🧠How to make your brand memorable…

Hey there,

Welcome back to the 15th edition of Brandish

Your guide to crafting an iconic brand

I hope you’re having an extraordinary weekend and are ready to crush this week ahead

In today’s newsletter, I’ll talk about the psychology behind why consumers make purchasing decisions and how you can leverage that for your brand.

Without further ado - grab your Brez and let’s dive straight into it!

Is our “branded marketing” EVEN working??

Remember the last time you visited a new city and in the midst of everything happening at the same time, you tossed your room key somewhere??

And

…Literally a millisecond later you didn’t even remember where you put it and are floundering now.

Well… at least THIS is what I experience on every visit to a hotel.

Why does this happen to so many of us?

There’s a scientific reason behind it.

Your brain is simultaneously processing all kinds of information like what time zone you’re in, what city, and how long until the next appointment - and with the limited capacity of our short-term memories, the room key doesn’t even make the cut.

The main point here is our brain is constantly collecting and filtering information.

Some bits will make it to your long-term story - “memory” while most bits will become clutter and be discarded.

This process is unconscious and instantaneous.

In other words - we have no control over it.

Bored and wondering why all of a sudden I am talking about neuroscience and whatnot???

There’s a good reason for it

And that is…

This is what happens on a daily basis to your ads on IG/FB, YouTube etc.

It just gets lost in all the clutter of content out there and you wonder why it’s not working.

All those hard-earned dollars you spend on ads go to TOTAL waste because we as humans immediately classify it as unimportant and it doesn’t even make it to our memory.

Don’t believe me?

Let me share some facts with you.

In 1965 - a typical consumer had a 34% recall of the ads he had been shown. That’s a great number though!

But here’s where it gets interesting…

In 1990, that figure fell to 8%.

And a 2007 ACNielsen phone survey of a thousand consumers found that the average person could remember a mere 2.21 commercials they had EVER seen.

Do you see now why your ads are not converting the way you want them to?

In this digital era, we are bombarded with ads everywhere and 99.8% of them don’t even make it to our memory.

Let me show you (through some research studies) how you can get to that 0.2% of advertisers.

PS: All of the stats and studies from above is from the book “Buyology” by Martin Lindstrom

Don’t be like Ford… Be like Coca-Cola

Around 2006-2007 (don’t quote me on the date) there was a study done to determine our recollection of ads from prominent TV shows like American Idol.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritties of the study, setup etc since this is NOT a research paper ;).

But, the results were astonishing…

The results from the study revealed that we have NO memory of the brands (Ford in the study) that don’t play an integral part in a program.

They become white noise, easily, instantaneously forgotten.

On the other hand, the products (like Coca-Cola in the study) that play an integral part in the narrative of a program - not only are more memorable but appear to have a double-barreled effect.

In other words, they not only increase our memory of our product, but they actually weaken our ability to remember the other brands.

Now, you might wonder…

How does this apply to my brand or my ad creatives?

It’s actually pretty simple…

If you think about it…

The sole reason why UGC ads took off a few years ago was that the products they spoke about fit into the narrative of their story and how it solved their problem.

But over time marketers realized this and so over-used UGC to the extent where they just started feeling like a sore thumb.

The sole reason for this is it’s NOT authentic.

Often, these creators are paid money for creating these videos from a brief, making the creators sign up for products that don’t even resemble their identity or play into the narrative of their story/life

And therefore… it can easily become a piece of clutter in the consumer’s mind.

That’s why… in our experience, the best creatives are the ones from customers/creators who have a deep affinity with the product.

Why?

Because when they talk about it, it forms an integral part of their story/narrative (since it genuinely helped them) without even giving them any kind of a script.

SO, the key takeaway here is when making your ads…

Think about how your product would subtly fit into the narrative of the creator instead of shoving the product down someone’s throat with value props.

Instead of just trying to push the product through inauthentic creators. who consumers can instantly see through

Anyways…

Now my hands started hurting from writing this newsletter…

So it’s time to go back to Fantasy Football

I’ll continue on this consumer psychology topic next week - so stay tuned for part 2!

Thanks for reading along

As always, thanks a lot for reading along.

I appreciate you and look forward to seeing you again next week