Brand design: how to be memorable

Researchers found that our minds are better at registering concrete phrases than abstract ones. Up to 10 times more likely, to be precise. Why such an important difference? It’s all because of vision – our strongest sense. When reading a concrete phrase, people will have an easier time visualizing it in their minds.

Another study looked how word recollection played out. A control group was given a list of words and a second group was given the same list, but with a missing letter in each of the words. That means the second group had to generate the word in their mind first. Can you guess how this impacted memorability? The group who had to generate the words themselves had a higher recollection of the word list. The visualization resulted in stronger remembrance.

So how can you apply these findings to your brand? You could do like Cancer Research UK, and remove letters from your phrasing, but this would most likely be a one-off, you obviously couldn’t run every ad in this way. You could however use similar methods that generally force the audience to do a little “work” in their minds from time to time. The key to solidify memorability is to get people to generate answers themselves.

At ARD, we apply out-of-the-box concepts to take your brand and your marketing further. Contact us today.