Aaron Shields’s Mind Terroir

Too often companies change the heart of their marketing campaigns in an effort to inject newness into their branding strategies in hopes of capturing attention. The latest neuroscience research reveals why changing the core of your messaging can be detrimental to your brand.

A phenomenon that is receiving a lot of interest in current brain research is memory reconsolidation. Although the biological mechanisms are in debate, the occurrence is well documented. Simply put, when a memory is recalled it is subject to alteration.

In one study, one group of subjects memorized a list of words, and later a second list. In a second group, the subjects were asked to recall the first list before memorizing the second. When the second group was later asked to recall the second list, items in the first list crept in and sometimes the memories of the first list were forgotten altogether. In the first group the lists were recallable with out alteration. The same phenomenon has been shown in emotional events, and is a key in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. (Nerd Note: a new therapy involves memory recall combined with taking a pill that affects an emotional center in the brain. See: “Manipulating Memory.”)

So what does this mean for marketing? Every time a customer sees a new campaign, their memories of your brand and what you stand for can be altered. All the time, energy, and money you spent building brand equity can be damaged. Overtime, with repeated changes in campaigns the brand risks becoming diluted as it becomes a hodgepodge of memories and emotional associations built up overtime.

This is a key reason why successful brands stick to the same core idea throughout their lifespans. Nike has spent decades reinforcing the idea of the dominance and mastery through the archetype of the warrior (for clarification on the importance of archetypes in branding, see my article Archetypal Branding: Cult Branding 2.0; Apple continually reinforces the ideas of beauty, creativity and self-actualization through all of its campaigns, from 1984 to Think Different to the current Get A Mac ads.

Instead of overhauling your strategy to capture attention, look to the heart of your business and use that as inspiration for developing your new messaging.

Tags:   Apple · brand · Branding · Business · Marketing · memory · Neuroscience · NikeNo Comments