Why making brands memorable is the only real defence against the attention recession

By Amy Budd, Client Services Director, Launch

You have exactly 1.7 seconds before someone scrolls past your content.

That’s the window.

The number of ads we see daily has doubled in a decade from 600 to over 1,200 and attention has officially fallen off a cliff.

We are living in an attention recession, where even Netflix is leaning into ambient media designed to be watched while you’re doing something else.

For CMOs under pressure, the temptation is to pour every penny of your performance budget into high-intent, short-term channels like search and shopping. But that logic is a trap.

This article will help make sure you don’t fall into it, including a powerful framework to ensure you can make your brand memorable to your target audience. 

The Problem: Performance is a Light Switch

In my talk at The CMO’s Guide to Growth, I compared performance marketing to a light switch. Turn it off, and results stop.

When the market is booming, chasing the 5% of people currently in-market works. But when the market softens, you realise that what got you here won’t get you there.

To grow, you have to win the battle for the 95% of consumers who aren’t ready to buy yet.

This is where your brand comes into its own. It can be a vital shortcut to decision-making.

The human brain is only 2% of our body weight but consumes 20% of our energy; it is hardwired to look for shortcuts. Build familiarity before a customer starts their search and you’ve effectively won before the auction begins.

The framework: the 3 Rs of OF MAKING YOUR BRAND MEMORABLE

To move brands from being ignored to being remembered we use a three-part framework to audit creative effectiveness:

1. Is your brand recognisable?

Are you building distinctive brand assets? Audio, for instance, can drive over twice the level of distinctiveness. You can look away from an ad, but you can’t turn your ears off. Think Jet2 and Gillette: both can vouch for the power of a good earworm.

2. Is your brand relevant?

Does the creative connect to a tangible audience need? Brands like Airbnb succeed because they focus on specific use cases, for example pet-friendly stays or group travel, rather than generic holidays.

3. Is your brand rewarding to customers?

To keep a user focused on your content for more than 1.7 seconds you must make it emotionally rewarding. Humour, joy, nostalgia – these are the touches which drive long-term memory and ultimately persuade a customer to connect with your brand.

The commercial reality: why brand is a key performance tactic

If you only invest in performance, you are trapped in a cycle of renting your customers from Google and Meta. You pay the market rate every single time.

But when you lead with brand, building mental availability in your target audience, you change the odds. Here’s how:

The shortcut to a lower CPA

In a crowded search result or social feed, familiarity is a filter. A user is significantly more likely to click an ad for a brand they recognise than one they don’t. This higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) signals to the platforms that your ad is high-quality, which in turn lowers your Cost Per Click (CPC).

You get more traffic for the same budget because you’ve already done the hard work of building trust.

Defensibility in the messy middle

Between the first trigger and the final purchase, consumers spend a lot of time exploring and evaluating. If you haven’t built a brand, you are easily swapped out for a competitor who is 10% cheaper or has a faster delivery time.

Brand memory acts as an insurance policy against price-sensitive switching.

The Multiplier Effect

We see this consistently: brands that invest in upper funnel awareness see a direct lift in their lower funnel conversion rates. This is because the consumer isn’t meeting you for the first time at the checkout.

Your conversion rate increases because they were sold on the product weeks ago.

How to get started with building brand memory

You don’t need a multi-million-pound brand campaign to make your brand memorable. You need what we call a connected performance mindset, eg:

• Stop viewing Brand and Performance as separate line items. They are two parts of the same journey.
• Test lift from brand recall activity: run a YouTube or Meta awareness campaign in a specific region. Don’t just look at the direct last-click sales from those ads. Look at the branded search volume and the CPA of your Google Shopping ads in that same region.
• Fix the creative: if your performance ads aren’t recognisable (using assets which are distinctively you), you’re missing the opportunity to build long-term memory.
  

The bottom line on building a memorable brand

Performance marketing finds demand, but brand building creates it.

Most brands are bidding for the same 5% of customers. Be the brand that made sure the other 95% already knew their name and you’re onto a winner.

You can see me talk about brand building in more detail in my full talk on Youtube.

Most agencies optimise campaigns. We diagnose growth.

If your brand’s growth has flatlined you’re in the right place.

We can help diagnose what’s blocking your growth using our Seven Pillars of Growth diagnostic framework:

• Market opportunity
• Brand strength
• Creative effectiveness
• Customer experience
• The performance engine
• Testing culture
• Measurement.
  

Give us a call if this is the kind of support your business needs.