Is branding just a memory game?

The strongest brands aren't just known. They're the ones that win the memory game of being remembered for the right things, at the right time, when someone actually needs what they offer.

Remember the memory card game you probably played as a kid? A bunch of cards are placed face down on the table. You turn two cards over at a time and try to find a matching pair. If they don’t match, you turn them back over and try to remember where they were for later. Branding is a little similar. Except your customers aren’t trying to match two pictures of a banana. They’re constantly storing little pieces of information about brands and, hopefully, connecting some of them together.

They might see golden arches and think McDonald's. Hear a particular piece of music and think of an airline. Spot a certain colour combination and remember a product they saw at the supermarket. Drive past your for sale signage every morning on the way to work. Remember the unusual packaging they held six months ago. Recognise the mascot that keeps appearing in their social feed.

Every one of these interactions has the potential to become another card placed somewhere in their memory. But the objective isn't simply for someone to recognise your logo, colour or mascot. Eventually you want them to make a much more important match.

I need something → Your brand comes to mind → You offer what I need.

Because being known is nice, which is brand awareness. But being thought of when someone actually needs what you sell is considerably better.

Being known isn't enough

Brands spend an enormous amount of time trying to get attention. They want the social post that gets shared. The advertising campaign everyone talks about. The activation that gets people through the door. The clever bit of creative that stops someone's thumb for three seconds longer than usual. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with any of that and brand awarenes definitely is needed, but that's not the be all-end all. As there's a big difference between getting someone's attention today and being remembered and thought of by them months or even years later, especially when needed.

Someone might remember an ad without remembering who it was for. They might laugh at your social post and never think about you again. They might even recognise your name when they see it without ever thinking of your brand when they're actually looking to buy something in your category. In marketing and branding jargon, what we're really trying to build is called mental availability. Mental availability is essentially the likelihood of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation. To a normal, non-batshit crazy person that doesn't obsess over brands, you might just call it being thought of at the right time.

That's an important distinction because brand awareness ends at someone either knowing you or not knowing you. They might recognise you, they might remember your logo. They might know what you sell. They might associate you with a particular location, product, service, experience, price point or characteristic. Or, ideally, they might think of you without seeing anything at all. But if you don't come to mind in that buying situation when they need or want what you have to offer, that's potentially the harder game to play and it's one that is generally won over a much longer period than the lifespan of your latest short-term campaign that is just trying to get your brand known.

Give people more cards to match

Imagine if every interaction someone has with your brand creates another card in their memory. Your logo is a card. Your colours are another. Your packaging. Your signage. Your advertising. Your website. Your store. Your staff. Your uniforms. Your mascot. Your photography. Your social content. Your tone of voice. The music you use. The shape of your product. The experience of opening it. Even the smell when someone walks through the door.

The more recognisable each interaction people have with your brand, the more opportunities you have to build memories. But that doesn't mean the answer is simply to create more stuff. If every card appears to belong to a completely different game, you're making the task harder. Your Instagram looks one way. Your packaging another. Your store completely different. Your website has a different personality again. Your advertising changes depending on which agency made it and your staff have never heard of the brand strategy everyone spent six months developing two years ago.

You've certainly created plenty of cards. They're just incredibly difficult to match. On the other hand, strong brands have figured out how to build connections between these things. The logo feels connected to the packaging. The packaging feels connected to the advertising. The advertising sounds like the website. The website feels like the physical environment. The experience customers have with staff reinforces the promises they've already heard elsewhere. They don't necessarily need appear identical. They need to feel like they belong in the same deck.

Over time, this creates multiple ways for someone to retrieve the same brand from memory. You don't have to show them the logo every single time because eventually the colour might be enough. Or the character. Or the packaging shape. Or a phrase. Or a sound. Turn over almost any card and, hopefully, they know what it's supposed to match.

Positioning determines what you're trying to match

Of course, recognising your brand is only part of the game. Because ultimately you don't just want someone to know who you are. You want them to understand you're associated with and when you might be relevant to them.

This is where positioning becomes important.

Positioning is often reduced to a sentence buried somewhere inside a brand strategy presentation. But the real outcome of positioning isn't what you've written in a document. It's what exists in someone else's head. What do they think about when they think about you? What do they remember you for? What situations make them think of you? And do those associations actually relate to something you sell?

Distinctive branding can help someone identify who. Positioning can help establish what. While mental availability AND physical availability (being available when/where needed) can increase the likelihood of that brand coming to mind when. The aim is to connect all three to drive a strong brand position to outmanoeuvre those competing in your market, so that you're the go-to first brand the comes into a consumers mind for all the right reasons.

Someone sees your brand repeatedly and starts recognising it. They connect it with certain products, services, characteristics and experiences. Those memories become stronger through repeated exposure. Then, at some point, something happens in their own life that triggers one of those memories.

When they're hungry.

When their car breaks down.

When they need an accountant.

When they're buying their first home.

When they've run out of toothpaste.

When they need a brand designer.

Suddenly the card they're trying to match isn't your logo. It's a need or sometimes a want. Which is also called a category entry point (another marketing jargon term for the specific need, time, location, or emotion that causes a consumer to think about a product/service category and consider making a purchase). The brands with strong mental availability have spent years making sure there are plenty of cards in people's heads that can lead back to them and then back it up with physical availability to be present at those times/places that their offering is needed.

Play '20 Questions' with your brand

One way to test this is to turn your brand into a game of 20 Questions. Imagine someone has secretly selected your brand from all the brands within your category and another person has to work out which one it is using only yes or no questions.

Is it Australian?

Does it have physical stores?

Is it expensive?

Is its main colour blue?

Does it have a mascot?

Is it known for being fast?

Is it aimed primarily at families?

Would I find it in a supermarket?

Does it use a particular style of packaging?

Is it strongly associated with a certain location?

Does it always say a particular phrase?

Does it offer this particular thing?

And so on. The interesting question isn't just whether they eventually guess your brand. It's how many questions it takes them. If it takes all 20 questions to separate you from everyone else in your category, there's probably not a lot of useful information attached to your brand. If someone can get there in five, that's considerably more interesting and is more likely for those big famous brands we all know and buy from. But it means there are characteristics, associations or distinctive assets that help narrow the field quickly. And they don't all have to be completely unique.

You might use the same colour as five competitors. Sell the same products as ten competitors. Operate in the same locations and make many of the same claims. But the particular combination of things people associate with you can still make your brand much easier to identify.

So play the game. What questions would someone need to ask to get to your brand? And perhaps more importantly, what could you build into your brand today that would mean they need to ask fewer questions tomorrow?

Play ‘Guess Who?’ with your category

You can take the same idea and play another childhood game with your brand. Guess Who? Except instead of a board filled with people wearing glasses, hats and questionable 1980s hairstyles, imagine every little window contains a brand from your category including yours. Now start asking questions.

Does the brand use blue?

*Click* Down go six competitors.

Does it have physical locations?

*Click* Another five disappear.

Does it have a recognisable character?

*Click* Another three.

Is it strongly associated with a particular product?

*Click*

Does it communicate in a particular way?

*Click*

Eventually there's one little window left standing. Hopefully yours.

Now reverse the game. What question would make someone knock your brand down? That's where things can get uncomfortable. Because you might discover that many of the things you've been treating as distinctive aren't particularly distinctive at all. Everyone uses blue. Everyone talks about quality. Everyone says they care about customers or that they're "people first". Many use the same style of photography or the same stock photos. A lot of brands now have clean sans-serif typography. Everyone claims to make things simple or "No BS". Everyone's e-commerce website looks suspiciously like it was made from the same Shopify template.

The point isn't that you need to deliberately do the opposite of every competitor just for the sake of being different. It's to understand what people can genuinely use to identify, remember and retrieve your brand when needed. Because if every answer applies equally well to everyone else, you're making the memory game unnecessarily difficult by not giving your brand a shot at creating better business success.

The best brands make the game easy

Your customers aren't sitting at home studying your brand guidelines. They're not analysing your positioning. They're not keeping a spreadsheet of your distinctive brand assets. And they're definitely thinking about your brand far less than you are....like, 1000x less.

They have jobs to do, kids to pick up, dinners to cook, emails to answer and thousands of other brands competing for some small piece of their attention. I've heard a well known marketing professor, Mark Ritson countless times say, "brands are little things to customers". So don't make remembering your brand harder than it needs to be.

Strong brands effectively rig the memory game in their favour, and it's often why keeping your brand simple is often more effective. They repeatedly give people recognisable things to see, hear, hold and experience. They connect those things with particular products, services, needs, situations and ideas. And they keep doing it consistently enough and for long enough that those memories become easier to retrieve.

That's why long-term brand building matters. You're effectively spending years putting cards on the table and strengthening the connections between them. A logo on a sign. Packaging in someone's hand. A character in an advertisement. Music they've heard dozens of times. A distinctive store. A conversation with a member of staff. A piece of content. A particular message repeated again and again. Each interaction might seem relatively insignificant on its own but together, they can create something considerably more valuable... A memory, or as I call it, "a captivating moment of connection". Because the ultimate test of a strong brand isn't simply, "Have you heard of us?" It's, "When you need what we sell, do you think of us?" And perhaps the best measure of all: "How quickly?" and "How often?".

Branding is a memory game and the brands that win aren't simply the ones people remember. They're the ones that have been given a shot to help consumers think of them when it matters with better branding.