Marketing to the Memory: Simplicity

The first stage of memory is encoding. Encoding is the process of mentally digesting new information. Naturally, smaller bites make digestion easier.

The reason that phone numbers have seven digits is because that's the amount the average person can effectively recall. We can apply this idea to our marketing by deciding what information is absolutely necessary for the reader, then cutting out the rest. This is a quick way to clean up clutter and increase the effectiveness of your message.

You may find yourself wanting to add more text to an advertisement just because there's extra space on the page. That's not the right reason to add more. Remember, adding more text makes the message more complex and less focused. It's not a contest to see how many words you can fit into the ad space. It's a contest to make an impression on the viewer's mind.

If the viewer only remembers one thing from your advertising, make sure it's your company name. The name should be a prominent feature in your ads, regardless of the medium. This is where a many ad campaigns fail. I've seen a lot of eye-catching billboards on the freeway. Some were interesting enough that I mentioned them to friends. But, at the end of the day, I had no idea which company was doing the advertising. They spent thousands of dollars getting my attention and they didn't even tell me who they were. The business name was usually included at the bottom of the billboard in small font, implying it was not very important. I just looked right past it.

If you want a good lesson in simple marketing, take a look at some complex products that have been marketed successfully. What did they do to simplify their message? When developers successfully put an operating system into a small device that could fit in your pocket, they called it a PDA, which stood for personal digital assistant. The name seemed simple enough to the developers, but imagine the average customer who has just heard the term for the first time. "Do you have any of those new PAAs…er…PDFs…?" It wasn't a very marketable name. However, the term "smart phone" caught on like wildfire. People knew the term long before they even knew why they wanted the device.

Putting emphasis on the simplest ideas, logos, etc. will make your message more digestible. Then, once you've gained the reader's attention, you can go into further details about your product.

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