Brands and Memory Triggers

Brands are encoded into memory and decoded from memory using a variety of triggers. Often, specific emotions are also encoded in the brain associated with those triggers. The triggers can be images, colors, shapes, textures, sounds, scents, flavors, attitudes, personalities, voices, characters and other distinctive brand elements.

Consider what triggers exist for each of the following brands:

• Coca-Cola
• Apple
• GEICO
• Harley-Davidson
• Cinnabon

What triggers exist for your brand? Are you using them consistently? Are they associated with specific emotions?

Great Advertising

In today's over communicated world in which people are very busy and distracted, often multitasking, advertising needs to be highly entertaining to break through the clutter. After that, it needs to have a very simple message that it quickly and consistently communicates. Only when these two elements exist - (1) entertainment and (2) quick, simple and consistent message - does the brand break through the clutter and build memory triggers and associations.

GIECO does this exceedingly well. GEICO's very succinct and consistent messages:

• GEICO - Fifteen minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.
• If you want to save 15% or more on car insurance, you switch to GEICO. It's what you do.

To see how they have succeeded with this, click here to view some of their more recent highly entertaining ads.

Brands and Memory Structures

An important role of the brand manager is to determine the memory structures associated with the brand so that marketing communications can reinforce and leverage these structures. Also, potentially useful new brand associations can be discovered in the process.

For instance, Bush beans might be associated with summer, picnics, grilling, family and Duke (the dog). Coke might be associated with its bottle shape, the color red, the beach, parties and nightclubs. A pizza brand might be associated with cheese and tomato sauce, family and friends and watching sports on television. Hallmark's greeting cards are associated with holidays, special occasions, family and friends. But they also are associated with candy and flowers among other product categories.

Everyone knows McDonald's arches and Nike's swish. Most people associate Harley-Davidson with the sound of its engine. Many people associate Tesla with Elon Musk and batteries and alternative energy. People associate Cinnabon with the cinnamon scent. Many brands are associated with fond childhood memories or with sex. What is Old Spice associated with? How about Dos Equis? ("Stay thirsty, my friends.") GEICO? 

The trick is to discover all of the items people associate with the brand so that those associations can be reinforced, built upon and used to help people recall the brand associated with not only marketing communication and the brand identity itself, but also with specific relationships, occasions, complimentary products and other memory triggers.

If you have not identified and mapped out your brand's memory structures, you need to do so. it will help with the effectiveness of your advertising and your brand's identity system.