How to Get Noticed and Remembered

There’s a reason you can still recall the exact words of a slogan you haven’t heard in twenty years.

Sometimes it’s because the advertising was clever, or stand-out different. But mostly, it’s because the brand zoned into something really specific, found an inspiring way to tell the story, and then said it again, and again, and again, until it lodged, and didn’t change it for years.

Have a break, have a kit-cat.

You’re not you when you’re hungry.

Should have gone to Specsavers

Compare the Meerkat

Red Bull gives you wings

Most brands never give themselves that chance. They change the message when the marketing department gets bored, or a ‘head of’ comes in and wants to make their mark. They add claims when they launch new features. They refresh the creative every eighteen months because it feels like progress. In doing so, they reset the most important thing advertising actually builds: familiarity.

Advertising researchers have a rule of thumb: a customer needs to encounter your message around eight times before it truly registers. Which means that for every person who remembers what your brand stands for, there were seven previous encounters doing slow, invisible work, making the eighth one land. Every time you change the message, the counter resets. Plus, if they don’t hear from you in 90 days - that’s another reset. So the accumulation disappears. It’s a bit like compound interest. You want the interest to keep earning its own interest over time - and the time bit matters.

The brands that become genuinely memorable aren’t the ones with the cleverest campaigns. They’re the ones that chose something specific, expressed it in language that made people feel something, and stayed with it long after it felt boring to the people who made it.

Too many features?

Most founders have a product that does several things genuinely well. The instinct, entirely natural, is to talk about all of it, to communicate the full range of what’s on offer so that every potential customer can find the thing that speaks to them.

In practice, this is the single most common way a brand message fails.

When a message carries too many claims, two things happen. The first is cognitive load, the mental effort required to process information. When the brain is faced with more than it can comfortably hold, it doesn’t file selectively. It disengages. Comprehension drops. The likelihood of remembering anything at all drops with it.

The second is more counterintuitive. When a brand claims to do many things exceptionally well, people simply don’t believe it. The scepticism operates below the level of conscious reasoning, but the logic is sound: how could something be genuinely excellent at this many things? Fewer, stronger claims are more believable, almost always.

Why do some words get remembered?

In 2021, behavioural scientist Richard Shotton and Leo Burnett’s head of insight Mike Treharne ran a study that every founder who writes brand copy should know about.

They gave 425 participants a list of phrases, some abstract, some concrete, and tested how well people remembered them after a delay. Concrete phrases like ‘fast car’ were recalled with 6.7% accuracy. Abstract phrases like ‘innovative quality’ were recalled with just 0.7%. A tenfold difference in memorability from a single change in how an idea was expressed.

The reason, as Cicero observed in 55 BC and neuroscience has since confirmed, is that the brain encodes information more durably when it can form an image. When you read ‘happy cows’ you see something. When you read ‘ethical practices’ you see nothing at all.

This is why the words most brands reach for - innovation, quality, excellence, transparecy - are among the least memorable things they could say. They’re abstract. They generate no image. They leave no trace. And they’re the same words every competitor is using, which means even the small amount of recall they do generate is attributed to the category rather than the brand.

The halo does the heavy lifting.

Here’s what makes simplicity not just effective but strategically intelligent: you don’t need to say everything, because the things you don’t say don’t disappear.

The halo effect is the cognitive bias by which a strong positive impression in one area creates a generalised positive impression across others. When a brand is genuinely perceived as excellent at one thing, that perception spreads automatically. A brand known for one thing done brilliantly is assumed to do other things well too.

Apple understood this. ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ said nothing about hard drive capacity, file formats, or battery life. It said one thing, visceral and visual, that immediately felt like the solution to a problem anyone with a music collection had lived with. The halo from that single claim carried across everything Apple made for years.

What this means for your brand.

Of all the things your product or service does well, one of them is the most demonstrable. One of them is the most visual. One of them maps most directly onto a problem your customer already feels and recognises.

Start there. Say it in concrete, visual language, not ‘innovative quality’ but what that quality actually looks like in someone’s life. Not ‘ethical practices’ but the specific behaviour that makes the ethics real and visible.

Then say it again. And again. Long after it feels repetitive to you, because it is only just beginning to land with them.

FURTHER READING

→ The Choice Factory - Richard Shotton

→ Hacking the Human Mind - Richard Shotton & Michaelson Flickner