Memorable Marketing: How & Why It Works

Memorable Marketing - How & Why It Works - HR Marketing Institute, Jan 2024

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[00:00:00] Shelley Marsland: Hello, my name is Shelly Marsland, and I'm VP of marketing at HR. com. This is the our first of a series of HR marketing community virtual events. We are really excited about putting this community together for you. These events will help us marketing pros build our network, connect with our peers, learn how our peers are becoming market leaders.

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[00:00:34] Learn new trends and technologies and learn what's working and what's not. We're hoping to turn these events into a roundtable format in the future to give you a chance to connect face to face with fellow marketing professionals in the human capital space. So please feel free to turn on your camera and put your comments and questions in the chat.

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[00:00:53] It is my Complete pleasure to introduce Nick Warner, Senior Growth Marketing Manager from Together Platform. Nick is a passionate marketer who loves understanding humans, technology, and strategy. Nick has worked for Target and Amazon, working in marketing, product category management, and data roles. In 2020, he transitioned to the startup role.

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[00:01:16] Since then, he has led marketing growth and data teams and been a one man marketing band at early stage startups. His personal mottos, think big, act small, change the world. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. I love that. Nick is going to talk about memorable marketing, how and why it works.

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[00:01:39] Welcome Nick. Take it away!

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[00:01:41] Nick Warner: All right. Thanks, Shelly. Okay. So first I'm going to get rolling here and I'm going to introduce the topic. And that way you can make sure that you're in the right room before it's too late. So let's look at this oversimplified view of customer acquisition. And give me some rope here.

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[00:01:59] You'd be exposed in some way. Then that signal needs to be received. Then the received signal needs to be remembered. Then that received and remembered signal needs to catalyze a change or a set of changes. Today, we're going to focus on the memory part of it. And I propose that if this old marketing adage is true, then this revised marketing adage must also be true.

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[00:02:25] That person needs to remember something at some point. So, let's go back in time. The year's 1981, and these two guys, Al Reese and Jack Trout, published their cult classic on positioning. The first page of the first chapter They say this, and this is before the internet, before mobile, there's no email, texting, streaming, World Wide Web.

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[00:02:49] And for context here, per capita advertising in the U. S. was 376 in 1981. Now let's fast forward to the new millennium and see what's happened since Rees and Trout wrote those words. The advertising spend growth is outpacing the population growth by a wide margin. And per capita, advertising in the U.S. and Canada is astronomically higher than it was back in 1981. So I think it's fair to conclu oops. I think it's fair to conclude here that living in an over communicated society is going to be just as true in the future as it was in 1981, and just as true as it is today. So, present day, we're exposed to a lot of ads.

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[00:03:34] Depending on the source you choose, it's either a lot, or a lot, a lot. And, I'm willing to bet that most of you don't remember more than just a tiny, only remember a tiny fraction of those which Is the whole thesis for this is most of that marketing is forgettable. Now, let's take a step back. Why do we forget most of the marketing that we're exposed to?

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[00:03:59] And what is it about that slim minority that we do remember that makes it memorable? And as a marketer, what can I do about it?

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[00:04:11] So I want to just reiterate here that memory is one piece of the puzzle. And just like exposure, attention, and change aren't enough on their own. You need all of them working in concert. So how do we go from forgettable to memorable? Let's look at today's flight plan. So we're going to tackle memorable marketing from a few angles, and within each of these buckets, we're going to connect the scientific concepts to examples in the wild and practical tools that we can extrapolate from and put into practice in our own work.

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[00:04:46] So now I hope you've had enough to decide whether or not you're in the right room. I'm going to give you a little bit of background on myself and meet the flight crew, which is only me. So I'm Nick. And there I am with my partner of 12 years and wife of five months, Haley, who's a fish scientist by day and a marketing and pranks experiment subject by night.

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[00:05:05] There's our dog, Bella, who handles security and entertainment. And we live in Vancouver, which I wish looked like that all year round. Professionally and passionate about two things and I currently prosecute those ambitions at together which for clarification is a mentorship platform. It's it's software, not a supply of mentors.

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[00:05:25] Okay, that's enough about me. So let's talk about the four problems that all humans need to and do address. Problem number one, there's too much information, there's much more than we can actually process, so we need to filter almost all of it out. Problem number two, the world's confusing, and we only process a small fraction of the information that it presents to us.

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[00:05:50] So to mitigate that, we connect dots, we fill in the gaps, and we rely on mental models to construct meaning. Problem number three, we're constrained by information and time, but we still need to do things. So we're constantly predicting the future to make fast and slow decisions that will change it, updating our methods and models a bit at a time.

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[00:06:10] And we outsource a lot of that hard work to environmental cues. Other people, mostly. And then problem number four. If there's way more information than we can process, there's way, way more information than we can actually store. So we pick out a few things to save and discard the rest. Here our brain is like a day trader.

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[00:06:27] It's making bets and trade offs to determine what we remember versus what we forget. And for example, we remember generalizations over specifics because they apply to more things while taking up less space and what we save then goes back and informs what we filter out. And it makes up the ingredients from which we're able to construct meaning with.

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[00:06:48] So it's all self reinforcing. And with those problems in our pocket, let's get into what makes marketing memorable. So, all right, we're starting with my favorite one different wins. So we remember the things that stand out. In a sense we're still hunter gatherers and we're looking for dangers and opportunities amid a mostly static landscape.

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[00:07:14] And our first concept, appeal to novelty. We gravitate towards the new thing because it's new. We'll commit resources to updating our mental models if it's new. And if it's old and represents the status quo, why would we use our scarce resources to remember it? And our second concept, the bizarreness effect, for many of the same reasons as novelty, we remember these types of things.

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[00:07:41] And let's look at a few examples of these two in the wild. Old Spice is a classic one. For as long as I've been buying deodorant, this has been their play. I love this ad from Signal. It's a messaging product with privacy as a core differentiator. And it's an Instagram ad, it's jarring, it's so wildly transparent.

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[00:08:01] This one is a funeral home in the height of COVID, and a B2B example. This is Linear's homepage. They sell productivity software to developers. It's a challenger brand for Jira. And this is different than any other homepage I've seen in B2B, and it's provocative. Okay, let's look at a couple more concepts.

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[00:08:21] So, distinction bias. We artificially increase distinction between things to make the world more digestible, and the von Rostrop effect. We're more likely to remember the item that is different from the others. This one was named by the German scientist, Hedwig von Rostroff. But that's a bit of a mouthful and not very descriptive.

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[00:08:41] So we're going to call that the isolation effect. So, some examples of these two in the wild. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this one before and I think it's brilliant. We've got this one which seems like a slam dunk for ad blockers. It stands out. It's anti advertising advertising. A legendary example from VW at a time when bigger was better, especially in cars.

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[00:09:05] And the B2B example, this is Buffer's pricing page. They sell social media software to marketers. And it's the first time I've seen that on a pricing page and the transparency is different and it stands out. And then let's close with this textbook example from Tesla.

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[00:09:25] So takeaways, resist the gravity of being one with the herd, provide contrast, give a reason to reevaluate the status quo, bring something new to the table. Assume no one cares about your marketing until you give them a reason to care. And the best reason to care is newness. Mark Benioff and Salesforce are a beautiful example of creating difference in this way.

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[00:09:50] The CRM wasn't new, but their distribution was. And if you don't know that story, hang tight. We're going to get back to that one in a little bit.

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[00:09:59] Okay, less is more the least intuitive one, in my opinion. So, first concept here is the dilution effect. It's basically the, how we process and analyze arguments isn't an average or a sum. We don't take the best one. Excuse me, it's not a sum. We don't take the best ones. We just average them because it's easier.

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[00:10:19] So these fewer arguments, a couple of examples of this that I liked this is HubSpot's product page. Like it keeps it really simple. It's the most important features, but overwhelming. And speaking of overwhelming, here is one reason why SEO means Google and not MSN, this is 2004 MSN's homepage and 2002 Google's homepage.

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[00:10:46] Okay, next concept here is the peak end rule. This is how what we remember from an experience is not an average or a sum of the whole thing. It's mostly constructed from the peak and the end. And to a couple of examples here this is Zapier's upgrade flow. You get a little confetti in celebration when, when you finish, which is fun.

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[00:11:07] The anti example here, any Game of Thrones fans, for the most part, is an excellent series, but it's not remembered that way. And finally, Virgin Atlantic who hacks this rule pretty blatantly by giving away candy on the flight lands. Okay. A couple more concepts here. So first one is the Zagnarik effect.

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[00:11:27] Put simply, we're wired to remember things that are incomplete. We easily forget things that are already complete and outside of in product. User flows, this often manifests in information gaps. Now I'm going to introduce one more potentially seemingly unrelated concept here, the levels of processing model.

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[00:11:49] The basic idea is that our cognition processes things, processes things first visually, then verbally and then semantically, which is to say conceptually and understanding visual and verbal are most often on autopilot as we go about the world. Semantic isn't most often not on autopilot. It takes dedicated effort.

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[00:12:10] And to get into long term memory, you need semantic processing. Now that's why information gaps are such an effective tool to increase memory. We can't help but to try to fill in the blanks which requires semantic processing. Let's look at a couple examples of this and a few might require stretching, so be ready for that.

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[00:12:34] Here we go. First one is pubic schools. Is that effective marketing? Probably not. Is it memorable? Definitely. A couple copy examples here we fill in the gaps effortlessly, which gives the copy some extra zip and it forces us to do a little bit of work as we read it. And then the missing type campaign.

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[00:12:55] So these started to pop up everywhere. This was a blood drive, missing types of blood, and it was one of the most successful blood drives ever. In a month, they more than doubled the prior year's total numbers. So takeaways, short is sweet, be direct, get to the point, and get folks to the end quickly. And here's Canva's homepage and Shopify's homepage.

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[00:13:24] And design the end that you want them to remember. Not the end that they end up remembering because they left and it was boring. I think a good example of this is my former employer, Amazon's customer service. And find ways to delight in your selling motion. It'll outweigh the not so delightful stuff.

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[00:13:42] An example from my own past is at Sam Labs, is an education tech company. When customers signed, we'd send them this little blocky plush toy. It's our little mascot all over the site and in the product. It's just a little way to hopefully bring a smile to their face and make it easy to remember us and hopefully talk about us.

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[00:14:01] And then provoke thought without increasing the friction. You want to give folks enough to get them in the right direction, but let them fill in the white space. And another canonical example here, this is the first major ad campaign that Steve Jobs orchestrated at Apple. So there's a lot going on here, it's like nine pages, super detailed.

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[00:14:19] Then he left Apple and went to Pixar for a little bit. When he came back, He launched this campaign which still lives in infamy today.

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[00:14:30] Okay. Multimodal cheat code.

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[00:14:38] Excuse me. So we're visual creatures. If the picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a lot more words than that. I'll give a couple of snacks for thought here. 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. 92 percent of all human communication is nonverbal. And our brain processes visuals about 60, 000 times faster than text.

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[00:15:01] All of that leads to the picture superiority effect. People remember pictures better than not pictures. And sometimes, here's an example from a parking garage, and sometimes attaching a visual is essential to the memorability. And we've got multiple sensory pathways, which leads us to the modality effect.

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[00:15:23] The idea here is that memory increases when incoming information is encoded in multiple ways or at multiple times. And we'll revisit both of those concepts in a couple of different ways as we move along here. For now, here's an example of this in the wild. This is so visceral. Like, I can taste and feel the oil, it's unpleasant, and it's hard to get out of my head.

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[00:15:47] Multimodal interactions increase the surface area of connections for later recall. And we'll, we'll continue to revisit that topic as we move along. Let's look at a couple examples of this. I think a good one from the B2B world is interactive product demos on the website. It's engaging trust building along with that multimodal input.

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[00:16:05] This is a toothpaste ad, which hurts my teeth to look at. And this is a soap ad, which is so gross. And it's hard not to think about when I look at my fingernails.

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[00:16:18] So seeing is believing at the risk of being overly obvious here, show and tell on your website. I'll remember the image and not the words and better yet, show your product in action. That's why almost all the folks came to the page. And so another example from my own work again, back to back to Sam labs.

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[00:16:38] So we did this customer showcase thing, or set up a hall of fame area on the site. We did weekly social posts, newsletter competitions. And customers would send us all the cool stuff that they would make in their classrooms and programs. And it was a, it's also a really great way of creating a lot of content for a startup marketing team in an, in an economical way.

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[00:16:58] And after we started this program, we started to see acceleration across the top of our funnel. All of which were, were down year over year, the year prior. And my favorite part we lowered our CAC compared to the year before there was a marketing team. Well, more than doubling our revenue growth rate.

[00:17:16] Alright, availability and repetition.

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[00:17:21] So, brands are lazy. We remember what's readily accessible. First concept for us in this bucket is the availability heuristic. People tend to recall the information that comes to mind fastest with the least amount of effort. Second 1. 5 concepts here are the mere exposure effect, which leads to the familiarity bias.

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[00:17:45] We more easily remember things that are familiar and relevant to our prior knowledge. And this chart on the right here is from a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research in the 70s called the Advertising Wearout. It was one of the first studies showing this effect in advertising. And the idea here is, and the researcher's conclusion was, we more easily remember things that fit into our preconceived beliefs and knowledge.

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[00:18:12] So, a mental model for us that we can use is memory recall works a lot like a search engine does or perhaps more accurately, search engines work like our brains recalling memories. The more nodes a concept is connected to, the more accessible it is when our brain searches its memory database. So, brains are lazy, we lean on shortcuts, and we like to learn through osmosis.

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[00:18:38] A couple of concepts here, the spacing effect information repeated over time increases memory, and the lag effect. We remember more and more accurately when that spacing is longer. Here's a good visual of how that works. The varying forgetting curves with and without reminders over time.

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[00:19:06] Okay, takeaways and examples.

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[00:19:11] First one this is from Together. And I'm just going to show our search presence for mentoring terms in a couple of snapshots. So, got mentorship, reverse mentorship. Workplace mentoring programs, purpose of mentoring, vertical directories like G2 and Capterra.

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[00:19:35] If a company is using search to look for mentoring products or resources, they're going to see it together over and over again. And that's a strong signal of importance, and it's hard to forget. Now, back to Salesforce. So the CRM wasn't new, there were large incumbents and a lot of niche solutions. In 2000, business insider called them the ant at the picnic.

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[00:19:57] So what did they do? They eventualized a new distribution method. The cloud, the cloud, the cloud, no software, software sucks. Rinse and repeat. They staged protests all around San Francisco. Their homepage was dedicated to the end of software and they held anti software events, which for a software company.

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[00:20:15] is pretty radical. And I think we're all familiar with how that worked out. If you're not worked really well. So consistency is named game. When you're sick of repeating the same message is probably the time it's starting to resonate and work with your market segment.

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[00:20:33] and then relate the future that you're showing to the past and the present that folks know and are experiencing. The canonical example of this is Henry Ford's Horseless Carriage. And some great permissionless advertising from Tabasco, drafting off our familiarity with Nike. Another legendary one, how Apple marketed the iPod.

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[00:20:54] Nobody knows what a digital media player was, at least they didn't back then. But everybody knows what songs in pockets are. And a B2B example this one is from Keyplay, who sells data solutions to go to market teams. Everybody knows these eye charts, so it's, it's pretty easy to understand what the message is here.

[00:21:12] And lastly, an example from Boxwater everybody knows this picture already. It just usually has milk or fruit juice in it.

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[00:21:23] All right. Need and want. So, let's go back to the start. Attention is the gatekeeper. And we used to think that attention worked like a searchlight. Now, the prevailing wisdom is it works like a filter. An energy intensive one at that. And our attention filter is informed by what we remember from the past.

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[00:21:44] Those are the ingredients that inform us what to let through and what to keep out. And, good thing that it does. Oops, got a little bit out of myself. Those, those are the things that help us figure out what we want to let in and what we want to keep out. And good thing it does because we need to save our scarce cognitive resources for important stuff.

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[00:22:12] So, we remember what we think we need to. First concept here is loss aversion, which I think probably a lot of folks are familiar with already. A potential loss is more powerful than a potential gain. Almost twice as powerful. I think another way to phrase this is that people work twice as hard to avoid loss as we will to gain a benefit.

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[00:22:31] And stacking on top of that, we also have a negativity bias. Negative events are much more impactful to us than positive ones. And we fear the negative a lot more than we desire the positive. So some examples of this out in the wilds are saving dollars instead of gaining it. Clipping a coupon gives you something that you then don't want to lose.

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[00:22:55] And same with the concept of a reverse free trial where you get full features on day one and then you lose them if you don't upgrade.

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[00:23:05] Alright, next concept here is the self reference bias. We're more interested in information about ourselves, believe it or not. Some examples of how this has been used is Dove's Real Beauty campaign showing real people. Personalization on websites. This is from Optimizely. This is an ABM personalization.

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[00:23:25] And Brooks Running which is an IP address current weather. Personalization that I think is pretty slick and then back to that same labs user user generated content example that I shared earlier. Okay, so we're gonna get into a couple more concepts here. This one is the Google effect. The idea here is that people remember information that isn't going to be accessible.

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[00:23:51] And the level of detail that we remember requires excuse me, the level of detail that we remember depends on future ease of access. and the testing effect. People remember more when we know we'll be tested on it later, and actually the act of retrieving that information increases memory itself. So some examples and tools here, introduce open loops and asking questions is a really great way to do this.

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[00:24:19] I'll show you an ad sequence from Supersod

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[00:24:27] and this one from Brex which is probably not a good answer. And an open loop from Netflix.

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[00:24:42] So we remember what we have to think about, prompt recall and processing. Like a We'll go through a couple of examples here. This is an ad from Tommy Hilfiger. We can't help but to try to fill in the blanks and figure out if we agree, disagree. Masterclass with a question that it feels like I should already have the answer to, but I don't.

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[00:25:06] And then another omission one. I can't help but to fill in the blanks. And we remember what we value a couple more concepts here the endowment effect, which I think we already covered, but wanted a chance to bring Smeagol into this or the ringspan. Hopefully you appreciate that. We value our things.

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[00:25:26] We value things more if they're ours versus not ours and hyperbolic discounting. We value what we can get now versus get in the future much more than is rational. And then social proof. We outsource lots of that brain work to other people especially. When other people are important and, or we aren't sure what we should do.

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[00:25:50] So let's look at a couple of examples of these three in play. First one is from Calm with a nice use of social proof in their mobile app. Mobile notification. A couple from Amazon's product detail page the fast track promise here hits both of these facts. It's almost yours and look how fast you can have it.

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[00:26:09] And then the social proof with the most common I thought this was really nice really nice copy. I can't recall from who, but I think it's a cool example of social proof. And then from booking. com social proof hit in a couple of different ways here. Last booking reviews, people looking at this hotel now.

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[00:26:29] Another twofer this is Uber and the same thing from Google. And then as a last example here this is Amazon using the endowment effect along with a couple other things to get audience participation and buy in.

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[00:26:50] So, that's it. Wrap up in questions. Had a last slide here to wrap it up, but given where we are with time. Let's just close it there. And yeah, let's open up for questions, discussions. Thank you!