Why memorability matters more than simply being seen
Kerrie Spaargaren, founder and managing director of brand experience agency Graffiti, argues that too many brands are obsessed with being seen, rather than creating memorable campaigns.
Kerrie Spaargaren
In my 21 years as the owner of an experiential agency, I don’t think a client brief has ever come past my desk that hasn’t in one way or another listed ‘brand awareness’ as the key objective.
And I get it, visibility is important. When every market is so cluttered, brands need to be seen to be chosen. That’s marketing 101. But the attention economy is burnt out. Consumers’ attention is being ripped in multiple directions – not just to other brands but to the rapids of the news cycle while juggling daily life.
So what good is awareness when your customer has a million things coming at them every day? For me, the question is: why do brands chase being seen, when being remembered is what really matters?
There has been a push towards experiences because we know the impact they can have. But impact is not a given. Plenty of activations may garner awareness but drive little real change. The ones that do leave people with an impression – not just a like or a share. An experience that stops you in your tracks stays with you. Because it taps into your memory. And if a brand can encode a feeling into customers’ memories after an interaction, that is a powerful economy to be trading in. Far greater than attention alone.
Awareness and attention is useless if its not linked to long term memory
So, how long does it take for an image to be committed to long term memory?
Well, those who make a living telling marketers that consumers need to view an image for up to 4 secs before its committed to memory will be disappointed to learn the real answer is ‘not even a second, or half a second. But, don’t take my word for it.
MIT [that’s THE MIT] have found that the human brain can recognise an image, make full sense of it and store it to long term memory in as little as 13 milliseconds. That’s the result of real scientific experiments – not the claims of ‘marketing scientists’, which is really just a b+$$&&@t title made-up by marketing graduates [ which is why they’re never invited to speak at real science conferences]. I genuinely believe in years to come, marketers who’ve been conned into wasting money on attention metrics will look back on the peddlars of attention metrics as the 21st century’s version of snake oil salesmen.