The Truth About What Customers Want

Chapter 7. Stay in their minds—if you can

It’s too bad we can’t market to elephants. In a poll of more than 13,000 adult humans, more than half were unable to remember any specific ad they had seen, heard, or read in the past 30 days.^[12] How many can you remember right now? Clearly, forgetting by consumers is a big headache for marketers.

As the popularity of the board game Trivial Pursuit shows us, people have a vast quantity of information stored in their heads that is not necessarily available on demand. Although most of the information that enters our memory does not go away, it may be difficult or impossible to retrieve unless the appropriate cues are present. What influences the likelihood that customers will remember a commercial message? ...