Meaning MAKETH memory

What are brands, if not memories?

If you’re meeting one for the first time, there won’t be anything to call on.

After that, the brand becomes a product with features you may or may not care about and assets you may or may not recognise.

Plus a collection of associations that live in your mind, built on your experiences and expectations, particularly the emotional ones.

So understanding how memory works is essential to brand strategy.

It’s easy to think of human memory as a hard drive. Hit save and the file’s there forever, as long as you can remember where you put it.

But we all know memories fade, which is why there’s so much talk in marketing about the need to refresh them.

The other popular view is that memory is binary. A brand is either available to you or it isn’t, mentally. Yes or no.

Now I’m no expert on this, but I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

I know there are different types of memory. Explicit, implicit, affective, enactive. So it’s a combination of what we know, sense, feel and do.

I also know marketing people have latched onto one particular corner of memory science, the Associative Network Theories.

These include the idea that memories consist of nodes, which can become connected when they’re encountered together. What fires together wires together.

Some then argue the priority is associating a brand with a number of Category Entry Points, the who, what, when, where and why of behaviour.

This is then reduced further. For a brand to be bought, it must first be thought of and the strength of the brand’s links to these CEPs determines the likelihood of this happening.

This all comes together in the concept of a brand Memory Structure, a network of associations that gets built up in our brains. And the job is to use a brand’s assets to trigger the right ones. Enter category, think of brand, choose brand.

I mean, writing this down, it all sounds plausible. And more importantly, measurable, and we all know you can’t argue with the comfort of data.

Except you can and it starts with that concept of a structure.

Here I have to thank Simon McCarthy for educating me recently on memory. He knows his stuff. Check him out on LinkedIn.

His key point is memory isn’t static. It isn’t just about exposure. Show me a colour a million times and expect me to keep buying.

Memory is dynamic. It’s re-constructed in the moment it’s needed.

So context matters. As does relevance to your particular needs, explicit and implicit.

This doesn't mean salience isn’t important. It is in many ways the way in.

But the relevance comes from a brand’s positioning. What it stands for. What makes it different.

Above all, what it means to you. Not necessarily something ‘deep and meaningful’, in fact rarely that. But deeper than salience alone.

Something worth remembering.