7 Steps to Branding Success: Step 4 - Keep repeating it
by Jonas Blake on May.12, 2009, under Social Upgrade
Once you have a simple message that is relevant to the client and appropriately targeted at their feelings rather than their logic… keep repeating it.
This sounds rather simple, but be careful. It is easy to forget about some great opportunities here. Your brand should be on, or in, everything you do. Eat, sleep, and breathe your message. Every time you have any communication with a client, reinforce your brand. You need to associate yourself and your product so strongly with your brand that it stops being something separate from you and becomes who you are, at least in the mind of the client.
The memory neurons in the brain form memories by building patterns of connections between neurons. If a new pattern is similar to an existing pattern, the new pattern is easier to remember. Similarly, if a pattern is repeated, it becomes easier to remember.
If you have a hard time remembering the names of people when you first meet them, you are probably familiar with this concept. It might take you four or five times of hearing someone’s name before you remember it. Some of the tricks people use to remember names, like associating someone’s name with something else about them, tend to work using this concept as well. By tying together a name and something else, you have reinforced that pattern, and therefor make it easier to remember.
Unfortunately, your clients are not likely to try to remember your brand. They are not going to use memory tricks, or songs, or anything else to remember better. You have to do the work for them, by repeating it over, and over, and over, and over, until they remember it.
One thing to note, before we move on, is that it is very important to have a consistent message. It is one thing to repeat it all the time, but if you are not repeating the same thing every time, repeating it is not reinforcing the memory. In fact, it is probably just confusing.
