If our customer engagement strategies are successful, they must stick in our clients' memories.
CREATING CLIENT MEMORIES IN 2022
Now is the time for businesses and brands to think and plan the memories we want to create for clients in 2022. Yes, 2021 has just finished and it is tempting to look back with nostalgia on the memories we have of the year that has gone. However, we need to be planning for the memories we want to create in 2022.
In a previous article we considered the question, “how much space does your brand occupy in the minds of your clients?” and the importance of our brands desirability for its success. Creating memories in the minds of clients not only increases the space your brand occupies in their mind; using sensory branding increases its desirability to clients.
Why do we need to plan the memories we will create?
If our customer engagement strategies are successful, they must stick in our clients' memories. Hence, the success of our business relies on the memories we create for our clients. This is particularly true as the impact of COVID continues to change customers' buying habits, and people make purchasing decisions based on information they have found on the web rather than relying on a salesperson in-store.
Strategies, sales, marketing, memories.
We know business in 2022 is increasingly complex. The impact of the internet and social media means there is more we need to consider, whether they are B2B, B2C or not-for-profit. For example, it is more than blanket advertising and marketing the products or services your business delivers, hoping the broad-brush approach will at least have some return. We need to understand market segmentation and how to target our services and/or products to the relevant segment of the market.
Strategies, sales, and marketing take work and time. The importance of learning to create effective memories for our clients can seem like an additional task that will take time and energy we don’t have. It can all seem too much, which it is if we view this as another thing to add to our "to-do" list.
CLIENT PROFILE AND PYSCHOLOGY
Effective businesses develop profiles of their ideal clients. Your standard customer profile contains information on the client's age, income, goals, hobbies, interests, and purchasing habits. While these profiles effectively clarify our thinking around how to market our services or products, they can often be two-dimensional. We need to understand the psychology of our ideal client to add depth and make the profiles three-dimensional. Understanding the psychology of our clients, allows us to be more effective in creating impactful memories of our brand.
Consistent repetition is essential in building brand memory.
CREATING IMPACTFUL MEMORIES
Understanding episodic memories
When our ideal client recalls one of our advertisements, they are usually using episodic memory. This is the memory recalled through standard recall and recognition cues [2]. The problem with episodic memory is it starts to deteriorate or decay immediately after being formed. The rate of memory decay for episodic memory is steepest in the first 24 hours [3].
The question arises, why invest in creating memories that decay in 24 hours?
Just because memory has decayed does not mean it has gone. A study by Nielsen of digital video ads and memory decay found while there was 50% decay within the first 24 hours, the remaining 50% memory was still there after five days [4]. This is important because relearning explicit information that may have decayed is much faster the second time around because there is already an imprint of that memory [5]. There is an imprint of 50% still remaining.
Timely consistent repetition is essential in building brand memory.
Question
What consistent brand memories will you create for your ideal potential clients in 2022 so your business is the one they remember when they need the service or product you provide?
-
Sensory Branding
We know that sensory marketing is marketing designed to appeal to the audience's five senses and influence them to purchase a product based on how it makes them feel [6].
Nostalgic marketing is one example of combining senses and memories to encourage clients to buy. The strategy of nostalgic marketing is to evoke fond or happy memories from the past, so the customer purchases a product or service to recreate the past experience [7].
Sensory branding is similar to sensory marketing in that it appeals to the senses but with the specific aim to create an emotional link between the client's senses and the brand [8]. For example, BMW is associated with sophistication and superior engineering; the Hyatt Hotels are associated with luxury [9]. These are two examples where brands have used the principles of sensory marketing to connect the senses with their brand to create strong brand associations in the clients' minds.
Regardless of whether we provide products or services to clients, we can develop a marketing strategy that appeals to our clients' senses to grow our brand and the memory of our brand in the minds of our clients.
Question
How will you use the principles of sensory marketing to create a strong sensory brand which your clients remember throughout 2022?
[1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[4] ibid
[5] ibid
[6] https://thriveagency.com/news/sensory-marketing
[7] https://customerthink.com/what-is-nostalgia
