For challenger brands, the biggest marketing problem is not simply getting noticed. It is being remembered when the buying moment arrives. Lucas Coe, Head of Agency at Manchester’s Formore, explores what psychology and marketing science tell us about how memories are formed, why some brands are easier to recall than others, and how marketers can use those principles to make their work more memorable.
Ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question: how many adverts, posts, emails or brand messages have you seen today?
Now try to name five of them.
That gap is the real problem marketers are up against. We spend huge amounts of time measuring reach, impressions, clicks and attention, but attention is temporary. If nothing survives in memory, very little has been built.
Good marketing does not just get noticed. It leaves something behind.
Memory is not a recording device
Human memory is selective. We do not store a perfect copy of everything we see and hear. We notice some things, ignore others, and retain only a fraction of what reaches us.
For marketers, that creates an immediate problem. Being clear is not enough. A message can be perfectly understandable and still vanish a few seconds later.
One of the most useful ideas here is the distinctiveness effect. In classic memory research, an item that differs from the things around it is often better remembered than similar items around it. The effect is commonly associated with Hedwig von Restorff’s work on isolation and memory.
This is easy to recognise in marketing. Entire categories tend to converge. Banks use similar blues. B2B brands use the same abstract gradients. Agencies describe themselves with the same handful of words. Fitness brands borrow the same visual language. Everyone is trying to signal category credibility.
The result is that everything becomes easier to process, but harder to remember.
Distinctiveness is not about being strange for the sake of it. It is about creating a meaningful difference that the brain can separate from the background. A colour. A shape. A phrase. A character. A sonic cue. A style of humour. A way of framing the problem that feels recognisably yours.
For a challenger brand, this matters even more. An established brand can often lean on years of accumulated exposure. A challenger usually cannot. If fewer people already know your name, every encounter has to work harder to create a memory worth retrieving later.
Familiarity is built, not launched
Standing out helps something get encoded. But one exposure rarely does all the work.
The mere exposure effect describes the tendency for repeated exposure to increase familiarity and, in many circumstances, liking. A large meta-analysis covering 81 studies found a broadly positive relationship between repeated exposure and evaluation, although the relationship is not endless and can flatten or reverse with overexposure.
The marketing implication is not ‘show people the same advert forever’. It is that familiarity takes repetition.
This is where brands often sabotage themselves. A campaign starts to become recognisable internally, so someone decides it feels tired. The colours move. The strapline changes. The art direction changes. The creative platform gets replaced.
To the marketing team, it feels fresh. To the audience, it can mean starting again.
The better approach is to repeat the memory structure while refreshing the execution. The ad can change. The joke can change. The format can change. But the cues that help people recognise the brand should survive.
There is another useful principle from memory research: the spacing effect. Studies of learning consistently find that information is generally retained better when exposures are distributed over time rather than crammed together in one burst. That is not a direct advertising formula, but the principle is useful. Memory benefits from repeated encounters that have time to accumulate.
For challenger brands with smaller budgets, that is a powerful reminder. One enormous burst of activity may create a spike in attention. Consistent, recognisable exposure over time is more likely to build something durable.
Memory needs a retrieval cue
Being remembered in isolation is not the goal. A brand needs to come to mind in the situations where someone might buy.
This is the idea behind mental availability: the probability that a brand is noticed, recognised or thought of in a buying situation. Closely related are category entry points, the cues and situations that prompt someone to enter a category in the first place.
Think about how this works in real life. ‘I need somewhere quick for lunch.’ ‘We need a new CRM.’ ‘I want somewhere sunny for February.’ ‘My back is killing me.’ Each thought acts as a retrieval cue. A small set of brands will come to mind. Most will not.
For marketers, this changes the question. Instead of asking only, ‘How do we make people aware of us?’, ask, ‘What situations do we want to be remembered in?’
That distinction is especially important for challenger brands. Bigger competitors often have more existing routes into memory simply because people have encountered them more often, in more contexts, over more years. A challenger has to deliberately build those routes.
That means linking the brand to real buying situations, not just repeating a generic promise. The more useful and relevant the cue, the more chances the brand has of being retrieved when it matters.
Emotion helps, but only if the brand comes with it
Emotion can also strengthen memory. Research in advertising has found relationships between affective responses and what people remember from communications.
That helps explain why humour, surprise, warmth, tension and even mild discomfort can make creative work more memorable.
But there is a catch: people can remember the advert and forget the advertiser.
We have all experienced this. You remember the joke, the character or the story, but when someone asks which brand it was for, you have no idea.
The problem is usually weak brand linkage. The entertaining part of the communication lives separately from the brand. A great film plays out, then a logo appears at the end.
That is not enough.
The strongest creative makes the brand part of the thing that is memorable. The distinctive colour, character, sound, product, line or visual device is woven into the idea rather than bolted on afterwards.
If you removed the logo, you should still have a fighting chance of knowing who the work belongs to.
Distinctive assets are memory shortcuts
Over time, recognisable brand elements can become distinctive brand assets: colours, shapes, characters, logos, sounds or phrases that strongly cue one brand.
Their value is not simply aesthetic consistency. They make recognition easier.
This is particularly useful for challenger brands because recognition is often the first battle. If the audience has to decode a completely different visual and verbal system every time they encounter you, you are making memory unnecessarily difficult.
The temptation, especially in fast-moving businesses, is to keep changing things. New campaign, new colour palette. New quarter, new art direction. New product, new tone.
But memory compounds through consistency. You cannot build recognisable cues if you keep replacing the cues.
The aim is not sameness. It is recognisable variation.
Distribution is part of memory formation
Creative and distribution are often treated as separate disciplines. From a memory perspective, they are connected.
Creative gives people something worth encoding. Distribution gives them enough opportunities to encounter it. Consistency helps those encounters add up.
Memorable creative with weak distribution becomes a beautifully designed secret.
Heavy distribution behind generic creative becomes expensive wallpaper.
Neither is enough on its own.
For challenger brands, this is where discipline matters. Smaller budgets make fragmentation expensive. If every channel carries a different idea, a different look and a different message, each exposure has less chance of reinforcing the last one.
The better question is: how can one strong memory structure travel?
A campaign can appear in social, search, video, PR, CRM, outdoor, partnerships and the website without becoming identical everywhere. Each channel can do a different job, but the brand cues should remain recognisable enough for one encounter to strengthen another.
That is the real role of distribution in brand building. Not simply to create more impressions, but to create more opportunities for the same memory to be formed, refreshed and retrieved.
Five practical rules for challenger brands
1. Be different enough to encode
If your work looks and sounds exactly like the category, the brain has very little reason to store it separately. Find a distinctive device that genuinely belongs to the brand.
2. Repeat the cues, not the advert
Consistency does not mean creative stagnation. Keep the recognisable ingredients while changing the execution around them.
3. Build around buying situations
Decide when you want the brand to come to mind. Link your message to real category entry points rather than relying on vague awareness.
4. Brand the interesting bit
Do not save the branding for the final frame. Make the thing people remember inseparable from the brand itself.
5. Plan distribution around memory
Think beyond a single burst. Repeated, recognisable encounters across time and channels give memory a better chance to form.
Challenger brands have more to gain from being memorable
The largest brands in a category usually start with an advantage: more people already know them. Their names, colours, products and past advertising have had years to accumulate in memory.
A challenger does not have that luxury.
That can sound like a disadvantage, but it creates clarity. You may not be able to outspend the category leader. You can be more disciplined about what you want people to remember, more distinctive in how you encode it, and more consistent in how you reinforce it.
The question is not simply whether someone noticed the campaign today.
It is whether, weeks or months later, in the moment when they actually need the category, your brand is one of the names their brain gives back.
That is the real test of memorable marketing.
