The Role For Marketing Is To Generate Memories.

It’s a useful exercise for a marketer, whether developing strategy, a brief or evaluating their marketing materials, to ask themselves if they’re connecting  ‘what do I want to say’ and ‘what do I want people to buy’ with ‘how is this going to be remembered?’ 

Often, we forget that the role of our creative advertising and media is to ensure that our Brand, products and services are remembered when it matters… the moment our customer has a need for a solution, so that they think of us first.

Every marketing decision needs to be reframed from this perspective first. When it comes to creative assets, marketers must ask themselves, ‘does this deserve to be remembered’ and  ‘will my brand be remembered?’ When selecting media, ask ‘is this going to appear where it will be noticed?’ and ‘will the right people remember this information?’ 

How memory works is particularly important, especially when being remembered is your commercial necessity. In B2C, it’s a memory jog on a shopping trip. In B2B, it can be the branded search at the beginning of a purchasing process that may last for months. In both cases, this moment is when the first search engine any buyer turns to is their mind. 

In marketing, the brand that’s remembered is often the brand that’s bought. The availability heuristic dictates that our minds are so reassured by the act of ‘thinking of something first’ that it tricks us into believing that the first thought of brand – or the day 1 brand – is also best. We found this to be true in our How B2B Brands Grow paper with the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, and they recently further supported this concept with their new paper on the Natural monopoly law:

The Natural Monopoly law is that big brands tend to ‘monopolise’ the purchases of the lightest, least frequent (probably least informed) buyers of a product category. Natural Monopoly is an important empirical law because it helps us understand how brands become big.

But how we build memories in B2B or B2C isn’t just about being served an ad. It is influenced by situation and context, the creative experience, recency and repetition.

Marketers Must Understand The Memory Mix To Generate Successful Memories.

There are four types of memory: 

1. Working Memory, which we use for remembering in micro-short periods to perform easy, routine tasks.
2. Episodic Memory: these are the long-term memories that we have of past time, events or recollections, and these memories are most easily recalled when they are associated with present cues or feelings.
3. Semantic Memory, which helps us to remember language or a list of facts.
4. Prospective memory, which helps us to remember the productive things we’re planning to do, such as events, dates, appointments or tasks.

As we write briefs and later, as we review creative work, we need to consider how we feed these different types of memory, asking: ‘what prompts are we giving,’ and ‘what are the time-frames that we are expecting our memories to withstand?’

Memories are created through a four-stage process: 

1. Receiving through our senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.
2. Encoding, which converts the message into links for the synapses to be able to retrieve.
3. Storing, which sorts the memory between long and short-term memories. Embedded memories often require repetition,which is also called ‘rehearsal.’
4. Retrieval, where long-term memory is accessed after time has passed.

Marketers are most interested in retrieval: we want our brands to be thought of in buying situations. To do this, we can invest in advertising that grabs attention, features situational messages that can be encoded easily, and is well-branded to ensure the memory stores well over time. 

Effective encoding and retrieval go hand-in-hand: we want to ensure that the feelings, settings, and places buyers are most likely to find themselves in when entering a buying situation – the moments of initial retrieval – are mirrored by the messages we build into our creative, and which are encoded into a buyer’s memory. And this all starts with the moment of receiving: the moment where we must grab attention. Without attention there is no response. But attention isn’t all or nothing – there’s passive attention and active attention. And both can help encode critical brand memories.

Attention Drives Memory, And We Can Now Measure Attention.

Research by Professor Karen Nelson-Field proves the essential factor of Attention leading to higher sales from ads. And at LinkedIn, we’ve been able to put this theory into practice with our Dwell Time metric. 

Traditionally, Dwell time measures the seconds an ad is viewable on-screen. This is something that was always implicitly tracked but wasn’t readily available to marketers to view. In partnering across our Customer Science org, we were able to unearth this metric and track it. We began to track it at scale, ad by ad, customer by customer. Measuring where we could see members ‘stop the scroll’ and ‘notice’ the ad has created a large data source that helps us to advise our customers better on how they gain attention.

Benchmarking dwell time is an effective way to identify high vs. low-performing ads, which is a core tenet of the CMO Scorecard measurement solution offered to customers in our B2B Edge program.

When plotted against reach, we can identify the ads that are adequately, over, or underfunded. This enables us to pick out the best performers across static and video formats alike, and importantly, to understand how to optimize these formats for different attention objectives.

Because when it comes to successful memory generation – successful marketing – marketers need to both build and maintain memories.

But in B2B, that’s not just one memory in one mind.

B2B decisions are group buying decisions, which means collective memory is critical to the buying committee that they’ve got the right supplier. For Mental Availability to be commercially impactful, the B2B Brand needs presence in the minds of a group that will either formally or tacitly ‘nod’ through the buying decision. That group is best represented as your ‘Category Audience’ and features those affected by the deal (the end user) as well as those who will evaluate the quality of the decision - often Operations, Finance and Legal as well as those in management. Collective memory, which we often label as ‘approval’ or ‘agreement’ or even ‘endorsement’ of a deal, requires that participants have heard of and agree on the type of work done by a supplier. Even if that understanding is relatively shallow it produces confidence.

Memory Mix Modeling: How Marketers Can Build And Measure Different Types Of Attention For Successful Memory Generation.

Just like different channels serve different media objectives, different creative formats serve different memory objectives. 

Traditional media mix modeling acknowledges the importance of cross-channel presence by ensuring that there are different KPIs for different channels. After all, a billboard and digital ad can both influence a future purchase, but only one will result in a click.

Now we have a way to understand this by tracking our success in gaining Attention; using dwell time. We know that Attention is the critical first-step to influencing memory, but importantly, different types of formats will facilitate and engage different lengths of Attention. And that is okay! Attention is fleeting and fragmented but luckily the human brain doesn’t require many seconds to form a connection, even subconsciously. 

The key to Memory Mix Modeling is to embrace the fleeting nature of attention, ‘fleeting’ does not mean ‘unpredictable.’ Our Better, Bolder B2B Branding report shows that video is a more reliable way to capture active, engaged attention. It offers more time for a marketer to tell a compelling story, and it provides opportunity for viewers to turn on sound and engage more.

But static images are more likely to be passively consumed by viewers, which gives marketers an exciting opportunity to build awareness and refresh existing memory structures when done right. The key here is to invest in distinctive brand assets that will stand out at a moment’s notice. 

B2B Brand Spotlight: Toast Tab

Toast’s marketing to restaurateurs and small business owners is a best-in-class example of Memory Mix Modeling done right. 

Toast builds memory with video ads that grab active attention.

But equally importantly, Toast maintains the memory structures from their video investment over time by grabbing passive attention with distinctively-branded static ads.

We continue to invest in attention measurement, and believe these capabilities will only advance as marketers become more savvy about building attention metrics into their creative pre-testing. But for now, we are excited to help our customers execute a successful Memory Mix Modeling measurement strategy using our custom, competitive dwell time analyses. Reach out to your LinkedIn representative to learn more about the latest in our dwell time offerings, and to see if you may be eligible for a custom B2B Edge measurement analysis.

Many thanks to my colleagues at the B2Bi in the writing of this article. I would particularly like to recognize the work of Rachel Abbe, Derek Yueh and Mimi Turner. 

If you have any interest in Memory and if you find this article useful, please consider donating to the Alzheimers Society UK and the Alzheimers Association USA.