I read recently that a study has found that we don’t see things all the time. Brain activity has peaks and troughs (about ten per second) and when it’s in a trough we don’t see. Then there is inattentional blindness. You know, the thing that happens when a man in a monkey suit walks across a two-ball basketball counting game (it happens all the time, but people fail to see monkey-man because they’re so busy counting the number of passes). And then there’s the problem that my wife can’t find her keys or her phone or her address book (often her address book). Because I understand the psychology of looking at stuff I know that her strategy is a reckless one. It’s no good putting stuff down any old place and relying on your eyes to find it when you start looking. You might momentarily have your attention elsewhere, or […]
Memes and Marketing: Part II
When it comes to marketing it’s important that your product, brand name, company name and proposition work as memes. That means making as many aspects of your offer as memorable and as easy to pass on as possible. And as we saw yesterday, whilst having both is nice, memorable often beats meaningful. Our heads are full of junk that we’ve heard from brands (and elsewhere) that have become etched into our unconscious, and we all know we’ve heard jokes, quotes or ideas that, at the time, seemed to us utterly brilliant, and yet a couple of hours later they’ve gone. So what is it that makes a meme work well? I’ll give you my personal opinion of what can help: Rhythm and rhymes create narrower options of associations thereby making it more likely that the whole phrase will be recalled accurately (if you can remember the first line, the rhythm […]
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