customer is convinced that your latest offering is a must-have, they still might not go out and get it. This explains why Apple fell short of its quarterly goals earlier this month. Customers anticipated that an even newer model was coming out soon, so they simply didn’t buy any iPhones all summer. And now that they’ve waiting this long, what’s another few months?

I think the secret is to empathize with the average consumer and to be patient. Feel their frustration. Feel their fatigue. And find ways to break through the apathy and disappointment to show them that your brand and your service is here to make their life better. Demonstrate that you’re listening and you care. When you’ve had a long day, the last thing you want is a salesman showing up at your door. Instead, be the friend that comes by to lend a listening ear.