When it comes to advertising, the most important metric is “memorable.” Not memorable like the family trip to the Grand Canyon, but memorable like something that your target audience will simply know. Memorable is what keeps us singing a silly jingle from 20 years ago. Memorable is what makes the difference between marketing and communicating.
Memorable means something that you know without thinking about. Take GEICO, for example. You know who they are, and you undoubtedly know their tagline too, but when’s the last time you thought about what GEICO actually stands for? Or what ESPN stands for? (For the record, it’s Government Employees Insurance Company, and Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.) But beyond the obvious advantage of being shorter, the names we know these companies by are quite simply more memorable.
Think about it – how did you memorize the order of operations in elementary school math? It may have been decades since you had to find the value of X, but you still remember it – Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally! Is that shorter than “Parentheses, Exponent, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract?” Not much. But is it a hundred times more memorable? You bet.
Everything around your marketing communications, from tagline to design, needs to be memorable. When your audience sees your product, they immediately know who you are. When they hear your name, they immediately remember your tagline. With a strong brand and message, any company or group of letters can become memorable for every person.
A great brand is what makes a group of letters take on a bigger meaning than the words they stand for. If you told someone a product was from “International Business Machines,” they probably wouldn’t have much of an opinion or reaction. But if you told that same person that “International Business Machines” is “IBM,” they’d hold the product in extremely high regard. A brand that’s communicated – and named – with a focus on being memorable is why cooks everywhere “spray some PAM in there” and don’t “spray some Product of Arthur Meyerhoff in there.”
If you’re looking to create a brand that’s more memorable, G/L can help with that. If you’re wondering what other companies you never knew the full names of, enjoy this article, then give us a call.