September 20, 2006

How Memory Affects Marketing and Communications

We all know how powerful our remembered experiences are and how deeply they inform our reactions to products and services. For example, hear the word "Coke," and each of us remembers childhood memories of that cool, refreshing, bubbly goodness. Successful marketing taps into positive memories and associations. After all, that's a lot of what branding is all about.

The same dynamic occurs with respect to people and events. We saw an extraordinary new play in London called Frost/Nixon. It's about the 1977 interviews that David Frost conducted with former President Nixon. Both men were at low points in their careers. Frost hoped to restore his career by getting Nixon to appear in four hour-long interviews, and he paid Nixon a very high fee in order to get him. Nixon figured that by agreeing to appear with Frost (whom he considered not to be a journalistic heavyweight) he could vindicate himself on a wide variety of issues and become once again a positive national leader.

Both Frost and Nixon were portrayed sympathetically, and I realized that had the play appeared much closer to the 1977 date, I would have brought too many strong feelings to it (especially about Nixon)...so that I would not have had adequate distance to appreciate each individual's perspective...the actual people and event would have been too close, with opinions and prejudices too sharp and raw.

Too close proximity to the actual event may have had a negative effect on two recent movies, Flight 93 and World Trade Center. They may have been released too soon after the actual event.

Daniel Mendelsohn makes this point in a fascinating article in The New York Review of Books.

He tells the story of a play called The Capture of Miletus, by a Greek playwright called Phrynichus. The play appeared only two years after Miletus was brutally occupied by the Persian emperor Darius. The audience wept uncontrollably. Mendelsohn reports that "it quickly became evident that it was still too soon to turn history into drama." As a result, Phrynichus was fined, and further performances of the play were banned forever.

The issue of when we have adequate distance from events to consider them in some reasonable perspective and appreciate their nuances as well as their impacts is intriguing. It's all tied to the issue of what collective emotional baggage we carry with us.

As marketers and communicators, we do not speak to blank slates. We speak to individuals with deep reservoirs of experience and emotion. And being respectful of that, understanding that, and tapping into it constructively is a wonderfully exciting challenge.