Neuromarketing: 3 Factors to Strengthen Your Brand Memory

“Consumers don’t think how they feel. They don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”

David Ogilvy

The preceding statement reveals why the Behavioral Economics and Neuromarketing disciplines were established.

For decades, researchers and professionals have relied on questioning individuals about their motivations and behaviors in order to analyze their behavior patterns and activities and, as a result, develop goods, services, or plans based on the information obtained.

The reality is that we are not as rational as we believe! In fact, the majority of our brain operations are performed on autopilot by our primal brain which is unconscious and not systematically logical, with just a small proportion performed by our rational brain to do complicated computations, reasoning, and learning.

This understanding of the human mind has called into question the accuracy of traditional marketing research, as well as the validity of common qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing consumer behavior, such as surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and old-school observations.

This in return often leads to one of the most prevalent biases that we experience on a daily basis, the Outcome Bias where we subconsciously accept the outcome as granted, without paying attention to what brought us to that conclusion. As a result, in many cases, we base our judgments on faulty or deceptive resources, resulting in an outcome that is based on incorrect data and information.

Consequently, the field of Neuromarketing has emerged to challenge the concept of old-fashioned marketing research and campaigns, opening the door to limitless potential to improve our understanding of consumer behavior and develop successful plans and strategies based on accurate scientific neuroscience tools and findings targeting the dominated unconscious section of consumer brain.

Clement Levallois and his team in their paper “Translating upwards: linking the neural and social sciences via neuroeconomics” defined Neuromarketing as the subset  of  neuroeconomics,  which  combines  neuroscience,  genetics, economics, and psychology to understand  how  specific  neuron  activation  may lead to larger scale market behavior.

In Neuromarketing, consumer preferences and behavior toward specific brands are influenced by habits, perceptions, feelings, and personal experiences, as opposed to traditional marketing, in which consumers are treated as rational targets who can deliberate and are fully aware of their preferences and motives, which have been proven to be incorrect.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of memory in our everyday decisions and offer three factors that will help us enhance consumer memory for our selected brand.

But Why Memory?

Brands can’t be positioned in consumers’ minds unless they are registered and retrieved from our long term memory.

Ahmed Al Ansari

Memories do not exist in isolation; they interact with one another to form meaningful patterns in our brain. Our short term memory can hold up to 7 objects at a time, which can last roughly 20 seconds before being lost unless those memories are wired into our long term memory.

Patrick Renvoise, co-author of The Persuasion Code, stated, “- It’s not what you communicate to your audience right now, is important, it’s what they will remember when they make the decision.”

This is crucial to understand and act on since it is not about the moment of experience that a consumer had when are experiencing the touch points of a brand, but about what the consumer will remember and decide upon when things get wired in their memory. The response might be in milliseconds or even after years! And here it’s very important to notice that our experiencing memory is not a copy of the memory that we recall later!

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses the massive difference between our experiencing self and our remembering self.

Our experiencing self is the true moment that we come into contact with an object or an event, and our remembering self is when we recall our experiencing self and mostly remember a portion of the event, or another version that has been manipulated in our brain due to interconnection with other memories, which may or may not reflect the actual moment we had.

For example, imagine going to a 3 weeks trip to visit a relative in the Kingdom of Bahrain, you had an amazing two week of family gathering, attraction, shopping and food. The last week ended with you having an accident, breaking your leg and getting to your home town on a wheelchair!

In the above scenario, your experiencing-self had an excellent time for the first two weeks, but your remembering-self will assess the entire trip as poor or chaotic! And it’s not only that! As Kahneman mentioned in one of his TED Talks, You may remember less than an hour from your entire 3 weeks trip and if you had some photos you might recall barely another 30 mins.

This gave rise to the Peak-End Rule, a cognitive bias that explains how we tend to remember the peak (climax) and the end of prior good or bad events while unconsciously ignoring the remainder. This is seen clearly when we recall movies, relationships, or in memories of childbirth, where a woman recalls the agony of the experience (Peak), but after the kid is delivered, the joy and satisfaction of having the child dominates the whole experience.

The above cognitive bias is associated by the Representativeness Heuristic, a mental shortcut that allows our brain to quickly judge or solve issues around us based on emotional responses utilizing a snapshot of our memories rather than examining the actual experience itself. It is essentially how we compare a current circumstance to a previous representative pattern stored in our memory.

It thus brings us to the subject of how to associate the Ad Memory to the Brand Memory in marketing communication, in which we may have a strong ad that gets wired in our memory in a flash or by repetition, but later, our brain retains the ad without any link to the brand that it was representing. In other words, we may have a really strong and effective ad or message, but it will be disconnected from the representative brand that leads to a failure campaign!

A well-known example is the most-awarded advertisement of all time, “Dumb Ways to Die“, which was intended to communicate awareness and educational messages to teenagers in Melbourne, in order to enhance railway safety. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the animated song with its beautiful darling creatures became popular, the rate of injuries in the six months after the promotion was chaotic.

What happened here! Why it went wrong! As Dr. Peter Stidel mentioned in his book Neurobranding, the popular animated ad have created a counter effect with teaching teenagers the different methods available to kill themselves rather than providing a strong connection between the ad and the Melbourne Rail brand. In fact, the animated music video become so popular that the brand itself was neglected from memory.

Humans are emotional in nature, and as a result, people who build their plans on sophisticated assumptions frequently overlook the fact that we are driven by simple and emotional impulses.

Following a fundamental knowledge of why memory is important for brand positioning in the minds of consumers, the following three factors by Patrick Renviose, co-author of the book, The Persuasion Code, can help improve memory registry and retrieval.

Repetition                  

Do you recall as a child when your teacher asked you to memorize the multiplication table? You began by reading it, then repeated it until it eventually registered in your brain!

Repetition is a major contributor to the formation of habits, which in turn contributes to our brand preference and choice. This is related to the Mere Exposure Effect, which states that repeated exposure to a stimulus improves familiarity and likability of what that stimulus presents.

With the assistant of the other two factors, Emotions and Position, when we are repeatedly exposed to a brand identity, attributes, or ambassador in multiple contexts, we automatically recall it and connect to it more and more.

The connection between neurons in our brain is strengthened each time we repeatedly absorb the same information through our different senses, allowing it to encode faster information into the Amygdala (emotional data storage) and Hippocampus (episodic memory storage) parts of our brain that register long term memories. 

This takes place in unconscious emotional level with some assistant of our rational brain, and it is true for many situations that requires repeated practice and exposure to the learning subject such as storing and remembering our best friends’ birth date, a T.V ad for a certain brand, or how certain product or service functions.

It is crucial to note, however, that repetition does not often convert ad memory to brand memory on its own; rather, it promotes process fluency, and fluency builds brand preference in consumer’s minds.

Furthermore, the occurrence of several exposures at the same time (Temporal Adjacency) enables your unconscious brain to intuitively link those patterns just because they occurred together, impacting brand positioning significantly. However, not every repeated stimulus will be registered in the memory and that’s why the other two factors can provide great assistance to strengthen the process.

Emotion

Emotions are far more powerful than logic. All behavioral and neuroscientists have reached this conclusion after decades of study and experiments on the human brain and its effect on our behavior and decision-making processes.

Unfortunately, as much as we would like to believe that we are logical in our responses, we are not. Our Primarily Brain, which consists of our Reptilian and Emotional (Limbic) brain systems, is in charge of our survival and emotional experiences and reactions, as well as leading our decision-making process, allowing our prefrontal lobe to assist with cognitive learning and reasoning activities.

As mentioned above, our experiencing self and remembering self are way different from each other as we often register and recall moments and information that are more emotional than the rest of the pattern.

As Dr. Peter Steidl mentioned, “We know that the more deeply an event is classified by the emotions surrounding it, the longer it is remembered and the more detailed that memory is”.

For example, attending to a restaurant and eating nice food might be in average interest, but attending the same restaurant and unexpectedly getting 50% discount may wire that moment in our long term memory due to the amount of pleasure that we unexpectedly gained during that experience!

It’s crucial to incorporate emotions in your brand building strategies as the amount of emotions your brand generates makes or breaks its chance to be registered in your long term memory.

Ahmed Al Ansari

Position

Repetitions and emotions, when combined right, can significantly improve the process by which we register and recover brands and their attributes from our long term memory, but there is another essential aspect to consider, and that is the placement of stimuli inside the context of the conveyed event that we communicate.

We briefly reviewed the Peak End Rule and how our brain registers and retains the event’s peak and end while paying little attention to the remainder of what occurs. Another cognitive bias is the Primacy Effect, which explains that individuals recall the beginning and ending parts of an event far better than what happens in the middle. This is critical to understand as marketers should position the most significant brand messages and values in those locations to achieve the best results.

Let’s look at a basic illustration of how the three factors may work together to improve brand memory. Assume we have a new startup that sells premium cellphone accessories like ring covers, holders, and gold stickers. The brand identity and core value propositions should be included in the first 1 minute of a 10 minute presentation regarding the outstanding offering of the brand.

These primary themes should be echoed throughout the rest of the presentation with unique emotive messaging that will stimulate customer interest and produce a peak effect directly linked with the brand. The key principles should be reiterated and stated at the conclusion to aid in recording such attributes in the brain and strengthening brand recall in the minds of consumers.

Simply said, if a brand is not recorded in the consumer’s memory, they will be unable to recall it, hence, they will have no brand awareness and preference, which could trigger their behaviors and decisions.

Ahmed Al Ansari

As we can see, it is not enough to provide the consumer with an exceptional experience, as this may or may not activate consumer interest or the purchasing behavior; instead, it is critical to associate that experiences with strategies that will elicit positive emotions and aid in registering that pattern in the consumer’s long term memory.