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The primary goal of all advertising,
including website content is to be remembered. No matter what other marketing
goal you want to achieve, if your audience doesn't remember your presentation,
it is a wasted effort and lost opportunity. All the money spent on attracting
people to your website goes right down the drain if your content is instantly
forgettable. With that in mind it is hard to believe how little thought is put
into creating content that people will remember.
In order to create content or advertising that people will remember, we have to
understand a little about how memory works. Professor Daniel Schacter of Harvard
University is an expert in the study of human memory and has written numerous
books on the subject, including 'The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets
and Remembers'. In this book Schacter describes seven characteristics of human
memory that all marketing people need to be aware of in order to construct
content and advertising that website audiences will retain.
Transience
Transience refers to the fact that memory degrades over time, our recollections
become generic and what we are left with is a sense of expectation rather than
specific features.
If you overload your website visitors with a shopping list of features or a
series of b-school banalities, you are giving up the opportunity to make a
singular impression on your audience, especially if the features you are so
proud of are mere duplicates of features offered by your competitors.
You may not remember the specifics of the latest Volvo automobile advertising
campaign but you most likely regard Volvos to be safe, the primary focus of
their long-term marketing efforts. What Volvo has done is position itself as the
manufacturer of safe cars. This is the position they hold in the minds of the
car buying public. As an advertiser this should be the focus of their campaigns.
If they for some reason decide to change their approach, they stand to confuse
and alienate their audience.
Whether you are dealing with website content or webmedia presentations the focus
should be on establishing your primary marketing message in your audience's
minds. If that singular message gets lost in a jungle of corporate platitudes
and extraneous specifications then the chance of your audience retaining your
message is greatly reduced.
To deal with this problem, we suggest clients think in terms of advertising
campaigns rather than just an ad, and program-style linear narrative
presentations rather than feature and specification-based information. In our
own recent marketing campaign (http://www.mrpwebmedia/ads) we were able to
present eighteen different issues, each in an individual presentation, but all
with a central unifying theme. People may not remember the individual issues,
but they will remember the central unifying theme of the campaign; most
importantly they'll remember who we are and what we stand for.
Absent-mindedness
Absent-mindedness is the failure to pay attention when receiving information
resulting in no memory, or the inability to recall information buried deep in
memory because of missing contextual references.
The sheer volume of demand for attention and information that people deal with
on a daily basis, what author and information architect, Saul Wurman refers to
as "Information Anxiety," makes it impossible for people to absorb everything
they think they should, or even want to, retain. Our brains automatically
filter-out extraneous data and retain only what is important or relevant. As a
result people are more likely to develop a general familiarity with a brand
rather than an in-depth recollection of details.
Recognizing that your audience is only going to retain the core message you are
delivering if it is relevant and meaningful requires that you give up the
immaterial and concentrate on the essence of what you need to say.
You also must find ways to break through the mental barriers people erect in
order to block-out useless content. A website dominated by large amounts of text
requires a huge commitment of interest in order for someone to pay attention and
commit your content to memory. The use of web-audio and web-video requires less
of a mental commitment from your audience and at the same time provides the
sensory, emotional, and contextual references that aid in memory recall.
Blocking
Blocking is a familiar phenomenon most people have experienced. We recognize a
person and can tell you almost everything about that individual except his or
her name. Unlike transience where the name has faded from memory, blocking
refers to a situation where the knowledge is in memory but the appropriate
reference or association has not been accessed to stimulate recall.
To overcome blocking people must access mental associations that are emotional,
contextual, or sensory. Emotional triggers are an adaptive imperative for our
survival as a species and advertisements and presentations that reflect common
emotional experiences will leave indelible impressions. By framing your
presentation in some familiar context, you will provide viewers with an
association that aids in memory recall. The addition of sensory mnemonics like a
distinctive voice-over and an on-screen visual character, provide assistance in
memory recall.
Misattribution
We often remember some information or experience but attribute it to the wrong
source. This 'unconscious transference' occurs when a feature or benefit is too
similar to a competitor's, or when the presentation lacks any distinctive
association, reference, mnemonic, or emotional impact.
Sometimes the presentation of information is highly relevant and is therefore
embedded in memory but the source of that information is considered extraneous
and is therefore dismissed as inconsequential. When delivering information to a
website audience, it is important to create presence, and establish credibility,
in order to link the message to the messenger.
By using web-video and web-audio to present information, you create the
opportunity to establish a memorable personality for your organization.
Presenting information as 'programming' rather than just information provides
context and character, both of which help build a memory inducing corporate
personality.
Suggestibility
Suggestibility occurs when information learned from an outside source is
attributed to personal experience. Vivid mental images, intense emotional
reactions, or suggestive questions that target emotional soft spots can trigger
this type of false memory.
Research suggests that suggestibility for false memories can be enhanced if an
audience is instructed to expect results that are plausible. The combination of
suggestibility and misattribution can result in people having memories of things
that never took place.
In a research paper entitled, 'Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our
Memories of the Past,' Kathryn A. Braun of Harvard Business School, Rhiannon
Ellis of the University of Pittsburgh, and Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University
of Washington, present evidence that certain types of suggestive advertising can
create false memories.
As a basis for the research they used a Disney advertising campaign, 'Remember
the Magic,' that featured a family enjoying themselves at Disney World and
included a scene of a child shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. The researchers
wanted to know if such an autobiographical ad could create a false memory of
shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, when in fact it never happened.
In order to test the validity of their theory, they created an ad that prompted
people to remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny on a childhood trip to
Disneyland, an event that could never have occurred since Bugs Bunny is a Warner
Bros. character and would not have been seen at a Disney theme park. Despite the
fact that this event could never have taken place, a significant number of
participants in the study were able to recall the experience of shaking hands
with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.
Bias
New experiences are filtered through past experiences and pre-existing belief
systems. Often when people with opposing political points-of-view watch the same
political debate on television, they will come away with totally different
opinions on who won the debate based on their pre-existing bias.
New experiences are filtered through our past experiences and color our
interpretation of current events. Advertisers often use images and nostalgic
icons of the past in order to create a positive context for interpreting new
product offerings. On the other hand, political campaigns often use the same
kind of technique in reverse to generate negative attitudes toward an opponent
or a divisive polarizing issue.
Memories are not static imprints of the past, but rather reconstituted
constructs filtered through an ever-evolving personal history of learned
knowledge and emotional experiences.
Persistence
Emotionally intense experiences, especially negative ones, will leave
longer-lasting impressions than emotionally neutral experiences. It is important
for us to remember traumatic events so that we learn from them and don't repeat
them; it is an innate survival mechanism.
Advertisers can use this to their advantage by reminding people of negative
situations that could be avoided with the use of their product. These types of
advertisements can be used for health care, personal grooming, and financial
services and products.
On the positive side, we can see from the previously mentioned Disney 'Remember
the Magic' campaign that positive emotional experiences can also be used to
create positive attitudes in a properly constructed campaign.
The main difference between positive and negative persistent memory is the
recall of details. Persistent negative memories tend to be richer in detail
whereas positive persistent memories tend to be more generic, a fact that can be
used as we have discussed previously to create false memories or what is more
euphemistically referred to as 'imagination inflation.'
Conclusion
The more we know about how human beings process and recall information, the
better we become at communicating our marketing messages to website audiences
that are decidedly more complex, and emotionally motivated, than can be
determined by mere demographic profiling or statistical Web-visitor analytics.
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,
a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads ,
http://www.136words.com , and
http://www.sonicpersonality.com .
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com
or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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