Repetition in Advertising is Good. Repetition in Advertising is Good.
Stories are and always have been what inspire and motivate humans. So naturally in advertising, we seek to tell stories for our brands. Stories in any form, whether for a book or a movie or an ad campaign, start out with a story arc that has 4–5 points that will become the basis of the story — usually one main point and 3–4 supporting points. From there, the story is fleshed out into whichever full form it will take. The only problem is that brand stories are very different from stories we read in books or watch in movies. People will spend an average of ~5 hours reading a book and ~100 minutes watching a movie, digesting all points and aspects of the story. The same however is not true for advertising.
In advertising, we create 30–60 second commercials and write long form content for websites and brochures. To make sure they’re conveying our intended story we test them (or the story arc that leads to them) in qualitative research where we pay people to take an hour to engage with our work and tell us if it’s clear and motivating. If they say it is, we think we have a great story. But as I’ve written about in a previous post, this does not reflect what actually happens in the real world. In reality, people will only spend about 4 seconds engaging with our work, if we’re lucky. We don’t have time to tell a long story. If we want to our audience to remember our main message and our main promise to them, we need to clearly articulate it as a single idea and reinforce it as often as we can.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) communications are the worst offenders of this attempt to tell a long story. A classic example of CRM would be someone opting in to receive weekly emails from our brand. In the first email, we deliver our main message but then for the subsequent emails, we assume that the customer already knows our main message and move on to other less important story points. We do this even though we know it’s highly unlikely that the audience really internalized our first main message. Of course we shouldn’t resend the same email every week, but we should use the weekly chance at engaging with our audience to constantly be reinforcing our main message so that if they remember anything about our brand, it’s that.
What I’m proposing is actually something that we in advertising already do, just not with consumers. When we’re presenting to clients or senior leadership, we espouse the best practice of, “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” It’s an extremely effective communications style that allows us to give people whom we want something from, and whose attention we can’t take for granted, a single takeaway to remember and consider. And yet we too often stray from this effective communications style when trying to engage with consumers — who are also people whom we want something from, and whose attention we can’t take for granted.
There was a commercial I used to make fun of as a kid. It was for a headache reliever and the entire commercial was just, “HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead.” Just the name of the product and the main message on repeat. This is an extreme example but there’s something to be said for the fact that I still remember it nearly 20 years since I last saw it. And there’s a good chance you remember it too.
By reinforcing our main message and our single promise to consumers at every opportunity, we give ourselves the best possible chance to differentiate our brand from competitors, be remembered by our audience, and get consumers to buy our products.
By reinforcing our main message and our single promise to consumers at every opportunity, we give ourselves the best possible chance to differentiate our brand from competitors, be remembered by our audience, and get consumers to buy our products.