Your memory is flawed. It’s not what we’ve been taught to believe. It’s not a perfect recorder that captures every minute of our consciousness. Instead of a recorder, our memories are more like a broad representation of our lives. Your memory is less like a recording device and more like a game of telephone.[1] To some people, this can be scary because humans are collections of experiences and if you can’t remember these experiences, it might make you question who you are.
Our memories are flawed and that’s okay. Vivid memories are especially flawed. Why? Well, every time that you recall a memory, you bring the past memory into the present moment and each time you do this, it is likely to be modified, even slightly. You do that 100 times, and that’s 100 opportunities for the memory to get altered. There are also so many different types of memory. The best marketers understand how the brain works and how memories are made. In this article, I’ll cover the marketing implications of your brand competing with several different types of memories.
Short-Term Memory
Your short-term memory is your working memory. There are two different types of short-term memory processing, imagery and discursive. Imagery processing is just like it sounds, it involves processing an image where discursive processing, involves the processing of words.[2]
Short-term memory also has a limited capacity. How limited? Well, based on a famous study by George Miller, most adults can remember 7 items at once (plus or minus 2). Dubbed “Miller’s Magic Number”, this study had lasting implications. Think of the amount of digits in a phone number, the number of words on a typical billboard, and the number of words in a good headline. They all hover around Miller’s Magic Number.
Our brains try to compensate for this lack of short-term memory availability with a concept called chunking. This is essentially grouping items to make them easier to remember. Mnemonic devices are a classic example of chunking. Do you remember “my very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas?” I get it, Pluto is no longer a planet, but still… I also remember one from 7th grade: King Phillip came over from Greece swimming, which is a mnemonic device for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Or my favorite, to remember my guitar strings, every average dude gets better eventually. That’s not just a great trick to remember your guitar strings, it’s also funny, not to mention its sage advice if you’re an average dude like me and you just happen to be feeling defeated when you sit down to play the guitar.
Marketing Implications
Due to limited processing, marketers have to not only capture your attention, but they need to keep it as well. As stated earlier, headlines and billboards need to appeal to short-term memory. Also, marketers need to keep three words in mind: repetition, repetition, repetition. In order to permeate the short-term memory to be imprinted to long-term memory, your message must not be forgotten.
Long-Term Memory
Your long-term memory is where information is permanently stored. Permanent? Well, many people believe that it is permanent, there are just so many items that can distort the memory itself and the retrieval cues to recall a memory.
Semantic Memory
Semantic memory is a type of long-term memory that shapes the facts about the world around us. Cars are things that have wheels that get us to where we need to go. Pizza is a round object that has sauce, cheese, and toppings. Semantic memory involves what we have gathered from our experiences that tell us general information and facts about the world around us.
Marketing Implications
Your product or your message can’t be too disconnected from what is known about a product. We see this happen in adoption rates for new products. When a product improves upon something that we’re already used to, it typically has a higher adoption rate rather than one that completely forces us to engage in a new behavior. Take something like Google Glass as an example. Besides potential legal and ethical issues of recording other people without them knowing, this strange device was also incongruent with people’s semantic memory of glasses. Glasses should improve your vision, not turn you into a nerdy cyborg. The stark difference in people’s views of reality likely led them to have a low adoption rate.
Mobile phones, however, have evolved more slowly. First, they were just regular phones that you could take anywhere. Then you could text, then came the Blackberry, and now, they’re not really used to make calls at all. Seriously, unless you’re in sales, when was the last time you answered a call from a number you didn’t recognize? Collectively, our semantic memories have changed over time to recognize phones as they are today.
Episodic Memory
An episodic memory is a type of long-term memory that is tied to an experience. It could be a vacation, a party, or a bad day at work. Episodic memory involves many senses. Let’s say, for instance, you were remembering a birthday party you had on the beach with friends. You might remember what people were wearing, the smell of the sunscreen, the taste of a lunch you packed. You might remember what it felt like to get that really bad sunburn.
Episodic memories are very complex and could potentially shape the way that you think about certain places, people, or events. Let’s take that same example. At your party, maybe you were playing your music too loud and a couple of people approached you to ask for you to turn it down. This experience may shape the way that you view that particular beach, or beach town, forever. You might feel like it’s full of a bunch of fun haters, when in fact, it was just a couple of people that you are likely to never see again.
Marketing Implications
Marketers want to build strong episodic memories that are attached to their products. Places like Disney World cater to your desire to create episodic memories for your children. Car commercials don’t often focus on the features of the car, but where the car can take you (again, to create episodic memories).
Explicit & Implicit Memory
Explicit memory is when you consciously remember something. From a consumer behavior standpoint, maybe it is something like the ingredients in a Big Mac or the number of horsepower in a certain car’s engine. Implicit memory, however, occurs when you are not consciously aware, something comes to mind that you were not trying to remember, like a song that just pops up in your head out of nowhere.
Marketing Implications
Marketers are always fighting for space in your memory, whether you consciously or unconsciously remember the message. That’s why jingles and taglines are so popular. They are devices to create explicit and implicit memories in consumers’ minds.
Source Confusion
Memory source confusion, or source misattribution, happens when you can’t remember where a memory came from. Do you remember hearing that Subway’s bread had ingredients that were used in Yoga mats? Do you remember where you heard that? How about that McNuggets don’t actually contain chicken? Have you heard that and do you remember where you heard this information?
You probably don’t remember where you heard this information and probably didn’t do much fact-checking to make sure the information was true. Unfortunately, some of these items are really sticky in our brains and the story is just so interesting that it sticks with us, regardless of what is true. Source confusion can even be harmful. Misinformation campaigns can have lasting impacts on the way that we interact with the world.
Marketing Implications
For source confusion, there are many marketing implications. One implication is to carefully consider your response to negative PR. If you’re not careful, you can get in a fight with the press that ends up in an exchange that leads to more and more exposure which is rarely in your favor. This can just end up reinforcing the original claim and a consumer is not likely going to remember what was said in defense. You should develop a solid crisis communication plan so if you are ever in this situation, you have a step-by-step guide to help you through the problem. If you don’t you will certainly make the wrong move, maybe many wrong moves.
A crisis communication plan should have a section for an immediate response and an ongoing response. You should have an incident management and media relations team. My crisis communication plan has six steps:
- First alert, where the team is notified
- Get the facts
- Verify and keep information moving
- Prepare for media
- When reporters arrive
- Media follow up
The plan that I built also has worksheets for each team member, other than the spokesperson, that will be involved in any type of communication with the media. This plan was built off of the CDC’s crisis communications response. I would highly recommend anyone reading this that does not have a crisis communications plan to build your plan from the CDC recommendations.
Another marketing implication is that your brand has to accept is that for consumers, perception is reality. Regardless of the truth, if your consumers believe something negative about your company to be true, you need to do something about it. Remember the Subway yoga mat thing? They actually made two great moves. First, they didn’t come out and fight the claim and make everything worse, they just quietly got rid of the ingredient and moved on.
Source confusion doesn’t always have to have negative marketing implications for your brand, you can also use this to your advantage. Suggestibility bias shows that our memories and behaviors are subject to outside influences. Use an omnichannel approach to communicate your message. A combination of video, display, retargeting, print ads, direct mail, and public relations can help your key message stand out. The consumer is likely to forget where they saw your message, but if you run a comprehensive campaign with one strong over-arching message, you are more likely for it to stick.
Associative Network
An associative network is a group of items that are associated with one overarching concept. It includes all of the items that you might link with the concept. Some links may be strong, and some may be weak. For instance, for the concept of skiing, you may think of snow, skis, chair lifts, cold, or fun. But you might also associate items on the periphery, like the bar at the ski lodge where you sing karaoke. You may think of the only car that you can take because it has enough room to pack all of your equipment. You might live in Florida, so you might think of traveling. You might think of the cost. You might have really weak links like the kind of food that you typically eat before you go or warming up in the lodge or car afterward.
Marketing Implications
Knowing the associations customers have with your product can help you develop a stronger story for your marketing plan. For instance, an association related to M&M’s may be Christmas. Pushing red and green M&M’s at Christmas time could lead to stronger sales. It also appears that M&M’s have also attempted to increase their associative network with other holidays like Independence Day, Halloween, Easter, and Valentine’s Day. Around these holidays, you can find special, seasonal M&M’s with colors that fit the theme of the holiday. While what may have started as an attempt of building an associative network around the Christmas holiday for M&M’s has grown to attempt to just be associated with any holiday. They’re targeting parties and other gatherings in an attempt to be one of the links that tie all of these holidays together.
Wrapping Up
Our memories are perfect recordings. They’re more like representations of our lives. They are prone to distortion and manipulation. There are also so many different types of memories that shape the way we view the world. Our past experiences impact our future decisions. Marketers can shape our memories, whether it is changing our views of the past or promising positive future memories. Although your memory is far from perfect, all of these imperfections make up who we are.
- [1] D. J. Bridge, K. A. Paller. Neural Correlates of Reactivation and Retrieval-Induced Distortion. Journal of Neuroscience, 2012; 32 (35): 12144 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1378-12.2012
[2] Hoyer, W., MacInnis, D., & Pieters, R. (2018). Consumer Behavior (Seventh Edition). Cengage Learning.