Remember me, buy me

For over a decade and in some instances longer, the way in which human memory and decision making work have been modelled and understood. Within reason you understand, the human mind is profound and unknowable but we have some broad sweep concepts that seem to hold true the majority of the time based on the available research.

If this information is out there – about how we remember things and how we make decisions – then you would imagine that it would be the food of the gods to people working in branding. In the end, branding is about creating memory structures in the mind of your customer which encourage the decision to purchase your products. There are lots of bits and pieces involved but that is the nut in the nutshell.

So why do so many seem to ignore it?

You can’t remember what you don’t know.

In this instance, I am referring to those who support other people with their branding. It seems that most of those in branding aren’t aware of or interested in how the brain works. At least, they don’t talk about it or refer to it much if at all. I’ve completed some pretty high-level training on branding and marketing and read around the subject extensively and I’ve only found a very small number of references in this direction. Why is it important? Well, it’s quite easy to get your branding wrong if you don’t know what you are doing. This can make things worse. While I don’t like to focus on the negative here are some examples to help illustrate the point…