Brand Recall

Snickers owns hunger.
Red Bull owns exhaustion.
Corona owns the beach.

They trained you for years until the feeling itself does the selling.

That's brand recall.

Ep 10 of Position To Win.

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Imagine you're hungry, really hungry, and you're not feeling like yourself. What chocolate bar comes to mind? For a lot of you, it was Snickers. Now imagine it's three o'clock in the afternoon and you're fading and you're running out of energy. Or you're about to do something extreme and you're about to jump off in the airplane and you want an extra edge, you want an extra boost of energy. Either way, you have nothing left in the tank. What do you reach for? Well, for a lot of you, it's a red bull. Now, picture that you're on the beach, there's the sun, the sand, and you're escaping from reality, and you have a cold beverage in your hand, and then there's a wedge of lime in it. What is it? Well, for a lot of you, it's a corona. So notice what comes into your head. You're not weighing options, value propositions, benefits, features. It's really a feeling that comes up. A feeling of whether it's hunger, exhaustion, escape. This feeling reaches into your memory and it pulled out the brand. And that's brand recall. Those brands trained you on purpose for years until the feeling itself does the selling for them. And this is episode 10. Welcome to brand recall. I'm John Luke. Welcome to position to win. And there are two types of brands: the ones that accept their position in the market and the ones that challenge it. And this show is for the challengers and for the founders and CMOs who are responsible for making that happen. So for the first nine episodes, we've been talking about building the brand. On episode eight, we talked about the character behind the brand. And on episode nine, we talked about the persuasion behind the brand. And all of it sits on acquired assets, which is really recall. Often this is overlooked, but it's powerful. It decides who's going to keep it for the space inside your customer's head. The best argument in the world can lose if the name doesn't arrive in the head in the first place. So essentially, there's two types of brand awareness, right? So awareness can be split into recognition or recall. To recognize or to remember. Recognize is prompted, right? So you're walking down the street and you recognize that familiar face. This is when you see a series of brand options. You see this is a familiar face. This is something that you've seen before, et cetera, et cetera. So whether it's the shelf, the feed, the search results, it just feels familiar and therefore intends to feel more safe. Yeah, so recall is unaided. You don't need to be prompted. You don't need to see it. You don't need to be walking down the streets. You just think of it, right? Um, the need you could be woke up in the middle of the night and just think of this brand. And or maybe you're just starting to feel hungry, or you need to feel that escape. You need to go to the escape, or you're at the beach and you're like, you know what would be nice right now? A corona. The need is the only prompt that you really get, the feeling. So, and that ends up prompting the need, and that's why it's the most important thing. And then there's obviously inside that recall, there's the top of the mind. Top of the mind is the category term, which is the first brand that is retrieved. The first brand that is retrieved tends to have a lot more pulling power than the second or third brand. And oftentimes it's really the first brand that ends up winning the whole category. For example, when you think about Snickers. The Aaron Bird Base Institute splits this into two separate categories. There's mental availability and there's physical availability. Mental availability is simple. It's it's how easy it is to remember it. Physical availability is how easy it is to be able to find it when it's in front of you. Like is it when you're shopping? Can you easily find it? So inside a two recall, basically recall opens the door and the availability still has to let the customer walk through it and actually make the purchasing happen. Recognition works when the brand is physically present. So when it's on the shelf, it's in the marketplace, it's inside your directories, it's on the results page. And in that moment, it really does the job, right? If you feel if one feels more familiar than the other, that one is more likely to get the customer. Now, recall works when the customer ends up feeling the need. They don't really need the options presented in front of them. Recognition gets you chosen from the competition. Now, recall oftentimes gets chosen without the competition in mind. It's the first thing that you remember and it's the first thing that you go out and seek. And oftentimes the other competitors are irrelevant. So you might ask, so why does a first name win more than its fair share? Why does the first name win more than all the other options? So there's two psychologists, Tversky and Codman, and they demonstrated this through a series of experiments. And people found that when something comes to mind easily, when it's easy to be remembered, that it when it comes to mind often, people think that the brand itself is more common, that it's been used more, that has more of a following, that it's more used than what is actually perhaps the reality. What surfaces feels more familiar, tends to feel more safe. Recall doesn't guarantee you the sale. However, it gives you a chance that a forgotten brand never gets. When a brand is easy to remember, people start thinking of it as this is a good option to choose. So how does a brand make itself recognizable? Jenny Romain, this is her territory. She wrote this book about building distinctive assets. She's one of the scientists of branding. A distinctive branding asset is anything that identifies your brand from the asset. So you think about colors, shapes, characters, sound, line, anything that you that your brand can associate it with and be attributed to your brand. It could even be a smell. So Romanuke says to divide these into two factors. Uniqueness is how many people think that this is only yours. So let's look at red, for example. Red is a fairly strong association for Coca-Cola. You move this into fast food, and red can meet McDonald's, KFC, Wendy's, Five Guys, Burgers and Fries, and half of the category. So there's far less real ownership. So most brands forget the second part. So a lot of brands care more about fame than uniqueness, which is which quite frankly, fame is more important than uniqueness. This is how you get a blue logo in a category of blue logos, where companies are spending real money advertising the whole category, including the competitors. And that's why people tend to think of when they think of software, they do think of blue. An asset that is famous but is not unique is doing charity work for the competition. Assets are how customers identify you. So many of these things can work, including sound, right? We have the Intel five notes, we have the Netflix ta-m, with the McDonald's ba-da-da-da-da. I'm loving it. Sounds that identify your brand with your eyes closed. Those are distinctive sounds that's a brand asset. And then there's words, right? The most obvious ones are the tagline, right? I'm loving it, just do it. 15 minutes of market save you 15%, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there's also ones that only your brand uses. For example, the Big Mac or Frappuccino. Everybody knows where who which brand belongs to which. So the way of speaking ends up being recognizable. Things where you end up knowing where the brand is before the logo really appears. And these assets don't have to carry a profound meaning. The swoosh by itself does not explain speed. Tiffany Blue does not necessarily mean luxury on its own, right? They were because one brand has used them over and over again until that asset and the brand built that meaning. And it became inseparable. Identification is only half the job. An asset helps a customer recognize you. However, a trigger helps them remember or recall you when the need or the desire first appears. Or first, or when they first enter the category. And so that entry point is the reason why the same types of brands tend to be next to each other. So in front of a Starbucks tends to be another type of a coffee shop, or all the fast food restaurants ends up being next to each other. So when I am hungry, I go here. This is the entry point. Now the strongest brands are connected to many different types of feelings, and that is called conditioning. More than a century ago, Alvov is a psychologist. He paired the sound with a feeling. He tested out with his dog, and he rang ran a chime before he fed his dog every time. And eventually he ended up ringing the chime, and the dog started salivating even when the food wasn't there, which makes sense. You can try this with your own dog. And that's called traditioning. And brands do this all the time. The cue gets becomes so connected to the outcome that you get the feeling right away. And grant great brands try to do the same thing. So they do this through the moment. Snickers connected themselves through hunger. You're not yourself when you're hungry. They repeated this over and over again until your hunger itself helped retrieve the brand and say, hmm, I'm not myself. I need a Snickers. Red Bull connected itself to crash, right? So the long nights, the second wind, and Corona connects itself to the beach. The exhale and the escape. And then there's D beers. A lot of marketers like to talk about this story as it tends to be like a universal marketing case studies. And so in 1940, they eventually invented this idea to uh buy a diamond ring for engagement. With the tagline, a diamond is forever, is eventually how they introduced this tagline, and it became a mass cultural expectation. And then it made engagement a moment of buying and a moment of occasion for diamonds. So rather than associating themselves as, okay, when I look for jewelry, maybe I should also look for diamonds. They said, no, in this moment of your life, when you are getting engaged, this is when you need a diamond. And a moment tends to be stronger than actually comparing yourselves to the category, right? So for example, it's it's not I'm looking at snacks, what are my options? It's like, no, when I'm hungry and I'm not feeling like myself, then I need a Snickers. There's it's a total shift of perspective, but fighting for the moment ends up weighing more consumer in your in in brand recall than uh competing naturally with inside the category. So now's the hard part. Memory doesn't really hold still. There's this study that's done by Herman Erbinghas, and he studied that people tend to forget things that they just learned unless they are reminded of them. So the exact numbers is really the point. The point is that the pattern is memories can weaken over time if you have nothing to refresh it. Your brand faces the same problems. The assets and the associations that you've built begin to fade over time unless you put in continuous energy reinforcing them. Which means that advertising tends to become more maintenance, more defense mode to defend the recall that you've earned, to defend the brand awareness that you build rather than achieving new things. Because if you stop, because if Coca-Cola stops advertising, they will lose their brand awareness over time. Recall is built through using the same asset over and over again. This is long after your team is bored and sick with them, right? Your team will be bored and tired of the same assets over and over again, right way before the market starts having that recall. Byron Sharp makes this point that says being recognized in a series of competition is more important than being specifically unique. It's not that, hey, he's unique because he's pink, but it's just that pink belongs to him and that you're that people can recognize you and that they feel safe with you. That's obviously more important. That they people need to recognize you, recognize you quickly and keep recognizing you, and that's where you build the most important branded assets. Well, that's where you build the better Rico. That's why when a rebrand wipes away your distinguishable brand asset, it can become a memory wipe and it can be very dangerous for a brand. Um, Tropicana learned this the hard way where they got rid of the orange and the straw, and they replaced it with the glass orange juice, and they completely changed their design. And consumers didn't even recognize the brand. So, in less than two months, the sales reportedly fell 20% and immediately losing over $30 million. So Trappy kind of brought back the old packaging asset. So the day that your team is getting bored with the brand is actually maybe the day that your market is beginning to learn it, to be to associate that asset to you. You see it every day, and your team sees it every day, and the customer sees it maybe a few times a year. So judge every change by one question. Does it strengthen the memory that you already have, or does it force the customer to learn a new you again? Are they starting from scratch or are they building from what they have already built? So every exposure can enforce the brand or it can dilute the brand or accidentally build the memory of someone else or something else. So, one more idea, especially for businesses where people buy rarely, like B2B companies or things like that. So John Doss and Ehrenberg Institute suggests that in the B2B category, that only 5% of the audience that you are speaking to are potential buyers at the time. And that 95% of them are going to are not shopping yet. It's not the right time for that. They may already have a provider, or they may be locked in a contract, or they may simply not need that thing today. A company might change its bank or software platform or agency only once every few years. So at any given quarter, the most potential buyers are not really ready to ask. The 95% rule is a rule of thumb that Dahl says so himself. But the strategic point matters that if you are marketing to only the 5% of people that are ready to buy now, you end up competing with everybody else for the same small group. The larger opportunity is targeting to the 95% and building brand awareness, building brand recall, so that when that moment of time comes, you end up being remembered or at least being recognized. Think about the funnel of your business. You cannot force people to go through down your funnel. As Gemini Romanuk says, you can catch them as they fall. It is the memory that you build today, so your brand is already present when the need finally arrives. Recall and brand memory, brand awareness is built slowly. A brand with no recall that people can't remember rents attention every time that memory could have owned for free. Recall determines whether or not the rest of the brand gets a chance to work. Start with a moment or feeling that you can choose to win. Choose the asset that you are going to allocate it with that's the most famous, and choose one that's uniquely yours. And build this beyond the logo. Think about the sound, sights, and smell, the language, the character, the voice. Then you're going to repeat them way past the point of boredom. Because when the market is starting to recognize you, might be that same time that the team is kind of getting tired of it. So build that memory over time, way beyond what you feel comfortable with, and try to come up with refreshing content that builds it over time and refreshes that image, but still builds on what you've already owned. A brand that's easy to remember will always be a brand that's easy to forget. Just make sure you are easy to buy when they get there, right? So you have mental availability and physical availability. So next episode, once you know what a brand is being recalled, you can figure out what's holding the brand back. A lot of brands confuse the problems between is something a marketing problem or a brand problem. And so next episode will dive in to help you diagnose the difference and figure out okay, why something is not moving. Because when growth stars, most marketers' teams reach for the wrong thing. They spend marketing money on branding problems and they spend branding money on marketing problems because they tend to think that the both are the same thing. And then they wonder why nothing moves. So next time we'll learn how to tell the difference and which problems you actually have and how to do a brand diagnosis. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon.