Why this idea means business : We explore how brands benefit from better understanding of how memory works. Learn how to make your brand stick in customers’ heads. Read this to learn how to craft a more memorable brand.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To deepen your brand’s connection with customers by making it more memorable. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – More spend
- Skill area – Psychology
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. increase in monthly spend/customer = +$3 (+3%)
- Est. sales increase = +$3k (monthly) | +$36k (annual)
Memory is rarely discussed in marketing.
However, if customers can’t remember your brand, you won’t get sales. So, it’s clearly worth exploring how memory works and how to influence it to work in your favour.
Making your brand more memorable significantly improves its impact. Let’s start with using some psychology to get into the customer’s head and explore how the brain manages memories.
The hippocampus - your brain’s librarian for memories
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that handles memory management.
It’s part of your brain’s limbic (emotional) system.
It receives inputs from your senses via the thalamus and converts these into memories to be called on as and when needed.
In effect, your memories are like a library, and the hippocampus acts as the librarian.
Because memories are organised by your emotional brain, it means that experiences which stir emotions are usually easier to remember than logical facts.
For example, you remember the happy feeling (an emotion) of being at a wedding. But you struggle to recall the name of the band at the reception (a fact). You remember crying when ET went home (an emotion). But not how many government officials were trying to catch him (a fact).
So lesson number one for building a memorable brand. Engage the emotions. Brands that do this are far more likely to be remembered.
Memorable brand lesson #1 - Engage emotions
This isn’t about using cheap tricks to make customers cry at every opportunity. Customers aren’t stupid. They can sense when their emotions are being manipulated. You have to stir their emotions in a relevant and meaningful way.
Mastering the sensory inputs from the thalamus that the hippocampus uses to create and store our memories is key here. It’s much easier to remember things with high sensory appeal.
For example, aesthetically pleasing visuals. Uplifting audio. Tastes that tantalise our tongues and smells that stimulate our synapses. The tingling textural touch of a well-designed product.
A memorable brand uses the senses in all its brand activation. For example, in the psychological colour associations used in its packaging. The music in its advertising. The crafted design touches of its website and overall customer experience. A memorable brand uses the senses to deeply connect with its customers on an emotional level.
Working and long-term memory
However, sensory memories aren’t the only type of memory our brains work with. Two others worth exploring are working memory and long-term memory.
Working memory
Working memory refers to the active, short-term memories we hold in our heads to do specific tasks.
When someone tells you their phone number, and you repeat it before putting it in your phone, that’s your working memory in action.
Research from Nelson Cowan, a psychology professor at the University of Missouri, has shown that our working memories have limited capacity. We can usually remember 3-5 items comfortably.
However, adding more items then reduces our ability to remember them all.
For example, it’s why we remember phone numbers as 3 bursts of digits 0468 xxx xxx, rather than a string of 10 individual digits. (a process known as chunking).
Brands should therefore be selective about what they want customers to remember when they engage them. More on that shortly, but first, let’s look at long-term memory.
Long-term memory
Long-term memory is where your brain files away memories for future use. It organises these in a loose structure of connections, called schemas. Memories exist in multiple interconnected hierarchies of schemas. For example, Canberra could be in a schema called “capital cities”, another called “Australian cities” and another called “untrustworthy politicians”.
Different types of long-term memories work in different ways. For example, those we actively recall – explicit memories which can be semantic or episodic. Semantic is about a specific fact. Parliament is in Canberra. These are usually fixed and quite reliable. Episodic, on the other hand, is your recollection of events when telling a story. If someone did something stupid on a night out, for example. These aren’t so fixed. They’re looser, and the brain essentially reconstructs them when needed.
For example, think about your favourite movie. You’ll have a high-level schema of it. But you probably don’t remember it scene by scene, line by line. You might remember a character first. Then a scene. Then you remember what led up to that scene and what happened next and so on. This is why witness memories in crimes are often unreliable. Our episodic memory reconstructs events rather than remembering them as they happened.
Implicit memories are managed more instinctively. If asked about your usual route to work, you could pull it from your memory, right? But when you drive it, you usually do it on a kind of auto-pilot. You’re not actively thinking left turn here, right turn there. You remember the route without much thought. It’s an implicit memory. Implicit memories drive most of our habits. Things we do regularly without much logical thinking.
Memorable brand lesson #2 - Fit in with how working and long-term memory work
So, how do you use these insights to craft a more memorable brand?
Let’s start with working memory’s limited capacity. You should keep what you ask the customer to remember very short when you first engage them. E.g. great advertising usually only asks the customer to remember 3-4 things. A headline to grab attention. One key benefit. A call to action. Those, plus the brand identity, are as much as a customer can hold in their working memory at one time.
Getting your brand into a customer’s working memory is about prioritising what you share with them. Be concise. Be clear. If you overload someone’s working memory, it shuts off. They’ll ignore your communication.
Getting your brand into a customer’s longer-term memory takes more work. There has to be some useful reason for the customer’s brain to want to remember it. The key is making your brand identity and experience feel relevant to them.
You want them to associate your brand with a specific situation so that your brand is the first to come to mind when that situation occurs. That’s why so much advertising shows people in real-life situations. They’re using drama and storytelling to build memory connections that activate when customers next encounter that situation. For example, insurance companies that show people who’ve been in accidents. These stir the emotions and create strong memories.
You can also use brand identity assets to trigger similar strong memory connections. For example, a distinctive logo and brand colour palette. A jingle or slogan. When your customer sees or hears these, it reinforces the memory association and makes your brand more memorable.
Surprise!
Repetition helps turn your brand identity into a more memorable brand for customers. But there’s a tricky balance to manage. There’s a danger that repetition makes your brand too predictable, and that can make it less memorable.
That’s because we need a certain level of attention to trigger a memory. This is part of our instinctive and emotional responses. But repeated and predictable brand messages can lead to our brains taking those messages for granted. They tune predictable messages out as not worth paying attention to.
The answer isn’t to frequently change your advertising, brand identity and website. That just creates confusion. The answer is to refresh those things just enough that the customer continues to pay attention to them. Our brains get more active when they spot something’s different.
Memorable brand lesson #3 - Do something different to stand out
This need to stand out to make your brand more memorable relates to a psychological phenomenon known as the Von Restorff effect.
Named after a German psychologist, it showed that when presented with a list of similar, predictable items, anything distinctly different was more likely to be noticed AND remembered.
For example, take this list – A,B,3,D,E. Von Restorff suggests you’re more likely to notice and remember the number.
The same thinking applies to brands. It’s why you should make your brand distinctive. If you look and sound like every other brand in your category, customers won’t remember you.
There are many creative ways to do this.
For example, you make your packaging distinctly different to the rest of the category. Bottled water brand Voss is a good example. Very different packaging from all other water brands.
Or you could do seasonal products (e.g. for Easter or Christmas) or limited editions (only available in limited numbers or for a limited time). These pull on the psychological trigger of scarcity. Customers fear missing out on getting something. They feel compelled to buy in case it’s not available again.
You can also use brand identity assets creatively here. Show the logo in unusual situations or places, for example. McDonald’s does this often with the Golden Arches in their outdoor and print advertising.
You can even use public relations. An event or sponsorship, for example, that relates to your purpose and values. Anything that’s out of the ordinary enough to force customers to notice and remember you.
How to make an “un” memorable brand
Many of these ideas sound obvious. However, it’s still easy for brands to fall into pitfalls that instantly make them less memorable.
For example, when you over-rely on using certain design cues to show you belong to the category. Look again at all the bottled waters in the image above. Similarly shaped and coloured bottles. Similar colour palettes on the labels. Only the differently shaped and coloured Voss is memorable. If you don’t stand out, customers won’t remember you.
There’s also the danger of making your brand message too complicated. This often happens with bigger brands, where campaigns have to go through multiple approvals. As each approver gives feedback, the message grows. It becomes bloated and overloaded. If customers find what you say too difficult, they won’t remember you. It’s an opportunity for challenger brands. Keep it simple. Be direct.
Lastly, there’s the danger of making your product deathly dull. Remember, customers connect with brands initially with their instincts and emotions. For those to kick in, you can’t lead with logic. Make it available for those who want it, but truly memorable brands build the emotional connection first. Be interesting. Be entertaining. That’s what will make customers remember you.
Conclusion - How to build a more memorable brand
Memories are a big part of our brains. They’re how we learn to do things, they drive our habits, and we need them to make decisions.
When it comes to the brands we choose, memories massively influence our decision-making.
Everyone has had a bad meal at a restaurant and vowed never to go back. Or had such a great meal, that they go back to that restaurant again and again. It’s our memory of those experiences that drives our future behaviour.
Brands can do many things to make themselves more memorable.
First, they should make sure they engage customer emotions. Memories are driven by our emotional systems, so emotions make brands more memorable.
Then, brands should work out what types of memory they want to create. Working memory requires short, concise relevant pieces of information. Longer-term memory requires brands to make connections to specific situations and triggers.
Finally, brands should use surprise in their marketing. Customers forget predictable brands. Surprising brands are remembered. It’s not surprise for suprise’s sake, but doing something that refreshes the connection with the customer in a distinctly different way. That makes your brand stand out from the crowd. It makes your brand memorable.
Check out our how to use emotions in creative for more on this. Or get in touch (when you remember) if you’d like to find out even more ways to craft a more memorable brand.
Photo credits
Bookshelf : Photo by Jamie Taylor on Unsplash
Man crying : Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
Girl reading magazine : Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash
Go for it (adapted) : Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Surprised Monkey : Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash
Red tulip / Yellow tulip : Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
