It’s the ongoing mission of the marketer. Get people to pay attention and get them to remember you when it comes time to make a purchase (or enroll, or register, or make a recommendation). But how’s it done? We’re all busy people and (more and more) our attention is pulled in hundreds of directions.

Here are 4 things you can do.

Give people a clear picture

Seth Godin says, “Consumers don’t notice anything until they pay attention and pay is the perfect word. Everyone is granted a finite amount of time per day, and how it gets used is a significant decision” (All Marketers Are Liars p. 58).

Your audience has a finite amount of time. Their attention is scarce. So they’re naturally protective of this limited resource, and any second they waste (or pay) for you is precious. It’s your job to make your brand:

Findable and understandable
Worth engaging with

To accomplish that first goal, you need to present a clear idea, thought, or story to your audience. How about this:

“…you can forget about the laundry list of wonderful attributes your product has. You can’t possibly associate them all with your brand name in a human mind. To get into the consumer’s mind you have to sacrifice. You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute” (The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Ries & Ries, pp. 44-45).

This isn’t about your bulleted lists of features. This isn’t about your corporate history or your wonderful team. I’m sure those things are great. And they’re important (maybe).

Your brand needs to give a clear, simple, distilled picture of what you’re all about and what you stands for. This is the goal. Author and designer Marty Neumeier said, “When brand communication comes through intact—crystal clear and potent—it goes straight into people’s brains without distortion, noise, or the need to think too much about it. It shrinks the ‘psychic distance’ between companies and their constituents so that a relationship can begin to develop” (The Brand Gap, p. 18).

Create shared meaning

Now that you’ve given your audience a clear picture of who you are, you need to give them a reason to care. You need to show them how your brand stands for something that resonates with their image of themselves or something they already care deeply about.

This is where story comes in. Branding experts have already explored the implications of storytelling for brands. Godin said, “Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard” (All Marketers Are Liars, p. 74). Branding specialist Jim Signorelli added, “Like stories that resonate with something meaningful to us, successful brands also resonate with their audiences. This comes about as a result of shared truths” (StoryBranding, p. 27).

By communicating your brand with stories that both demonstrate the meaning of the brand and reflect back to the audience a meaning they already hold to be true, you’ll remove barriers between the audience and your brand, convince the audience that there’s good reason to engage, and expedite the process of building a relationship.

Help them remember

Good branding will differentiate you from competitors in the market. People have a tendency to define objects by how they differ from other similar objects. A tangerine is like an orange, but sweeter. This is especially true for objects, or products, that are made and bought. A Ferrari is in the sports car family, but it’s more expensive, more prestigious, and higher performing than other cars. A MacBook is a laptop, but it offers a certain user experience. JC Penney is a department store, but it offers steep discounts. Until it didn’t. The world saw how it worked for JC Penney when the store stopped offering coupons, lost their differentiator, and experience a 25% decrease in revenue over a single year.

Clear differentiation makes you easy to categorize and define. This leads to memory.

But there are over one million trademarks registered in the United States alone. What relevant (and true) distinctions can you really make?

Simplification is key. Neumeier said, “Differentiation works because of the way the human cognitive system works. Our brain acts as a filter to protect us from the vast amount of irrelevant information that surrounds us every day. To keep us from drowning in triviality, it learns to tell things apart” (The Brand Gap, p. 34). The human brain is wired to simplify. Neumeier was suggesting that there is too much information for us to handle. So the brain filters out the irrelevant and simplifies inputs to the essential.

What does this mean for a brand? Focus on the one feature that truly makes you unique. An audience will quickly lose sight of all the listed benefits. The best hope for a brand is to instill in the audience’s mind the one feature that makes the product or service different.

Once you’ve found that one differentiator, storytelling can help you communicate that differentiator to your audience and help them commit the differentiator to memory. Stories will help the audience relate the brand to previous experiences and establish a large number of connections between the brand and the world as the audience already understands it.

This increases the connections between newly learned information and existing memory, helping the audience to place that new information within the context of what they already know. Cognitive psychologists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson described the process this way:

“Thinking involves indexing. In order to assimilate a case, we must attach it someplace in memory. Inaccessible information is not information at all. Memory, in order to be effective, must contain both specific experiences (memories) and labels (indexes) used to trace memories of experiences. The more information we are provided with about a situation, the more places we can attach it to in memory and the more ways it can be compared to other cases in memory. Thus, a story is useful because it comes with many indexes. These indexes may be locations, attitudes, beliefs, quandaries, decisions, conclusions, or whatever. The more indexes we have for a story that is being told, the more places it can reside in memory. Consequently, we are more likely to remember a story and to relate it to experiences already in memory. In other words, the more indexes, the greater the number of comparisons to prior experiences and hence the greater the learning.” (Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story)

Memory, according to Schank and Haven, is essentially a filing system. When new information is added to the files, it’s much easier for the human brain if that new information fits into an existing folder. “Sensory details” increase the number of indices, helping the brain know where to file the new information in the context of existing memory. Stories contain greater amounts of sensory detail, helping to facilitate the process of memory creation.

The more connections that new information has to existing memory, the greater the chance that the new information will be added to existing memory and be recalled at a later date. Story Proof Author Kendall Haven added:

“Both the acts of remembering and of recalling are triggered by a greater density of sensory detail, by an emotional impact, by the presence of known context and relevance, and by the presence of multiple indexing labels. These, in turn, are all created by story structure. Using stories enhances memory and facilitates information recall” (Story Proof, p. 72).

The process is further aided if your key brand idea is delivered in recognizable patterns. As I wrote in a past article, humans are innate storytellers, meaning that story structure and story pattern are coded into the way we see the world. Your brand idea, communicated in the recognizable story form of character, plot, and action, can provide links between your brand message and the audience’s prior experience, as well as links that differentiate a brand from competitor brands. These links will make it easier for an audience to remember a brand as it relates to their own lives, and as the brand stands in the competitive landscape.

Focus on relationships

Ultimately, the most valuable benefit of a strong brand is the connections, bonds, and relationships it forms with audiences. If your brand doesn’t build the level of trust and loyalty that leads to conversions and ongoing commitments, you’ve failed to do your job and the branding process has been little more than a time consuming and expensive creative or theoretical exercise.

Jim Signorelli said, “As a rule, the human being is fickle and tires of the same old thing. But relationships are not things. This is why we prescribe a relationship with the prospect as the ultimate goal of our marketing efforts” (StoryBranding, pp. 84-85). Humans crave connection and relationship. Brands, especially when they’re communicated in story form, can satisfy some of that craving by exhibiting a distinct personality, worldview, and set of values. Once that connection is made, the audience will view the brand as an “old friend,” rather than a commodity to be bought and sold.

What role does story play in forming relationships between a brand and its audience? Stories contain the essential element of character. Just as humans are innately drawn to story and form emotional bonds with characters in stories, they’ll form connections with the brand character in a brand story. Then, as people begin to connect with the brand character, they’ll begin to see their own identity reflected in the identity of that character. Neumeier said, “As we’ve moved from a one-size-fits-all economy to a mass-customization economy, the attention of marketing has shifted from features, to benefits, to experience, to tribal identification. In other words, selling has evolved from an emphasis on ‘what it has,’ to ‘what it does,’ to ‘what you’ll feel,’ to ‘who you are.’ This shift demonstrates that, while features and benefits are still important to people, personal identity has become even more important” (The Brand Gap, p. 38).

Once your audience starts to affiliate their own identity with the brand identity, they’ll want to share that experience with others in their community with whom they have previously established connections. This is an essential strength of brand storytelling.

“If we look beyond the need for immediate sales, we start to see something that is far more appealing than the brand’s facts or opinions about why it’s the best, strongest, most durable, cheapest, etc. We start to see a belief, philosophy, or cause that defines who the brand is, not just what the brand is for. And much as we form an emotional bond with story characters, we start to relate to a brand in the same way. The brand’s importance goes beyond any functional advantage. When we buy a brand, in a sense we join that tribe. In turn, we invite it into our lives to reinforce who we are while telling those around us what we believe is important” (StoryBranding, pp. 4-5).

At this point, the audience shares the story with those in their networks out of their own initiative. This peer to peer sharing of a brand story has the capacity for a far greater reach than any traditional marketing effort. Godin summarized the idea:

“The desire to do what the people we admire are doing is the glue that keeps our society together. It’s the secret ingredient in every successful marketing venture as well. You have no chance of successfully converting large numbers of people to your point of view if you try to do it directly. But if you rely on the nearly universal worldview that people like being in sync with their peers, you are likely to find that those who believe your story will work hard to share their lie with their peers. If your story is easy to spread, and if those you converted believe that it’s worth spreading, it will” (All Marketers Are Liars, p. 69).

Hopefully these tips help on your next brand-building project.