An Ecosystem of Memories

An ecosystem is a good model because it treats memory as something that lives in the mind. For those interested in learning how advertising works to create branded memories, it sets a new kind of agenda for asking research questions, particularly for researchers in the new area of marketing neuroscience.

Is “ecosystem of memory” only a metaphor or is it a useful model? Let’s take a look. The following attributes are characteristics both of living things and of memories:

Brand Memories Are Born: How does the introduction of a new idea for a product or service create new living space in an already established category of brand thoughts?

They Feed: Brand memories are nourished by experience, by advertising of many media types and by other psychic nutrients. How does a given diet of nutrients affect the health of a brand memory?

They Grow: Do brand memories grow like nodes in a network? Or like the growth rings of a tree? Is it biologically possible to estimate the age of different branded memories?

They Replicate: Brand memories spread from brain to brain like a virus, from contact with human carriers thru word-of-mouth, through communal storytelling in television, print and social media. How do brand memories mutate in the retelling of them?

They Compete: Memory is a limited resource in the brain. In the struggle for survival, for psychic nutrients, the stronger ad defeats the weaker not only in its fight for attention, but also (as we will show) in its ability to actually erase the short term memories laid by the weaker competitor. What happens in the mind when two brand memories compete for the same niche?

They Die: Do brand memories die out only when the last consumer remembering them dies off or do they die sooner when starved for psychic nutrients? The study of memory formation is yin and yang with the study of the process of forgetting.

Or They Live On In A Complex, Interconnected Environment: How do the memories of one brand interact with other brands to form families and tribes of larger memory communities?

By changing the frame of reference for models of memory from marketing and psychology to other fields of science, such as biology and ecology, it may be possible to identify new, but proven, techniques and approaches to exploring the world of branded memory.

Memory Theater

For centuries, theater of the mind has been used to train people to improve their memories. Theater is a good metaphor to describe the different world of the brand that we enter into when we read a print ad, watch a television commercial or interact with a digital ad online.

What are the basic elements of the theater? First, there is a stage that frames the experience. Second, there are actors on the stage. Third, there may be props that help facilitate the action or advance a storyline. In short, the theater can be described in terms of place, people and things. We can use these creative elements to describe a brand by looking at each of these 3 P’s.

The Place
When we read a novel, watch a movie, play a videogame or go to the theater, an essential part of the experience is that we are transported to a different place, separate from our everyday world. So, too, with advertising. The brand place frames the brand experience.

Places are containers in which we store emotions. Home is where the heart is. We fight loyally for our country. We still cheer for our college team, even when we’re eighty.

The Persona
Every brand must present a human face to the world. They must project unique personalities, attitudes and a sense of style for users to identify with or aspire to.

Companies learned long ago the value of own-able trade characters like Tony the Tiger or Mr. Clean. It is easier to maintain a consistent image in memory if the brand is personified as a continuing character in the advertising.

The advertising manager must act like a casting director, focusing on the role and not the actor when casting their particular brand for a performance in the consumer’s interior theater. Mickey Mouse is the archetypal child that evokes feelings of nurturing. Apple’s brand expresses a “cool” style that conveys individuality and creativity.

Archetype research into the deep cultural memories of the mind—rebel, sage, trickster or hero—is a key genre of research for identifying those dramatic roles that may be appropriate for your brand’s play.

The Product
Think of the product as a prop that we use to facilitate our actions in the physical world or to furnish our experience of our inner world.

Memory Networks

Thinking of memory as a network is obvious for two reasons. First, it’s the image we all hold in our minds of the brain as a ball of neurons networked together. Second, the Internet has become a popular model for the brain, particularly as social networking has begun to transform the business of marketing.

As early as the sixties, artificial intelligence researchers used semantic networks as a way of representing artificial memory. Neural networks, widely used in analyzing huge databases and machine learning, are an extension of this early work.

Semantic maps are usually created to display the relationships between words or concepts. A fresh approach is to show the relationship between visual images. The example below is taken from the data in a pretest of a television commercial. Shortly after an audience has watched the ad and processed it into memory, it quantifies the complex, non-linear interrelationships that exist between the different images in a TV commercial.

To build such a memory network is a straightforward process:
First, the different elements from an ad (it can be copy, not just spoken words) are retrieved from a sample of target consumer memories, using self-report research methods that are easily done over the Internet.

Second, each element from the ad is “tagged” with a number representing a metric obtained in the research, such as the strength of memory associated with each element, the positive or negative feelings associated with each element, the conceptual, strategic meaning associated with each element or the degree of brand affinity of each element.

Third, a correlation analysis between the various numerical tags is performed. The results are displayed as a network model of the associative strength of the different advertising elements obtained from consumer memory.

A network is a useful model of advertising-created memories because it underscores the important fact that remembering is a complex process of consolidating our perceptions. A commercial is a linear sequence of images presented in time and frequently organized with narrative structure–but it is folded and translated into a brand memory that is widely distributed over the networks of the brain.

On a larger scale, the network model of memory might even be taken one step further. It is interesting to speculate about the implications of the billions of personal photographs that are being uploaded every day to social networks like Facebook. They now represent a form of collective memory for our society and our culture.

Visual and Verbal Memories

There are two, fundamentally different ways of directly retrieving advertising and brand memories from the mind.  One uses words, the other uses pictures. Subliminal or unconscious memories are not, by definition, accessible with self-report research. They must be inferred from indirect evidence.

Of the two types of memories that can be accessed, the visual is primary.
Babies first experience the world, and form memories, through vision. Talking in words comes much later. As Aristotle observed, “The mind never thinks without an image.”
Visual memory is the “mind’s eye.” Neuroscientists call memories “representations” on the neural circuits of the brain. They also call them “images.”

It was by an accident of technology, or more specifically the limitations of collecting (telephone) and manipulating data (numbers and text), that earlier generations of market researchers started with verbal methods of retrieving memories.

However, collecting memories in day-after-recall tests, communication checks and tracking studies was a messy business of coding verbatims to try to “prove” what was remembered from advertising. Distinctions needed to be made between “top-of-mind” or “unaided” recall and “aided” remembrance. It is the distinction between being able to call up the right word when you want to speak it and recognizing a little-used word when you read it.

Among psychologists, visual recognition as a test of memory has a long history. However, most academic research into memory is based on exposure and recognition of an unconnected series of letters, shapes or photographs—usually involving timed effects.

For research into advertising and brand memories, we are more interested in images that are connected by narrative, in a logical or temporal structure. What matters is the study of a stream of images in a movie, a television commercial, a web video or even a dynamic and moving digital ad. Brand memories are formed in the rapid current, rhythmic waves and complex eddies in the flow of imagery.

Fortunately, for over a century, still photographs have proven to be a useful tool for freezing time and catching the emotional moment in the stream of everyday day living, for storing personalized memories in family albums and now for Facebook. They also turn out to be quite useful for studying how branded memories are created in the flow of advertising.

Open and Closed Memories

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are excited by the possibilities a new year brings.

And now on to our continuing discussion of memory…

The difference between the memory of a brand and the memory of an ad is that brands form “open” memories while ads form “closed” memories.

The memories one may have of their spouse are different in a fundamental way from the memories one may have of their wedding. The memory of a husband/wife is a work-in-progress, but the memory of one’s wedding remains stuck in the past.

It is the difference between an idea and an event. An idea branches out fractally, like a tree growing in a forest, while an event is closed and bounded like a leaf on the tree. Memories of events can be part of an idea—those that never really happened and were only imagined. The mind chunks the streaming experience into stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Of course, that does not mean that the way the mind remembers an ad-like event is fixed and unchangeable. The memory of a wedding may be revised and reinterpreted by a story told from the point of view of one of the guests at the wedding.

However, brand memories are collected over a whole lifetime of experience. Describing what the memory of a well-established brand is in the mind of a consumer cannot be done in one simple story. Mathematicians who study complex systems might describe a “brand” as an attractor, which is the limit state of a non-linear dynamical system, like the vortex of a whirlpool or a constellation of memories.

Understanding how to manage brand memories is the new challenge in the age of social media. An analogy is the difference in business models between open source software code like Linux and closed source code like the Microsoft operating system.

The open source approach treats the memories of a brand as an unpaid collective enterprise of a large community of users and commentators. It casts the brand manager in the role of a community organizer.

The problem with the open source approach is that it is difficult to control the meaning of what the brand represents and difficult to measure and monetize the value of the brand memories being created.

The closed source approach is the command and control model of the current advertising business. Advertising agencies are the wedding planners who pre-package brand memories for the happy marriage between the consumer and the products she buys.

For more information, please contact Sonya Duran (sonya@ameritest.net)

Happy Holidays from Ameritest

Hoping your holiday season is filled with discovery, peace and happiness!

Places of the Imagination

There are two distinct neural circuits linking the eye to the brain. One answers the question, “What is that?” The other answers the question, “Where is that?” A sense of place is fundamental to perception.

Places are also storehouses of memories. Place is a powerful, but frequently overlooked way of conceptualizing and storing the brand experience in the consumers mind.

Places can be spatial, temporal, or social. For advertising purposes, place can be metaphorical, not literal. If you want to sell a sexy new brand of shampoo, you might show a longhaired beauty walking down the street attracting looks as if she were strutting on a catwalk. If you want to sell a new brand of cutting edge technology, you might show it displayed in a setting where it seems displaced in time, as if it had just arrived by time machine from the future.

Prestigious, luxury brands frequently appear in high society social settings—but price-driven “anti-brands” can play downstairs against upstairs. Suave Shampoo once did this by showing the brand in “backstage” settings where ordinary people deride the imaginary product differences for which rich people pay premium prices.

Creating an own-able brand place can differentiate a brand in ways that help maintain focus in long-lived advertising campaigns. In the 1980s, Miller beer created a memorable brand place called “Miller Time,” sandwiched between work time and home time. It was a third space where you could be yourself and enjoy a Miller with your friends. A generation later, Budweiser looked at the time continuum differently and created the “Whassup” campaign. It was based, in part, on the idea of “slacker time”— anytime, even when you’re hanging out and doing nothing, is a good time to drink a Bud.

Place can also be used to think systematically about how to extend a brand into new territories of the mind. To illustrate, consider the entertainment brand, Star Trek. Since the TV show was first created in the sixties, it has created five places for performance.

In the first Star Trek series, stories were set in a 24th century starship that went “where no man has gone before.” In the sequel the stage was moved forward in time to follow the exploits of the Next Generation of the crew. For the third show, Deep Space Nine, the setting was fixed in space, in a space station orbiting a wormhole. In the fourth series, Voyager, the space ship was translated across space to the other side of the galaxy where the crew wandered lost, searching for home. And in the most recent television version, Enterprise, the brand place was moved backward in time, to the era of space exploration before the original series that launched this valuable entertainment brand.