talking faster than memory

Brands are present everywhere now. They speak daily, sometimes hourly, showing up across formats, platforms, and mediums. Endless loops are invading our screens.

With all this activity, questions start to repeat themselves; “What does this brand actually say? What does this brand trying to sell me? Sustainability, Endurance, Price advantage? Purpose?” The list keeps growing because brands are “always on” and quite active. Some companies use it as a part of their strategy to stay “top of mind” and "always on". Yet that leads of shrinking attention spans and creating struggles for consumers to comprehend.

It can be easily argued that meaning forms over time, by stories and familiarity through repetition whereas advertising has limited time to communicate. A brand needs attention and recall along the path that leads to purchase.

Daido Moriyama, Night Shinjuku, Tokyo, 2018

Without meaning, branding has nothing to attach itself to. A message needs space to land in its environment. The message has to be understood first, before it connects to a brand. The human brain looks for context before it accepts symbols. When logos, colors, and identities appear too early across every medium, the consumer might not comprehend what it is. It would be better for a brand reveal itself after a story, a message, a value, a point of view.

Well today, most of the brands trying to compete by saying more, by trying to possess more images, more styles, more messages and by just staying relevant with the trends. They try to say new things about their products whilst hoping the audience get it all. They even try to articulate new values while not all of their audiences grasped their core ones yet. This image and message traffic actually might erase the clarity and left the consumers lost. Buzzing words arrive faster than memory can comprehend while assuming everybody can understand what the message is. Not sure about it anchors memory. Meanwhile, you may play an unexpected game like Reddit when they did with the Super Bowl halftime show appearance. It was raw, as they call “a bet”. They just appeared for five seconds, no body understands what it was, didn’t create a memory yet people recognized their logo which was present more than fifteen years. It managed to drive curiosity and that curiosity led people to other mediums. And there were they waiting. People talk, share, comment on it. A single appearance started a longer arc, a brief moment extended other mediums even to the news. As they position themselves “the underdogs” who can achieve, the brand relevance of the campaign was exactly to the point.

People can remember far less than it is assumed. Is it possible to remember the logo of a café you only seen once, decoration of a restaurant just by going there once, or all the products sold in a corner shop after visiting it once? The space. The details. The memory builds over time. Not seeing the logo, the buzzing words alone create a memory whereas it needs anchors, feelings, storytelling, so that people can relate to it.

And now it’s the content madness era. Endless feeds. Endless updates. Super short ads between Instagram stories,  X (old Twitter) posts. All leads to never ending doom scrolling Minds are push to be filled with images. And it slowly became a standard to post everyday  as part of “always on” strategy. Everything moves fast. Everyone is asking “Have you seen this? have you seen that?” If you haven't seen it yet, sorry but you’re not part of the conversation anymore. Every post, every update, every little ad takes a slice of our time and attention. It feels small in the beginning yet when you add up it’s too much. As brands keeps speaking that frequently, the noise slowly replaces the meaning.

It might be better to start asking more foundational questions; “What we want to create along our brand’s journey?“ 

This is where responsibility comes into play. If brands ask for people’s time, they really ought to respect it. And when they add to the stream, they would better stop and think whether they are actually adding clarity or just more volume and noise.

When brands slow down, things start to change. The noise begin to settle and the messages start to stand out. The focus shifts from constantly chasing attention to building genuine authenticity. And it doesn’t mean vanishing whereas it means communicating with a real purpose and building familiarity.  And that helps aesthetics carry the message instead of constantly reinventing it.

Posts, frequency, reach… these are easy to measure. Numbers. 

Though meaning is difficult to measure and often reveals itself over time and through memory. 

Eventually, it’s not matter of how frequent a brand pops up, since being seen isn't the same as being understood. It’s about the message, familiarity or creativity. And what people are really looking for is good storytelling and genuinely good ideas.