Episode 17 Transcript

Welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing — the podcast for people who can remember an advertising slogan they heard when they were twelve but walked upstairs ten minutes ago and have absolutely no idea why.

I’m your host, Sean Makin — a man increasingly fascinated by the fact that the human brain can store the lyrics to songs we actively dislike for forty years while apparently refusing to retain passwords created last Thursday.

Today we’re talking about memory.

Specifically, why some marketing sticks.

Why do we remember certain brands? Certain adverts? Certain stories? Certain phrases? Why can a tiny piece of communication become lodged in our brains for decades while £200,000 worth of carefully researched corporate messaging can disappear before we’ve finished reading it?

Before we begin, make yourself comfortable.

Get yourself something to drink.

Ideally something unnecessarily expensive served in a container designed to suggest you’ve made excellent lifestyle choices.

Then find somewhere suitably impressive to sit.

A fashionable café. A stylish office. An airport lounge. Somewhere with soft lighting and perhaps a suspiciously healthy-looking plant in the background. Because today we’re going inside the human brain. Not literally. That would require considerably more paperwork.

And we’re going to ask a deceptively simple question: What makes something memorable?

Because marketers spend an enormous amount of time trying to get attention. But attention isn’t enough.

If people notice you and immediately forget you you haven’t achieved very much.

The real challenge isn’t simply being noticed.

It’s being remembered.

So, let’s overthink it.

Part 1: Your Brain Isn’t Paying Attention

Let’s start with some disappointing news.

Your customers aren’t paying nearly as much attention to your marketing as you think they are.

I know.

Awkward.

You’ve spent three weeks perfecting that campaign.

The headline has been debated. The photography has been approved. The copy has been revised seventeen times.

Someone from senior management has made the logo slightly bigger.

Then slightly smaller.

Then bigger again.

And eventually everybody agreed that the original version was probably fine.

There have been meetings. Documents. Comments. Tracked changes.

Someone has written:

“Can we make this punchier?”

without offering any indication of what that might actually mean.

And after all that work…

the customer?

They glanced at it for approximately two seconds while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Then their phone buzzed.

An email arrived.

Someone asked them a question.

And your beautifully constructed campaign disappeared into the enormous mental cupboard labelled:

“Things I vaguely saw earlier.”

And that’s important.

Because before somebody can remember something…their brain first has to decide it’s worth paying attention to.

Memory begins at the moment of encounter.

If something barely registers… there isn’t much to recall later.

And attention is limited.

Very limited.

Your customers are surrounded by information.

Emails. Notifications. Advertising. Messages. News. Social media. Podcasts. Videos. Screens.

Meetings. Colleagues. Children. Dogs.

And software asking whether they’d like to install an update at precisely the moment they absolutely would not.

There is simply too much information for the human brain to treat everything equally.

So it filters.

Constantly.

Important. Not important. Relevant. Ignore. Possible problem. Probably spam. Someone appears to be arguing on LinkedIn again.

Ignore.

This filtering isn’t a flaw.

It’s essential.

If we consciously processed everything around us, we’d struggle to make it through breakfast.

Imagine genuinely noticing every piece of packaging in the supermarket.

Every price label. Every promotion. Every shelf sign. Every product claim.

You’d enter the supermarket for milk…and emerge four hours later emotionally exhausted…carrying a scented candle, three avocados and absolutely no milk.

So the brain filters.

And most of what we encounter simply passes through.

Which is exactly what happens to most marketing.

Not because it’s terrible.

Not because customers actively dislike it.

But because it never registered strongly enough to become useful later.

This is where marketers sometimes misunderstand what a lack of response actually means.

We publish something.

Nobody responds.

And we conclude:

“They weren’t interested.”

Maybe.

But there’s another possibility.

They barely noticed it.

Those are different problems.

One is about persuasion.

The other happens before persuasion even gets a chance.

You cannot persuade somebody who hasn’t noticed you.

And you cannot expect someone to recall your brand later if the original encounter barely registered.

Because your audience isn’t sitting around waiting for your marketing.

They’re busy.

They’re thinking about work. Dinner. Money. Deadlines. Family. Whether they remembered to lock the car. Why the boiler has started making that noise again.

Your marketing isn’t competing only with other marketing.

It’s competing with life.

And life has an enormous media budget.

This matters commercially because most marketing isn’t trying to produce an immediate purchase.

Often we’re trying to establish something that can be retrieved later.

When the customer eventually needs an accountant…a software platform…a new supplier…
a consultant…a pair of walking boots…whatever it happens to be…we want our brand to be somewhere in the collection of names that comes to mind.

They can’t consider a brand they don’t remember.

And that’s why memorability isn’t simply a creative bonus.

It affects whether you’re even present when the buying decision begins.

This is also why simply producing more content doesn’t automatically solve the problem.

More posts. More emails. More adverts. More videos.

Businesses sometimes respond to declining attention by increasing volume.

If people didn’t notice the first twelve posts…

perhaps post thirteen will finally break through.

Possibly.

Or perhaps you’ve simply created thirteen forgettable things.

There is an extraordinary amount of marketing strategy that can be summarised as:

“Do more stuff.”

Engagement is down?

More content.

Leads are down?

More content.

Brand awareness is down?

More content.

At some point somebody should probably ask whether any of it is memorable.

But that’s Thursday’s meeting.

The better question is whether anything you’re producing gives people a reason to stop.

Even briefly.

A headline that creates curiosity. An image that makes someone look twice. A sentence that makes them think. A question that feels uncomfortably relevant. A point of view they weren’t expecting.

Just enough for the brain to say:

“Hang on.”

That tiny moment matters.

Something has registered.

And now there’s at least the possibility of it sticking.

This is where the obsession with reach can become misleading.

Your advert might technically have appeared on someone’s screen.

Your email might technically have arrived in their inbox.

Your post might technically have been served into their feed.

Congratulations.

You have successfully occupied some pixels.

But did anything happen in their mind?

A thought. A feeling. A question. Recognition. Curiosity.

Anything?

Because that’s the bit that matters.

And over time, those moments can accumulate.

“I’ve seen them before.”

Then:

“I recognise that name.”

Eventually:

“They’re one of the companies I should probably look at.”

That’s the commercial value of memory.

Marketing isn’t only trying to create a reaction now.

Often, it’s trying to make the brand easier to retrieve later.

Which means instead of simply asking:

“How many people did this reach?”

we should also ask:

“What are they likely to remember?”

Because a million impressions that leave no impression…

are a rather expensive collection of statistics.

So before buying more reach…

producing another seventeen pieces of content…

or scheduling another meeting about optimising the content calendar…ask a better question:

Why would someone’s brain decide this is worth remembering?

Because your audience isn’t waiting for your marketing.

They’re busy living their lives.

And somewhere amongst everything else competing for their attention…something has to register.

And once it does…

we reach the next question.

Why do some things stand out while others disappear almost immediately?

And that brings us to…

difference.

Part 2: Difference Gets Noticed

So… we’ve established that before something can be remembered… it has to register. Which brings us to the next problem. What makes something stand out?

One answer is remarkably simple. Difference.

Our brains are constantly looking for patterns. Patterns make life easier. They help us understand what’s happening without analysing everything from scratch. And once a pattern becomes familiar… we become remarkably efficient at ignoring most of it.

You see the same type of advert. The same style of social post. The same email subject line.

The same corporate language. And your brain effectively says: “Yes, yes. I’ve seen this sort of thing before.” Then moves on.

But when something breaks the pattern… attention increases. Something feels different.

Unexpected. Slightly out of place. And suddenly the brain becomes interested.

This isn’t particularly mysterious. Noticing difference has always been useful. Historically, a strange noise in the bushes deserved attention. A sudden movement mattered. Something unexpected could represent opportunity… or danger.

Modern life contains fewer sabre-toothed tigers. Although anyone who has attended certain networking events may wish to dispute this.

But the underlying instinct remains. We notice what changes. What contrasts. What doesn’t quite fit the expected pattern.

And this creates an interesting problem for marketing. Because marketers desperately want to be noticed… while businesses desperately want to fit in.

A company enters a market and immediately looks around. What are our competitors doing? What do their websites look like? What language are they using? What are they posting about?
Perfectly sensible research. But sometimes, instead of using that information to understand the category… businesses use it as a set of instructions.

“Everyone seems to use blue.” Blue it is.

“They all have photographs of people in meetings.” Find us some people in a meeting.

“Everyone says they’re innovative.” We should probably be innovative too.

And before long… the category begins to blur.

(aside): Nobody in corporate photography ever uses a laptop normally. There’s always someone pointing at it. “Look!” “A spreadsheet!” Everyone smiles. Apparently the quarterly figures are tremendous.

The same thing happens with language. “Leading provider.” “Trusted partner.” “Innovative solutions.” “Customer-focused.” “Delivering excellence.”

None of those things are necessarily bad. The problem is that they don’t give the memory much to hold onto.

“Delivering innovative solutions” may be the corporate equivalent of beige. There’s nothing technically wrong with it. It just doesn’t tell me why I should remember you.

And that’s the important distinction. Professional doesn’t have to mean interchangeable.

Customers need enough familiarity to understand what sort of business you are. If you’re an accountancy firm, your website probably shouldn’t make people think they’ve accidentally arrived at an underground nightclub. Unless that’s a very specific positioning strategy.

But within those expectations… you need something that belongs to you. A distinctive idea. A recognisable attitude. A particular way of explaining the problem. A phrase. A visual approach. A strong opinion. Something that creates separation.

And this is where it’s useful to distinguish between two marketing terms that are often treated as though they’re the same thing. Differentiation and distinctiveness.

They’re related. But they do different jobs.

Differentiation is about giving people a reason to choose you. What makes your offer meaningfully different? Perhaps you’re faster. More specialised. Easier to use. Better suited to a particular customer. You solve the problem differently. You provide a different level of service. You have expertise competitors don’t.

Differentiation answers: “Why should I choose you rather than them?”

Distinctiveness is about making it easier to know that it’s you. A recognisable visual style. A colour. A phrase. A particular voice. A character. A sound. A consistent point of view.

Distinctiveness answers: “How do I recognise and remember you?”

That’s an important difference. One helps create preference. The other helps create recognition.

And ideally… you want both.

Because there’s not much value in having a brilliant reason to choose you… if nobody remembers who you are.

And there’s limited value in being instantly recognisable… if customers can’t think of any reason they might actually want to buy from you.

(aside): You could become extremely distinctive by requiring every member of staff to wear a fluorescent orange cape. Recognition would be excellent. Brand recall might be spectacular.

The business case… would require further investigation.

So differentiation and distinctiveness should work together. Give people a reason to choose you.

Then make that reason easy to associate with you.

And for this episode, distinctiveness is particularly important because we’re talking about memory. Memory needs clues. If I encounter ten broadly similar companies, something needs to help me distinguish one from another.

And that distinction matters later. Because memory isn’t simply about remembering that you saw something. It’s about connecting that memory to the correct brand.

This is surprisingly important. We’ve all seen adverts that were funny. Interesting. Beautifully made. Memorable.

And then someone asks: “Who was it for?”

Ah. Good question.

“Was it a bank?” Maybe. “Insurance?” Possibly. “Car company?” There was definitely a car in it.

This is the marketing equivalent of throwing a wonderful party… and nobody remembering whose birthday it was.

Being distinctive only helps commercially if the distinctiveness belongs to you.

And this also means your product doesn’t necessarily have to be completely unique for your marketing to be memorable. That’s often unrealistic. There may be dozens of businesses offering something broadly similar.

But the way you present yourself… the way you explain what you do… the things you choose to emphasise… the personality you bring… can make you easier to identify and remember.
Because in many markets, customers aren’t choosing between: good company and terrible company. They’re choosing between several apparently competent businesses. So being clearly identifiable matters.

This is why some of the most memorable marketing contains an element of surprise. Not enormous surprise. Not: “We’ve released twelve llamas into Edinburgh city centre.” Although I admit I’d probably remember that.

Just enough difference to disrupt expectation. A headline that says something competitors wouldn’t. A visual that doesn’t look like every other advert in the category. A point of view that feels specific. A piece of copy that sounds like it was written by an actual human being.
These things create contrast. And contrast helps separate one memory from another.
But there’s an important warning here. Because once marketers hear: “Different gets noticed” there’s always the danger that somebody interprets it as: “Right. Let’s be weird.”

That’s not the point. Difference without relevance is just noise.

You could make your accountancy firm’s website memorable by filling the homepage with photographs of angry goats. People would certainly notice. They might even remember it.
But unless your positioning is: “Scotland’s leading goat-based accountancy practice” we’ve probably wandered away from the strategy.

The difference has to serve the brand. It needs to reinforce something useful. Something you want to be known for.

Because the objective isn’t: Be different at all costs. It’s: Give people a reason to choose you — and make it easy for them to remember that reason belongs to you.

That’s where differentiation and distinctiveness come together.

And over time, you want customers to be able to say: “That’s the company that…”

Those five words are enormously valuable. That’s the company that explains things simply.

That’s the company with the interesting research. That’s the company that’s surprisingly funny.

That’s the company that challenges the usual way of doing things. That’s the company that really understands businesses like ours.

Now you’ve given memory a label. And that label makes you easier to retrieve later.

So perhaps there are two useful questions to ask of your marketing. “Why would someone choose us?” That’s differentiation. And: “How would someone know and remember that it’s us?”

That’s distinctiveness.

If you can’t answer the first… you may struggle to create preference. If you can’t answer the second… you may struggle to be remembered at all.

And for memorable marketing… you need both working together.

But difference is only part of what makes something stick. There’s another ingredient that can make memories considerably stronger. Something marketers sometimes remove from their communication in the pursuit of being terribly sensible. Emotion.

Part 3: EMOTION MAKES MEMORIES STICK

Difference helps us get noticed. But some things we notice disappear almost immediately… while others stay with us for years. One reason is emotion.

Think about your own memories. You probably remember moments when you were excited. Embarrassed. Frightened. Delighted. Angry.

You probably remember considerably fewer moments when you were: “Moderately satisfied.”
And yet… “moderately satisfied” describes an alarming amount of corporate communication.
Businesses often remove emotion from marketing because emotion feels risky. Facts feel safer. Features feel defensible. Statistics feel professional.

So we produce communication that is technically correct… factually accurate… carefully approved… and emotionally dead.

Then wonder why nobody remembers it.

There should be a special award for marketing copy that manages to use 600 words without creating a single identifiable human feeling. “Our integrated approach enables scalable solutions across multiple stakeholder environments.”

How do you feel?

Nothing. Excellent. Legal has approved it.

And when I say emotion, I don’t necessarily mean enormous emotion. We’re not suggesting every B2B software company needs an advert where a small child runs across a beach in slow motion while somebody plays the piano.

It can be humour. Curiosity. Surprise. Empathy. Relief. Even the satisfaction of finally understanding something complicated.

Sometimes the strongest response in marketing is simply: “That’s me.”

Someone describes the problem you’ve struggled to explain. The frustration you’ve been experiencing. The concern sitting quietly in the back of your mind.

Suddenly the marketing feels relevant. Not because it knows your name. Not because an automated email has inserted: “Hi Sean!” into the first line. But because it understands something about your situation.

Personalisation has become a fascinating word in marketing. Apparently putting someone’s first name into an email means the communication is now deeply personal. “Hi Sean, we noticed you haven’t completed your purchase.”

Yes. Thank you. I was there.

True personalisation is often less about knowing someone’s name… and more about understanding why they care.

This is particularly important in B2B. Because there’s a strange idea that business decisions are somehow emotionally sterile. Apparently, the moment someone enters an office… they cease being human.

They become: The Decision Maker.

The Decision Maker has no hopes. No fears. No anxiety. No concern about making an expensive mistake.

The Decision Maker simply reviews the matrix… calculates the weighted score… and calmly selects Vendor B.

Which is reassuring. And also nonsense.

Business decisions are still made by people. People who want to make a good decision. Who don’t want to look foolish. Who want confidence that something will work. And who occasionally just want to solve a problem without requiring another Teams call.

So when a supplier makes something complicated feel understandable… or demonstrates that they genuinely understand the problem… there’s a human response. Relief. Confidence. Reassurance.

Not dramatic emotion. But meaningful emotion.

This is where companies sometimes go wrong. They hear: “Emotion improves marketing.” And immediately assume they need to become more dramatic.

Suddenly every customer story contains inspirational music. Every founder story begins with: “It all started with a dream…” Every LinkedIn post contains a life-changing revelation discovered while buying coffee.

(aside): Apparently an extraordinary amount of business wisdom is discovered while standing in cafés. Nobody ever has a profound strategic insight while cleaning the oven. Although perhaps LinkedIn simply isn’t ready for: “What Mr Muscle taught me about stakeholder engagement.”
The point isn’t to manufacture emotion. It’s to recognise the emotion that already exists around the customer’s problem.

Most worthwhile products and services already connect to something people care about. Saving time. Reducing risk. Making life easier. Feeling more confident. Being more in control. Behind the functional benefit… there’s usually a human consequence.

Take a simple claim like: “Our software reduces monthly reporting time by 40%.” Useful. Specific. Potentially persuasive.

But what does that actually mean? Maybe it means you don’t spend the last Friday of every month fighting spreadsheets. Maybe you get the report finished before 5pm. Maybe you stop worrying about whether you’ve missed something.

The statistic tells us what happens. The human consequence tells us why it matters.

And that’s often the more memorable part.

This doesn’t mean facts don’t matter. They absolutely do. Evidence builds credibility. Data supports claims. Details help people make decisions.

But facts and emotion aren’t enemies. Give me the evidence. Then help me understand why I should care.

There’s a danger here too. Creating an emotional reaction isn’t automatically good. You can annoy people. Frighten them. Make them angry. And yes… they may remember you.
But: “I remember them. They’re unbearable.” isn’t necessarily the brand-building triumph the campaign report might suggest.

The reaction needs to support what you want the brand to mean. Humour should reinforce personality. Empathy should reinforce understanding. Confidence should reinforce expertise.
Otherwise, people may remember the communication… without remembering anything useful about the brand.

So the better question isn’t: “How do we make people feel something?” It’s: “What should people feel that reinforces what we want them to remember about us?”

And answering that starts with understanding the human being you’re talking to. What do they want? What are they worried about? What frustrates them? What would make their life easier?

Because when you understand those things… you don’t have to manufacture emotion. It’s already there. Your job is simply not to remove it.

And businesses are surprisingly good at removing it.

A customer starts with a real problem. Something frustrating. Important. Expensive. Stressful.
It enters the marketing department. It goes through positioning. Messaging. Brand review. Compliance. Legal.

And eventually emerges as: “A comprehensive solution designed to optimise operational outcomes.”

All signs of human life have been successfully eliminated.

The patient did not survive the approval process.

So yes… be accurate. Be credible. Be clear. But leave some humanity in.

Because difference can help people notice. Emotion can help make what they notice matter. And things that matter have a much better chance of staying with us.

But we still need a way to organise information. To connect events. To give facts context. To turn disconnected information into something the brain can follow.

Fortunately, human beings invented a rather effective method for doing exactly that. Several thousand years before the first content strategy meeting. Stories.

Part 4: Stories Give Information Somewhere To Live

So…

we’ve got attention.

Difference.

Emotion.

But there’s another thing that helps information stick.

Structure.

Human beings have been telling stories for considerably longer than we’ve been producing

PowerPoint presentations.

And there’s probably a reason for that.

Stories organise information.

They give us people. Situations. Problems. Consequences. Change.

Instead of asking the brain to remember a collection of disconnected facts…
a story connects those facts into something meaningful.

Dates. Statistics. Features. Product specifications. Company milestones.

All useful.

All potentially important.

And all capable of disappearing from your head shortly after you’ve heard them.

Put those same facts into a situation…
and suddenly they have somewhere to live.

There was a customer.

They had a problem.

The problem was costing them money.

They tried to fix it.

That didn’t work.

Something changed.

Here’s what happened.

Now there’s movement.

Cause and effect.

Something for the brain to follow.

And yet businesses regularly have interesting stories available…
and remove all traces of them.

A company might have been started because somebody encountered a genuine problem.

The founders struggled. Experimented. Made mistakes. Learned.

Eventually they created something genuinely useful.

Wonderful.

There’s a story.

The website says:
“Founded in 2007, we are a leading provider of innovative solutions.”

Well done.

You’ve managed to take an interesting human story…
and turn it into the opening paragraph of an insurance policy.

Corporate copy has a remarkable ability to remove all evidence that human beings were involved.

People struggle.

Businesses “navigate challenges.”

People have ideas.

Businesses “identify opportunities.”

People make mistakes.

Businesses “experience learning outcomes.”

Nobody has ever panicked.

Nobody has ever spilled coffee.

Nobody has ever sat in a car outside a meeting thinking:
“Well… that could have gone better.”

And yet those are usually the interesting bits.

Because stories work through change.

Something was one way.

Something happened.

Now it’s different.

And most products and services already contain that structure.

A customer had a problem.

You helped.

Something improved.

That’s a story.

Take the traditional case study.

Real customer. Real problem. Real evidence. Real result.

Potentially brilliant marketing.

And somehow… we frequently turn it into:
Challenge.
Three paragraphs.
Solution.
Four paragraphs.
Results.
Three bullet points.
Technically…
that’s a story.

In much the same way that a list of ingredients is technically dinner.
The components are there.

But the thing that makes the result meaningful has often disappeared.

“We increased conversions by 27%.”

Good.

But why did that matter?

What was happening before?

What changed?

A little context turns the statistic into something people can understand.
And importantly…

storytelling doesn’t mean making things dramatic when they’re not.

Marketing has occasionally become rather enthusiastic about the word storytelling.
Suddenly every business needs:

A hero. A journey. A transformation. An enemy. A quest. Possibly a wise mentor.

You sell industrial pumps, Derek.

We may not need three acts and a dragon.

Sometimes the story is simply:

There was a problem.

We understood it.

We did something useful.

Things improved.

That’s enough.

The power isn’t in making the story enormous.
It’s in making the information connected.

This is particularly useful when the product or service is complicated.
Instead of beginning with:
“Our platform provides an integrated suite of cloud-based capabilities…”
you might begin with:
“Every month, the finance team was losing two days pulling information from five different systems.”

Now I understand the problem.

I understand why it matters.

And I want to know what happened next.

That’s what stories create.

Forward movement.

And they allow businesses to demonstrate things they’d otherwise simply claim.

“We’re responsive, knowledgeable and customer-focused.”

Fine.
Or:
“When the customer’s system failed on Friday afternoon, the team had it running again before Monday morning.” Now you’ve shown me.

Brands love describing themselves.

Reliable. Innovative. Passionate. Agile.

It’s a little like meeting somebody at a party who immediately tells you:
“I’m actually extremely funny.”

Excellent.

I’ll await supporting evidence.

Stories provide the supporting evidence.

They allow values to become behaviour.

Expertise to become action.

Promises to become outcomes.

There’s another useful effect.

Stories force us to choose what matters.

A business may have fifty things it could say.

But a good story asks:
What does the audience actually need to know?

What moved things forward?

What can we leave out?

And that’s useful because one of the biggest enemies of memorability is trying to make people remember too much.

But a word of caution.

You don’t need every piece of marketing to contain a story.

Sometimes customers just need the opening hours.

They don’t need:
“Our journey to Tuesday closing began with a simple belief…”

Sometimes they need the price.
The specification.
The delivery date.
The answer.

Storytelling should help communication.

Not become another layer customers have to fight through.

But when you’re trying to explain why something matters…
show change…
communicate expertise…
or make complex information easier to understand…
stories give information structure.

So when you’re looking at a piece of marketing and thinking:
“How do we make this more memorable?”
sometimes the answer isn’t to add more facts.
It’s to connect the ones you’ve already got.

Who is this about?
What was happening?
What changed?
Why did it matter?

Give people something to follow.
But stories also reveal another uncomfortable truth.

If you’re trying to make something memorable…
you can’t include everything.
At some point, you have to decide what matters most.
Remove things.
Prioritise.
Possibly even delete a bullet point.
I know.
Steady.

Because next we need to talk about one of marketing’s most difficult disciplines.
Simplicity.

Part 5: Simplicity Survives

So…
if stories help organise information…
simplicity helps decide what survives.

Because your customers aren’t going to remember everything you tell them.
I appreciate this is disappointing.

Particularly if you’ve recently completed a messaging workshop.
But memory requires compression.

We remember the bits that seemed important…
and quietly discard most of the rest.

Which creates a problem for businesses…
because businesses generally want customers to remember everything.

Every feature. Every benefit. Every service. Every value. Every differentiator. Every award. Every certification.

And the fact that in 2019…
they won Highly Commended at the Regional Business Excellence Awards.

It’s all important.

To the business.

The customer has rather less storage allocated to the project.

Ask a company what makes them different and you may receive something like:

“We’re innovative, reliable, sustainable, customer-focused, agile, experienced, collaborative, responsive and committed to excellence.”

Excellent.
What would you like me to remember?

“All of it.”

I won’t.

And this is one of the great tensions in marketing.

Inside the business…complexity feels accurate.

Outside the business…complexity often becomes forgettable.

Because businesses know themselves in enormous detail.

Customers don’t.

You know the history. The capabilities. The product range. The technical differences. The new service line you’ve been discussing for six months.

Your customer may know:
“They’re the company that does that thing.”

And strangely… that might be enough.

If the thing they associate with you is the right thing… that’s incredibly valuable.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important question in this entire episode:

If someone remembered only one thing about us, what should it be?

Not ten things.

Not the entire messaging framework.

One.

What do you want attached to your name?

Your expertise?

Your specialism?

Your service?

A particular audience?

A particular point of view?

What is the thing you want somebody to retrieve from their memory when your name comes up six months from now?

Because that’s really what positioning is trying to achieve.

Positioning isn’t simply deciding what to say.

It’s deciding what you want to be known for.

And that requires choosing.

Which businesses find surprisingly uncomfortable.

Because the moment you say:
“This is the most important thing.”

somebody says:
“Yes, but what about this other thing?”

Then somebody mentions sustainability.

Sales mentions service.

Someone adds innovation.

And before long… everything is important again.

This is also how brand workshops end up with eight values.
Integrity. Innovation. Collaboration. Excellence. Passion. Trust. Agility. And something called Forward Together.

Which sounds less like a brand value… and more like instructions for evacuating a ferry.

The problem isn’t that any of these things are bad.

It’s expecting customers to remember all of them.

They won’t.

And they don’t need to.
This is where simplicity is often misunderstood.

Simple doesn’t mean simplistic.

It doesn’t mean removing intelligence or pretending your product isn’t complicated.

It means deciding what matters most.

Simplistic removes necessary meaning.

Simple removes unnecessary complexity.

And removing things requires judgement.

Adding another bullet point is easy.

The harder question is:
“Does the customer actually need to know this?”
And sometimes:
“Do they need to know it now?”

Your homepage doesn’t need the entire institutional knowledge of the company.

Your advert doesn’t need every product feature.

Your LinkedIn post doesn’t need to address every possible objection.

Give people the detail when they need it.

But first…
give them something clear enough to remember.
This becomes even more important when the product itself is complicated.

Complexity inside the product doesn’t require complexity in the message.

In fact…
the more complicated the product…
the more valuable clarity becomes.

There are websites where you arrive knowing exactly what problem you’re trying to solve…
and leave twenty minutes later unsure what industry you’re in.

The homepage says:
“Transforming tomorrow through intelligent connected ecosystems.”
Wonderful.
What do you actually do?
“We empower organisations.”
Yes.
But how?
“Through transformative solutions.”
I see.
I’m going back to Google.

Clarity doesn’t make a business look less sophisticated.

It demonstrates that the business understands itself well enough to explain what it does.

And it gives memory something manageable to carry away.

Imagine somebody encounters your brand today…
and six months from now they’re asked:
“Do you know anyone who can help with this?”
You don’t need them to remember the third paragraph of your About page.
You need:
“Yes. There’s a company that specialises in that.”
Or:
“I remember someone who explains this really well.”
Or:
“There’s a brand that works specifically with businesses like ours.”
That’s useful memory.
That’s the answer to the question:
If they remember only one thing about us, what should it be?
Because if you can’t decide… don’t expect the customer to do it for you.
When brands communicate everything with equal importance…
customers often remember nothing with any clarity.
And simplicity has another advantage.
It makes repetition easier.
If you have one clear idea…
you can express it in dozens of ways.
Different campaigns. Different stories. Different examples. Different formats.
But the underlying idea remains recognisable.
If you have seventeen equally important messages…
you spend your marketing constantly introducing yourself again.
Monday:
We’re innovative.
Tuesday:
We’re sustainable.
Wednesday:
We’re people-focused.
Thursday:
We’re global.
Friday:
We’re local.
By Saturday…
the customer has concluded that you’re probably a company.
Which is accurate.
But perhaps not the competitive position we’d hoped for.
One clear idea gives consistency something to work with.
You can express it differently.
Show different evidence.
Tell different stories.
Use different creative executions. But underneath it all… the thing you want people to remember stays remarkably consistent. Because memory isn’t usually built through one perfect piece of communication. It’s built through repeated encounters and growing familiarity. Which means eventually… you’re going to have to say the same thing again. I know. Marketers hate this. And that brings us to repetition.”

Part 6: Repetition Builds Recognition

Of course, memory also depends on repetition.
We remember things we’ve encountered before.
Which is why consistency matters.
The same distinctive colours. The same visual cues. The same basic positioning. The same core ideas. The same recognisable voice.
Repeated over time.
Eventually…
recognition becomes easier.
The customer doesn’t necessarily stop and consciously think:
“I recognise this particular combination of typography, language and visual identity.”
Their brain simply says:
“I know that.”
And that’s enormously useful.
Because recognition reduces the amount of work the customer has to do.
A colour.
A shape.
A sound.
A phrase.
A particular style of photography.
A packaging format.
A tone of voice.
Over time, these things can become shortcuts to the brand.
But as we discussed in Episode 16…
consistency isn’t sameness.
And repetition isn’t simply copying and pasting the same thing indefinitely.
Because repetition has a problem.
Eventually…
people stop noticing it.
So the challenge is to repeat the idea…
without endlessly repeating the execution.
Same message.
Different story.
Same positioning.
Different example.
Same brand character.
Different creative expression.
The recognisable elements remain…
while the execution gives people another reason to pay attention.
That’s how strong brands can feel familiar and fresh at the same time.
You recognise them…
but you’re still interested.
And that’s the balance.
Familiarity helps memory.
Novelty earns attention.
You need both.

Repeat something too little and nobody remembers it.
Repeat it too much and people start actively avoiding you.
This is why children’s television theme tunes are both extraordinarily effective…
and capable of breaking adults psychologically.
The lesson isn’t to stop repeating.
It’s to repeat intelligently.
And this is where distinctive brand assets become particularly useful.
Because customers don’t always remember brands consciously.
Often…
they recognise them.
They see something.
Hear something.
Notice a familiar phrase or visual style.
And before they’ve really thought about it…
they know who it belongs to.
That’s memory doing some of the work for them.
The mistake businesses make is changing those things too quickly.
Often because Marketing has become bored with them.
Marketing sees the brand every day.
Customers don’t.
Your team may be completely fed up with the campaign you’ve been running for six months.
Your customer may have noticed it twice.

This is one of marketing’s great occupational hazards.
By the time we’ve become thoroughly bored with something…
the public has only just started recognising it.
Then someone says:
“It feels a bit tired.”
To whom?
“Us.”
We’re not the audience.
Distinctive assets become valuable through use.

A colour isn’t valuable simply because it’s in the brand guidelines.

A phrase isn’t distinctive because somebody has put it on slide 47 of the brand presentation.
A tone of voice doesn’t become recognisable because there’s a PDF explaining it.
These things become valuable when customers repeatedly encounter them…
and begin connecting them with you.
That’s why constantly changing your visual identity…
your language…
your positioning…
your campaign style…
or the thing you’re trying to be known for…
can make memory harder to build.

Every change asks the customer to learn something new.

And sometimes businesses do that just as the previous thing was beginning to work.

So before changing something because you’re bored with it… ask a different question:

Are customers bored with it… or have we simply seen it too many times ourselves?
Because there’s a considerable difference.
The objective isn’t endless sameness.
It’s recognisable variation.
Keep the things that help people know it’s you.
Then find new ways to make those things interesting.
Different stories.
Different examples.
Different campaigns.
Different formats.
But enough continuity that somewhere in the customer’s mind…
there’s that tiny moment of recognition:
“I know them.”
And every time that happens…
the memory becomes a little easier to retrieve.

Which is why memorable brands aren’t necessarily the ones constantly reinventing themselves.
They’re often the ones that know what should stay the same…
and what they’re free to change.

But there’s one more important source of memory we haven’t talked about yet.
Because people don’t only remember what brands **say**.
They remember what brands do.
And that brings us to experience.

Part 7: Memory Is Built From Experiences Too

And here’s the part marketers occasionally forget. People don’t only remember communication. They remember experiences.

The easiest website. The brilliant salesperson. The unexpectedly helpful email. The packaging that made them smile. The customer service person who actually solved the problem.
These memories become attached to the brand. And sometimes they’re considerably stronger than anything advertising can create.

This links back to Episode 14, when we talked about customer experience becoming a form of advertising. Because memorable brands aren’t simply good at communicating. They’re good at creating moments worth remembering.And often those moments are tiny. A thoughtful detail. A quick response. A personal message. An unexpected gesture.You don’t necessarily need a huge campaign. Sometimes you simply need to behave in a way customers weren’t expecting.

Because unexpected positive experiences are powerful. They interrupt routine. They create emotion. And they give people a story to tell.
That’s memorability doing useful commercial work.

Part 8: Be Remembered For Something

So… what makes marketing memorable? There isn’t one magic trick. It’s a combination.

Attention. Difference. Emotion. Stories. Simplicity. Repetition. Distinctive cues. Experience.
But underneath all of those is something even more fundamental. Meaning.

People remember things that matter to them. Not things that matter to the marketing department.
That’s an important distinction.

Your new product feature might be enormously exciting internally. The customer may care only that it saves them twenty minutes.

Your new company structure might have required six months of planning. The customer may care only that there’s now one person they can call.

Your rebrand may contain a sophisticated visual system based on twelve months of research. The customer may simply think: “Oh, they’ve changed the blue.”

Marketing becomes memorable when we stop asking: “What do we want to say?” and start asking: “What might somebody actually care enough to remember?”

Because being noticed is temporary. Being remembered has value.

And perhaps that’s the real science of being memorable. Don’t try to make people remember everything. Give them something worth remembering.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing. Until next time… stay curious… keep questioning… and remember— Your customers are not walking databases waiting patiently to absorb your messaging architecture. They’re busy human beings. Distracted. Emotional. Selective. And occasionally unable to remember why they walked into the kitchen.

So make things clear. Make them distinctive. Tell better stories. Create experiences people want to talk about. And give the brain something worth keeping.

Because the objective isn’t to be remembered for everything. It’s to be remembered for something.

Preferably something other than: “Aren’t they the company that sends all those emails?”
And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll find plenty more over on The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing website, including articles, marketing book reviews and previous episodes exploring the wonderfully irrational world of human behaviour and marketing.
And as always, if there’s a subject you’d like me to overthink in a future episode, drop me a line through the website or find me on LinkedIn.

Cheers.

The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and most places where people go to think slightly more deeply while looking for the glasses they’re currently wearing.