Most Advertising Fails To Make A Lasting Memory. And How To Change That.


Marketing has to create memories. The memories need to have certain qualities (e.g. branded, salient, etc.) but none of that matters if you don’t make a memory in the first place. So, how do you make a memory?

In The Seven Sins of Memory (https://lnkd.in/euRrvGr3), psychologist Daniel Schacter begins by describing the different ways in which memory fails; namely, through three sins of omission (transience, absent-mindedness, blocking) and four sins of commission (misattribution, suggestibility, bias, persistence). The most pervasive of these is transience, the simple fading away that occurs with the passage of time: “Incomplete rather than total forgetting that leaves in its wake scattered shards of experience. Vague impressions of familiarity, general knowledge of what happened, or fragmentary details of experiences, are the most common legacies of transience.” (And most day-after recall results.)

But Schacter also wants to give readers science-based advice on how to combat transience in their own lives and remember those things they want to remember. And that’s where it becomes interesting:

“Any attempt to reduce transience should include trying to seize control of what happens in the early moments of memory formation when encoding processes powerfully influence the fate of a new memory. All popularly available memory improvement packages recognise and build on this fundamental insight by trying to teach people how to elaborate on incoming information…[and in particular] generating elaborations that relate information you wish to remember to what you already know.”

But I imagine you can also reverse the formula: If you want people to remember an idea, make it an idea that they easily, pleasurably and quickly elaborate on. Something they naturally start rolling around in their minds, so that it can (re-)make connections with, and within, what they already know. That’s what being interesting means: producing an ongoing series of independent yet related things, a pattern, that people actually want to think about.

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