Make people remember your brand

TLDR

In a crowded market, simply being seen isn't enough; your brand has to be unforgettable. This guide reveals the psychology behind brand memorability and provides actionable strategies to ensure your brand stands out.

By combining a unique visual identity with consistent messaging and emotionally resonant content, you can create a brand that your audience remembers and chooses when they're ready to buy.

How to make people remember your brand with psychology

The Von Restorff Effect: Standing Out from the Crowd

Psychologically, people are more likely to remember something that stands out from its peers. This is known as the Von Restorff effect. In marketing, it means your brand needs to be the one that is different.

While everyone else in your industry is talking about features and specifications, you can be the one telling a story. When your competitors' brands all look the same, you can be the one with a unique visual identity and a distinct personality. You don’t have to be the loudest to be the most memorable. You just have to be different.

What are the elements of a memorable brand?

A brand is the sum of all its parts. To make your brand unforgettable, you need to be deliberate about every element.

Visual identity covers everything that includes your logo, colour palette, and typography, which are your brand’s face. Invest in professional design that is simple, unique, and immediately recognisable. Think about how a person would describe your brand's look and feel to a friend.

Tone of voice is what gives your brand's voice its personality. Is your brand witty, authoritative, serious, or empathetic? Once you define it, use it consistently across every piece of content, from your website copy to your social media posts.

The power of a Slogan or Tagline is often forgotten, but a short, catchy phrase can be a powerful memory trigger. A great tagline is simple, easy to remember, and encapsulates your brand's core value proposition.

Creating emotional connections Through Storytelling

People remember how a brand makes them feel. The most memorable brands connect with their audience on an emotional level by telling stories, not just listing facts.

Focus on the "Why", and your story will go beyond what your business does and explain why you do it. What problem do you exist to solve? What vision are you working toward? This human-centric approach makes your brand relatable.

Use customer-centric narratives by turning your customers into the heroes of your brand’s story. Share their journeys and how your solution helped them succeed. This not only builds trust but also makes your brand’s value tangible and memorable.

Making your brand unforgettable across all channels

Brand memorability isn't a one-time event; it's a constant effort. Your brand needs to be consistently present in the places where your audience spends their time. A "joined-up" marketing strategy ensures that every touchpoint, from your website to your email newsletter, reinforces your brand's identity.

• Your website is your brand's home. Ensure its design and messaging are in perfect alignment.
• Consistently create high-value content that positions your brand as a helpful authority.

Keep your brand top of mind by sending regular newsletters with valuable insights and using retargeting ads to serve relevant content to past visitors. For a comprehensive guide on staying relevant, read our article on how to keep your brand at the top of prospects' minds.

Measuring brand memorability

You can't manage what you don't measure. Here are some key metrics to track:

• Monitor how many people are searching for your brand name or branded keywords. A steady increase indicates growing brand awareness.
• An increase in visitors who type your URL directly into their browser is a clear sign that your brand is becoming more memorable.
• For larger campaigns, these studies can directly measure the impact of your marketing on brand awareness, recall, and perception.

By making your brand truly memorable, you can stop fighting for attention and start building a lasting relationship with your audience. For a full breakdown of how to build a winning brand and marketing strategy, explore our B2B marketing strategy services.

How to make your brand cut through the noise 

Why do people remember some brands, but forget others?

It’s not just because some are inherently more memorable, bold, and different than others. It’s also because those brands get themselves seen over and over again.

It’s a well-established rule of thumb in communications that it takes about seven repetitions for a piece of information to stick.

Different pieces of research put different numbers on it. For example, some say three encounters is enough of an ‘effective frequency’, but the precise figure is less important than the principle — you have to get your brand in front of person repeatedly, or it will get lost in the noise.

The more digital output and distractions that arise, the truer and more important that principle becomes.

Here is how to engineer the seven encounters as efficiently as possible and grow your brand by earning a place in people’s memories:

• Go where your targets are
• Offer what your targets like
• Be consistent…
• …but with variety

Put your content where your targets are likely to see it

Written down, the rule looks painfully obvious. Yet it’s surprisingly easy to forget. There are new trends, new platforms, and new cycles of hype that make big promises and seem to be ‘must haves’, and in the excitement and urgency of growing your brand, it’s not hard to get swept along.

So to make another obvious statement that still bears repeating, there is no point marketing your business where you are unlikely to find buyers. You might as well sell beef at a vegan food festival.

So if the question is ‘should we be on YouTube?’ or TikTok, or whatever platform or medium it may be, the answer is ‘only if your prospects go there’.

Offer content that your targets like

Once again, this is about as intuitive a rule as you can get, but it’s one that’s frequently ignored.

Marketing teams and business leaders like to create content that they would consume, but don’t always apply the empathy to ask if that is what their audience likes. If you love videos and like to research topics on YouTube, it’s easy to assume that others do, so the most appealing type of content for your own marketing and thought leadership becomes video.

But what if your market is saturated with video and your prospects are boredof them. What if your typical buyer actually prefers to read in-depth reports with academic style research behind them? Then they won’t engage with what you’re doing, and you’ll be lucky if they see your brand once, let alone seven times.

Take the time to research what your market consumes, and how your typical customer likes to receive information, and cater to that.

Why being remembered requires consistency in branding and messaging

If people see a different brand every time they see your brand, or hear a different message every time they hear your message, then you are back to square one each time. You’re not building momentum or building up to your magic seven encounters if every impression is the first impression.

So, visually, are your assets presenting a consistent character? If someone saw a video, a guide, a social media carousel, a blog post image, a whitepaper, a banner advert, and an infographic of yours, would they eventually have a sense that they had come across your before?

To many, the rules of brand guidelines can seem too extensive and pedantic, but they’re there to make sure that through consistency, the impact of the brand is as great as it can be, as soon as possible.

Why being remembered requires some variety

You don’t want to be so repetitive as to be boring, and you don’t want everything to look so similar that people stop noticing you.

So, within overall message-discipline and visual consistency, you also need to vary the type of content that you produce, the visuals that people see, and the topics that you cover. You will avoid fading into the background, and instead communicate that you have extensive expertise in your field.

For a deep and practical guide to marketing, messaging, branding, and design that gets your noticed, keep your prospects’ attention, and converts that attention to leads and deals, download your copy of ‘Claiming the Spotlight’.

GUIDE | Claiming the Spotlight: Your comprehensive guide to gaining market share

If you have questions about how to create the brand, strategy, and content that you need, or if you simply want to understand how your marketing could get more and better results, please get in touch at jenny.knighting@nutcrackeragency.com.

Recommended Reading

How to Fill a New Business Pipeline Using Content Marketing

This article expands on the crucial role of content in building a memorable brand. It provides a step-by-step guide to using content to attract, nurture, and convert high-quality leads. It's the perfect next read to understand how a well-remembered brand translates into tangible business growth and a consistently full sales pipeline.

Author Bio

Jen Knowles is Head of Design at Nutcracker, a B2B marketing agency that blends creativity with commercial impact. With extensive experience in design and branding, she specialises in translating complex business ideas into bold, visually engaging campaigns that capture attention and drive results. Jen is passionate about the role design plays in shaping brand identity and believes that great creative work doesn’t just look good, it tells a story that resonates with decision-makers. At Nutcracker, she leads on delivering design solutions that bring content and strategy to life, helping brands communicate with clarity and impact. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.