Cut & Paste into your own notes

Think of a brand that you like (at least a little bit). What are the associations that you have with it?
Would everyone else have the same associations? (think of people who are similar to you, and also people who are very different - people who came from richer or poorer households, people who came from different cultures?
Does this brand:
  • Own any positions?
  • Have any USPs?
  • Do their associations 'resonate' with each other?
  • Do any of their associations provide 'reasons to believe'?
Think of an association that they could add (ideally one that resonated, etc)
  What kind of an advert could you make to communicate it? (keeping in mind that you want to bring that meaning across clearly so that people can encode it)

Memory (branding!) pt. 2 (Associative networks)

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  • Long Term Memory stores information in a very different format than our spoken or written language does. Language codes meanings into words that are arranged into specific orders. Long-Term memory stores information as networks of inter-connected nodes. Encoding is the process by which language (and other thoughts) get translated into our LTM.
  • When a node is activated in our short-term memory it pops into our awareness, and then activation spreads outwards from that node to the other ones it is connected to. Some nodes are more tightly linked in our memory than others, and they spread activation more strongly. This is useful because we only have space to be aware of a few nodes at once, so only the most strongly activated will come into our minds.
  • This tells us a lot about branding. Brand associations are the concepts that are linked to a brand, and brand awareness is when a brand has a strongly developed node that is well-linked to the product category or core benefit.

Many terms that marketing practitioners use make sense based on this understanding:

  • Owning positions
    • Having such a strong brand association that competing brands would struggle to be able to get that more strongly associated with themselves instead. Especially when this association is one that is very useful for positioning purposes
  • USP
    • What your product offers to consumers that others don’t (not all types of products can really have one of these – especially ones popular enough to be copied). You would ideally want this to be a strong brand association in consumers’ minds.
  • Associations that resonate
    • Ones that are coherent with the rest of your brand, with many supporting links in memory
  • Brand permission
    • Do consumers feel that your brand is able or ‘allowed’ to offer an associaton
  • Reasons to believe
    • Associations that consumers see as supportive of the core benefit your are promising

We also talked about forgetting:

  • This happens when links fade, but you can protect against this by doing lots of mental work to develop really richly linked-up connections of nodes so that you can still recover the information even if some of them fade.
    • This is why reading the chapter, then skimming these review notes is a poor way to study. It pops all the information into your working memory, so you feel like it’s all there, but if your processing stays this shallow then you won’t have many connections between the nodes, and it only takes one or two fading and you won’t remember much at all. Real learning comes from the hard work of coming at things from multiple angles, working through examples that connect different things up, and really trying to use your learning while it is fresh. Sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear.
    • But this is why we give you the notes tab (see the page header) that gives you thinking prompts, and activities to fill out. This is why we give you lots of examples and ask lots of questions. It is to help you facilitate the type of active thinking that will lead to deeper and more lasting learning.