How to make the client remember you for decades

The first shot does not catch attention; the second one will be heard by everyone. This was said by American writer Hunter Thompson, who was hinting at the marketing business tricks. Repetitions, which are one of the most effective tricks, will hardly ever lose their edge. Read below about how to make the client remember you for decades by using the theory of memory.

Psychology and advertising are best friends. Various psychological studies come in very handy for advertising experts when they need to develop a strategy or campaign. One of the pillars an advertising campaign is supported by as well as built upon is memory or, to be more exact, specifics of remembering data.

We cannot remember everything – any thoughts and actions are forgotten sooner or later and go beyond our conscious control. In most cases, quite a bit of time passes between seeing an ad and actually buying a product or service. It is important not to lose the consumer at this stage.

Only a few ads can urge people to act immediately.

The recipe for success in accomplishing this task is to evoke enduring associations and carefully but persistently push the buyer into your hearty embrace. How can you do this? By getting etched in people's memory artificially.

There are four types of memory: instant, short-term, long-term, and permanent. You need two conditions to ensure that information gets from one type into another: vivid emotions or a certain number of repetitions.

You don't need to make efforts to remember events such as your own wedding or the birth of a child. Yet, things get more complicated when it comes to unimportant, commonplace events.

This is the main challenge for marketing experts – to make sure that an advertisement seen incidentally goes deeper into memory and ultimately results in the purchase of a product or service.

How to tap into the deepest memory?

First, information gets through the sensory organs into instant memory, where it may be stored for no longer than a couple of minutes. This type of memory is triggered when we are examining the temperature of the water or choosing the colour of a wallet in an online store.

"You need to try and transfer the information from the short-term to long-term memory."

To make the information go beyond the limits of the short-term memory and thus stay in the brain from several minutes to several days, a person needs to consciously or subconsciously repeat the information from 3 to 12 times. This figure entirely depends on the individual features.

Information can be transferred from the short-term to the long-term memory without much effort and kept there for a period from one week to one year; 4 to 25 repetitions will be sufficient for that. Under certain conditions and by repeating information from 8 to 60 times, you can reach permanent memory as well. The information may be stored there for decades.

It is important to take into account the principles of memory functioning when creating an advertising campaign.

"If we want an ad to encourage at least one visit, the message should be repeated at least 12 times, and to ensure it is remembered even better – at least 25 times."

The effectiveness of this method is proved by marketing leaders – this is why we recognize the song about Mr Proper from the very beginning or pronounce "mmm, Danone" with pleasure for many years in a row.

Moreover, researchers working in the field of advertising psychology have come up with an interesting idea: if an ad often catches our eye, we start to believe that our opinion about it is based on our personal experience.

When you need toothpaste, you are most likely to choose in the store the one whose ad you have come across most often or whose ad has left the most vivid impression. More so, you will be able to recall all the pros listed in the ad. Thus, you can highlight another doubtless benefit of frequent repetitions in advertising, which is the possibility to evoke the right association in the consumers' brain.

In other words, the more often the consumer sees your ad, the sooner he will become your client. It is also important to correctly identify the target audience and communicate the message on the right channels and with the necessary frequency.