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Today more than ever, getting your own marketing message heard above the general clamour is challenging. Customers may choose to use your product or service if they’ve heard of it, but they certainly won’t if they haven’t.  But getting heard is actually only a first step: the retention of your message by your customers – making it ‘stick’ – is the next challenge, and it’s a big one.

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Sometimes it takes time for brands to become sticky. Luxury brands are esteemed by their customers for the quality of the product or service they provide.  Some, like Rolls Royce and Lamborghini cars, as well as top-end champagnes, spend little or nothing on advertising.  Their brands’ ‘stickiness’ comes from an established reputation; even the word ‘champagne’ is a ‘sticky’ marketing label, a ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ (PDO) fiercely protected by those marques entitled to use it.

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Most brands, though, need to embed their brand’s message within their consumer’s mind by coming up with something memorable. Over the years, we have all been bombarded with marketing messages, so why is it that some stick and others don’t?

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A short, pithy message is obviously easier to take in and retain than a long, convoluted one, and so the art of the slogan and tagline has emerged.  Many successful examples include the product name, and this feels like it must be the most effective way of ensuring a brand is remembered.

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Others use a slogan without naming the brand (but usually alongside an image where its logo is prominent). I’m sure most readers will be able to tie the brand to the following examples:

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It’s the Real Thing

Just do it

Because you’re worth it

Some slogans even become embedded into the English language. An unfortunate person who trips over a kerb, mis-reads a timetable or even crashes their car into a lamppost might induce a ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’ comment, while any product that evokes strong positive or negative responses could be described as a ‘Marmite product’. These examples keep the brand name alive in consumers’ consciousness, but what about a product that self-evidently performs its intended function being summed up by ‘It does what it says on the tin’? The memorable phrase gets used regularly in relation to all sorts of products, so is there a danger that the association with the brand that introduced it* is forgotten?  

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We’re guessing as you’ve been reading this that you have ‘heard’ some of those slogans in your head because advertisers not only provide the words but also tell you how to say them – as with the emphatic ‘Bean’s Means Heinz’, the dramatic ‘Go Compare’, and the staccato ‘We buy any car dot com’. More often than not, the slogans are sung. A combination of a short phrase within a simple musical hook is very powerful – it can even get into and stay stuck in your head.

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Marketers can positively exaggerate this effect further by adding a nonsensical element.  A financial products comparison website has no obvious connection to an opera tenor, but that weird connection helps people to remember those ‘Go Compare’ ads much more easily (even if they don’t really want to!).  Likewise, ‘Compare the Market’ selling their service based on the tenuous premise of ‘market’ sounding a bit like ‘meerkat’ – it’s daft but it works!  

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So, if there is a formula for creating the ultimate sticky brand message, it might look something like:

Brand name + Pithy phrase + Catchy jingle + absurd element = Sticky!

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(And to any readers who are now experiencing earworms they thought they had got rid of, please accept our apologies!)

*Ronseal, in case you have forgotten!

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