Can you name 5 brands you saw yesterday? Just 5, that’s it.
You probably can’t, and that’s not a surprise. Even if you’ve spent half of your day on TikTok, it’s no wonder you can’t pinpoint a few brands you saw.
| The avg. user spends 6 hours online each day (most of that time is spent on social media). – Datareportal |
The weird thing about marketing these days is that consumers see more of it than ever, and yet they hardly remember any of it. The reason for that is that visibility is really, REALLY cheap nowadays. At the same time, it’s never been harder to make someone remember your brand.
Let’s see why that is.
Why More Exposure Doesn’t Necessarily Mean More Recognition
The average person spends a whopping 6 hours and 38 minutes online every single day. 2 hours and 21 minutes out of that is spent on social media, and during that time, they see an insane amount of logos, sponsored posts, ads, and product placements.
By the time you go to bed, you’ve seen hundreds of brands, and you’re not even aware of it.
But exposure doesn’t (necessarily) mean attention.
Just because someone sees an ad doesn’t mean they even registered it, let alone remembered or acted on it. There’s too much content everywhere, which is why you’re forced to filter a chunk of it out. You’d literally go crazy otherwise. By now, everyone’s used to social media, and everyone’s brains have figured out what to do with all those ads, and that’s ignoring them.
| Users are in the habit of actively ignoring familiar-looking ads because of ad fatigue and banner blindness. – National Institute of Standards and Technology |
It’s kind of scary to think that brands invest millions in marketing only to have their posts ignored, but that’s how it is.
Speaking of marketing, here’s where so many people go wrong.
They focus all their attention on impressions and engagement metrics. It makes sense that they do because those numbers are easy to track, but an impression only means that the ad appeared somewhere. An engagement can mean a click or a like, nothing more than that. Neither of those is money in a brand’s pocket, and it’s certainly not memory formation, either.
In order for someone to remember an ad or a brand, there has to be something worth keeping in it.
| Organic search accounts for approx. 50% of all visits, proving itself as a massive contributor to potential sales. – U.S. Small Business AdministrationUnlike paid ads which work as long as you’re paying, search engine optimization focuses on long-term growth. – U.S. Small Business Administration |
Sadly, most brands are all about visibility, and they don’t even think about whether people actually remember them after seeing their 30-second ad.
They’ll get all happy when they see a million impressions, but how many of those million people do you think could name that brand the next day?
For the most part, the number is tragically low.
To be fair, some businesses have realized what a problem this is, and they’ve started to tweak their strategies.
That’s great to see, but it’s still very rare. Working with a full-service marketing agency can be a big help here, but even with that, attention is only one part of the story.
| High-quality AND contextually relevant backlinks are one of the main signals search engines use to determine page credibility and, in turn, rank. – National Institute of Standards and Technology |
How Brands Blend Into the Background
Here’s how brands become completely forgettable.
In other words, these are the things you shouldn’t do.
Everyone Does the Same Thing
A brand sees another brand doing something well, so they do the same thing, hoping to get the same results. Today, that means every brand has a minimalist logo and pastel colors, and they’re all so friendly with their voices that they’re cringey more than anything else.
If you’re scrolling through Instagram, you’ll see 3 different makeup brands, and they’re all using the same fonts and the same messaging. Terrible.
Reinvention Becomes a Habit
Reinvention can be a great thing if you don’t try to reinvent your brand every 6 months.
Some brands go absolutely berserk, and they change their logos all the time, and change their tone from formal to funny to casual. And if you’re a consumer, you can’t remember that brand because they keep changing who it is.
Consistency isn’t boring, and without it, nothing can stick.
| Consumers like brand consistency, and this is reflected in brands experiencing higher revenue and/or recognition when staying true to their brand idea. – U.S. Chamber of Commerce |
Being Familiar Isn’t Valued Enough (or at All)
When you’ve owned a brand for a while, it’s easy to get tired of your own messaging. But your audience doesn’t. If you’ve used a slogan for 8 months, there’s no reason to change it so soon because your customers have seen it 5 or 6 times, not hundreds as you have.
Repetition is a good thing here because it’s how consumers remember you. It’s great if you want to freshen things up here and there, but repetition is actually a strategy.
You need to show your identity over and over for people to recognize you.
Conclusion
The more marketing consumers see, the less they remember.
That doesn’t mean the ads are bad or that your marketing team isn’t doing its job. It simply means that there’s too much information everywhere, and we’d all go crazy if we remembered all of it.
Being loud and flashy might work for a month or 2, but if you want more than that, then you’ll have to deliver actual value.
