How to create an advertisement that touches people’s hearts? Look here

We all know that marketing is a series of activities that create, communicate, disseminate and exchange products to bring value to customers, clients, partners and the entire society, and advertising is only one component of marketing. When I say this, I am not saying that advertising is not important in corporate marketing. On the contrary, advertising is the "soul" of the discipline of marketing, and this is even more so in marketing-oriented companies. Today let’s talk about how we should go about making advertisements that touch people’s hearts.

In fact, I have always emphasized a point in my previous articles on business anatomy: "The purposes of advertising are nothing more than four: to inform, to remind, to persuade and to reinforce." This is the fundamental meaning of corporate advertising. What we need to know here is that whether it is informing, reminding, persuading or reinforcing, it is essentially a process that establishes a relationship with a person's memory. So if we want to talk about advertising, we must start with the human memory model…

1. Human memory process

Human memory models can be roughly divided into four types: unconscious memory, unconscious recall, conscious memory, and conscious recall. For us advertisers, we usually use two memory models, unconscious memory or unconscious recall, to connect with target users through advertising (only those who do advertising research will actively pay attention to related advertisements). For companies, this is the entry point for advertising.

For users, "eyes, ears, mouth, hands, and nose" are the five major organs they use to perceive the outside world, corresponding to vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Students who are familiar with the structure of human organs know that people transmit contact information to the cerebral cortical nervous system and hippocampus through the nerve endings of the above organs, ultimately forming memories.

Understanding this, we know that what advertising needs to do is to consciously implant product information into users' unconscious memories and unconscious recollections through the "five senses" that users can perceive. Another point worth mentioning is that because the main information access points of people's "five senses" are "sight and hearing", most advertisements exist in the form of visual advertising and auditory advertising, or a combination of visual and audio.

2. Techniques to increase memory

Through the dry description above, we have sorted out the human memory process and understood the “why” of advertising? Next, let’s take a look at how we can use specific advertising strategies to make our products memorable to users. These are the three ways to quickly enhance user memory.

The first trick: repeated memory

German psychologist H. Ebbinghaus discovered a law called the forgetting curve, which describes the pattern of the human brain forgetting new things. The fastest forgetting rates are 20 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours, with 42%, 56%, and 66% forgotten respectively; the forgetting rate is stable between 72% and 79% from 2 to 31 days, and the speed of forgetting is fast at first and then slow. The takeaway from this is that the best way to remember what you want to remember is to repeat it over and over again.

Second trick: Visual memory

According to research, 70% of life activities are related to vision. In the cognitive process, people's response to "visualized" things often increases in terms of representation, memory, and thinking. This phenomenon is called the visualization effect.

The third trick: associate human memory

There are many nerve networks under the human cerebral cortex, all of which are interconnected. The level of human memory depends on the correlation between various types of knowledge in the human brain. The more strongly the knowledge stored in the brain is associated, “when you think of thing A, you naturally think of thing B.”

3. The application of advertising combined with memory rules in practical examples

The main reasons why many companies ’ advertising is ineffective are nothing more than these two: first, consumers are not interested in your ads; second, consumers do not remember your ads. The two reasons for this are nothing more than your failure to make use of good people's memory characteristics. Let's take a look at how those outstanding brands do it.

1. Repeat playback

Whether it is intentional memory or unintentional memory, constant repetition is definitely an important form of "remembering faster" and "remembering more firmly". This was particularly evident when you were reciting textbooks and memorizing words as a child. In advertising presentation, companies generally use three points to actually repeat memory:

1. Repeated broadcasting to win by quantity
2. Highlight as many brand keywords as possible in one advertising slogan to maximize efficiency.
3. Unification of brand image

Typical ads of this type include: Renrenche and Guazi Used Cars (crazy screen swipes in the elevator & constant repetition of tight brand words & product UI, color consistency of advertising materials, etc.)

2. Visualization effect

Visual images have the functions of attracting attention, arousing imagination, causing associations, deepening impressions, being easy to remember, and causing emotional resonance. This is also why “stories” and “novels” are particularly easy to remember.

Let’s take a look at this advertisement: “More than 300 million cups of Xiangpiaopiao milk tea are sold every year, enough to circle the earth X times. For seven consecutive years, it has led the country in sales.” "X circles around the earth" is a very visual phrase.

3. Associative memory

Associative memory is a bit literary, so you may understand it better if I put it another way: “labeling and using the familiar to guide the unfamiliar.” If a person introduces himself and says that his name is "Wang Lei", people may not remember it clearly and forget it quickly; but if he says that he is "Little Kobe of Guangzhou" Wang Lei. I believe that everyone will still remember his name when they meet him again after a long time. A very important point here is that we all easily associate his name with the label "Guangzhou Little Kobe".

This is what Bai+Hei does: "Take the white tablet during the day and you won't feel sleepy; take the black tablet at night and you will sleep soundly." Because in people's concept, "daytime is for work and you can't feel sleepy, and nighttime is for rest and you need to sleep soundly." The slogan and brand name of Bai+Hei are just based on this "coincidence".

Finally, there is nothing new under the sun, whether it is doing things or advertising. If you think more and gain insight into the fundamental laws of things, you will often get twice the result with half the effort.