Pop quiz: what’s your first memory? For many, it’s something painful. When I was 2, I was at a fast-food place and chose to look into a straw, scratching my eye’s cornea. It wasn’t a nice experience. After a quick visit to the emergency room, I wore a patch on my eye and created a memory that will stick with me forever.
In business, you’re lucky if people remember you the next day, let alone a lifetime. Advertising all over the Internet, billboards, and airwaves is no good if people can’t remember your product or service at the time they decide to purchase something.
When most people forget 90 percent of what they see in a day, how can you make your brand stick in their minds? Advertisers and researchers, like Carmen Simon, have been exploring this issue for years. In her latest book Impossible to Ignore, Simon reveals that being memorable depends on a mix of one or more of these 15 factors. Luckily, none of them require any extreme measures.
Context
Context is the setting in which you encode a memory. Context can be conceptual, such as “The three R’s of learning—reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Or it can be physical; you show people a car lot when talking about buying cars to build a memory association.
Cues
Cues are triggers for important content when the content is no longer right in front of us. They can be time-based (at one o’clock, I’ll pick you up) or location-based (when I get to the office, I’ll send that email). They could also be a sign in the lobby that says “No Smoking.” Except in France, where people always smoke under those signs.
Distinctiveness
Distinctiveness is the ability for something in your surroundings (a stimulus, in research terms) to jump out at you. For example, if you have a bunch of PowerPoint slides of the same bullet-pointed writing, then you slip in the image of a cute kitten, followed by more slides, people will remember the kitten since it broke the pattern.
Emotion
In terms of memory, emotion relates to obtaining rewards or avoiding punishments. When you tie an emotion to something you hear or see, you’re more likely to remember it, which is why storytelling works so well. Tell a story of someone winning the lottery, people imagine the reward; or show a starving orphan waiting on your dollar donation so they can eat that day, people imagine avoiding punishment.
Facts
We all know what facts are. They are pieces of information that can be verified by experience or observation. People tend to remember precise and useful facts, such as “People forget 90 percent of what they encounter unless they specifically try to remember it” or “4 out of 5 doctors recommend….”
Familiarity
Familiarity may breed contempt but it also helps you remember something if it relates to your knowledge or mastery of a subject. It’s difficult to remember something if you don’t understand it. How much do you remember of that high school French class? This is why you need to know your audience. You make baseball references to people who know baseball and knitting references to people who know knitting.
Motivation
Motivation is all about rewards; specifically the effort, risk, or delay in getting rewards or obtaining social impact. Think in terms of working out. If you hear “Try out our no risk program for losing ten pounds in ten days,” you’ll be likely to remember it because you are motivated to lose weight and the effort involved is minimal while the rewards are huge.
Novelty
We all crave novelty. Novelty can be absolute, like showing something you’ve never seen before, such as a new planet or species. Or novelty can be relative when we combine one or more things we are familiar with—like chocolate covered carrots.
Quantity of information
When it comes to memory, how much content we hear or see is just as important as the way we receive it. Too much content and people tune out; too little, and people don’t have enough to give the memory context and make it stick.
Relevance
Relevance deals with how important the content is to you. If the content is considered important for obtaining rewards or avoiding punishments, you’ll be all ears (or eyes). For example, you’ll lean in when you hear something like “You have three days left to get your free ice cream cone,” if you like ice cream cones. Or you might sit up and pay attention if someone puts down a ticking box next to you and says, “This bomb is going to go off in five minutes unless you press the red button to stop it.”
Repetition
You don’t have to tell someone something a million times to get them to remember, contrary to what your Mom said about times tables. According to MRI studies, showing something three times is considered repetitive enough to form a pattern. This is why we’re told to “say what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell people what you said.”
Self-generated content
Self-generated content is all about making things interactive for your audience. When you’re active you remember more than when you’re passive. Think of all those classes where a professor droned on: how much did you remember of those lectures? By asking questions or inviting your audience to imagine something (through storytelling), your audience will be more likely to remember.
Sensory intensity
Sensory intensity can be visual or auditory (or even smell, touch or taste if provoked through imagination). Coupled with distinctiveness, sensory intensity can make things memorable. Think of the girl with the red dress in The Matrix or Schindler’s List. The bright red dress against a dark background jumped out at us and made the scene memorable.
Social aspects
You remember things that will help you attain social advantages such as power, prominence, or status. See someone’s new BMW or hear about a bestselling book, and you’ll be likely to remember them because other people think those things are important.
Surprise
When we encounter something unexpected, it tends to stick in our memory (like a straw to the cornea of your eye). When something is unexpected, we tend to recall it to improve our prediction models. Such as the shopping mall is busy on Tuesday mornings, the French restaurant is closed on Mondays, or I expected a human to be driving the car, not this sexy robot.
So if you want to make your business memorable, all you need to do is incorporate these variables, and people will be purchasing your products the next time they make a buying decision.