Designing Brands That People Remember
Distinctive beats different
Brands chase difference and get forgotten anyway, because difference is judged against competitors and recall is judged against everything else on the feed. What sticks is a small set of assets a viewer can identify with the sound off, at thumbnail size, in half a second.
Repetition is the strategy
The point at which an internal team is bored of an asset is roughly the point at which the audience has started to notice it. We plan for that: the same framing device, the same color, the same three words, across every creator, for a full quarter before anything is reviewed.
Auditing recall honestly
Ask twenty people in your audience to describe your last campaign without naming the product. If they describe the product category rather than you, the assets are not distinctive yet — and no amount of extra spend will fix it, because spend amplifies whatever is already there.
“We were changing the look every campaign because we were bored. Our audience had never seen it twice.”
