Being Remembered Is a Marketing Objective

Marketers are obsessed with getting attention, but attention on its own is not particularly valuable if nobody remembers who created it.

We have all seen adverts that are funny, emotional or beautifully produced and then struggled to remember which brand they belonged to. From an entertainment perspective they may have succeeded. From a marketing perspective, that creates a rather obvious problem.

The brand needs to get some of the credit.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in distinctive brand assets. Logos matter, but brands have far more available to them: colours, shapes, typography, characters, sounds, language, graphic devices, packaging, photography styles and repeated creative conventions.

Used consistently, these things create shortcuts in memory. The work we have been developing around the Archer identity at Cardiff Met Sport is a good example of how I think about this. Stickers, graphic devices, apparel, cups, patches, banners and physical installations are not simply decorative merchandise. Repeating recognisable visual assets across digital and physical environments can gradually make the identity easier to recognise.

The key word there is gradually.

Brand assets become distinctive through repetition. If we completely reinvent the look every campaign because the marketing team is bored, customers never get the opportunity to learn the system.

Marketers see their own brands vastly more often than customers do. We attend the meetings. We open the design files. We see every social post. We might be completely sick of an asset just as the audience is beginning to recognise it.

That is why consistency requires discipline.

This does not mean everything should look identical forever. Creativity still matters and brands need enough flexibility to remain interesting. The challenge is creating novelty inside a recognisable system.

I think sport has a natural advantage here. Team colours, badges, shirts, mascots, stadiums and rituals already create distinctive assets. The marketing opportunity is to use them deliberately rather than treating brand identity as something confined to a set of logo guidelines.

Byron Sharp's work around mental availability has influenced my thinking here. People buy brands they notice and remember in buying situations. Distinctiveness helps make that memory easier to retrieve.

I therefore increasingly ask a very basic question when looking at creative work:

If the logo disappeared, would anybody still have a reasonable chance of knowing who this is from?

If the answer is no, perhaps the brand needs to do more of the work.