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The American Family Life Assurance Company was a multi-billion
dollar health-life-disability insurance company that nobody had ever
heard of. At least not until December, 1999.
 Then a duck
quacked "Aflac!"
and their awareness went into the stratosphere.
The duck was a mnemonic – or memory enhancing – device created by
the Kaplan Thaler Group to raise awareness of the previously
invisible company. Their success should be a reminder to all
marketing communications professionals to take advantage of the
recall-multiplying power of mnemonics.
Mnemonic devices come in many forms and combinations. Ten of the
most familiar types from classic and current advertising include:
1. Music:
Most people can think of a song from long in their past and replay
the music and lyrics in their heads. (Sometimes, unfortunately, they
do it out loud.) Often just a few notes can trigger recall, like
"Intel
inside."
Jingles have fallen into creative disrepute, but those ditties from
the fifties and sixties stuck in people's heads like Crazy Glue.
2. Rhyme:
In the late 1950s, newscaster John Cameron Swayze appeared in a
series of torture test commercials for Timex watches. His
pronouncement when the watch survived each thrashing was
"Takes a
licking and keeps on ticking."
That little snippet of rhyme became so firmly established that now,
decades after the commercials ran and years after Timex inexplicably
dropped the line, it is still quoted in hundreds of newspaper
headlines about feats of durability.
3. Poetic Foot:
This is the spoken equivalent of music's beat, the sequence of
syllables which are accented and unaccented. (The number of feet per
line is the meter. As in Shakespeare's most used line length, the
pentameter.) Phrases with regular accent schemes are significantly
more memorable than those which are randomly-accented. You may
vaguely remember the primary types of poetic foot from tenth-grade
English:
§
Iambic (unaccented/accented), as in:
"We
bring good things to life."
§
Trochaic (accented/unaccented), as in:
"Have
it your way."
§
Anapestic (unaccented/unaccented/accented), as
in: "Have
a Coke and a
Smile."
§
Dactylic (accented/unaccented/unaccented), as
in: "Reach
out and touch
someone."
4.
Alliteration:
A series of words beginning with the same sound (not necessarily
the same letter). It worked for years with
"Greyhound
going great."
Sometimes the alliteration can be on alternate words, as it is on
the country song that also features the bus line,
"Thank God
and Greyhound She's Gone."
5. Repetition:
Repetition is one of the most
important tools in marketing communications. Repetition is one of
the most important tools in marketing communications. Repetition is
one of the most important tools in marketing communications. It
works when the same phrase is used in all media and not changed for
years. It works even better when it's used appropriately within a
single execution, as it was in Verizon's
"Can you
hear me now?"
spots.
6. Modified clichés:
One twist (usually at the end) of an old cliché gets the
double-mnemonic effect of expectation and surprise. It's easy to get
the target audience to remember a phrase when they already know all
but the last word by heart. If the change in the last word puts a
surprise twist on the meaning, it's darn near impossible to forget.
Like the old Miller Lite "Everything
you've always wanted in a beer. And less."
7. Inversion:
When expectations are turned
upside down, the results are hard to ignore. In an era in which
"Think big" was a corporate – and frequently personal – mantra,
Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig's Volkswagen ad
"Think
small" got
tremendous buzz and recall.
8.
Visual surprise:
It looks like a bug and walks like a bug. But the commercial reveals
that it's actually a Jeep with some surfboards on top. Which is a
lot more memorable than starting with a standard beauty shot of the
vehicle then bringing on the babe or hunk who can't resist the
driver because he or she has such a sweet ride.
9. Visual signature:
A consistent visual – which relates to the product benefit or name
– can be enormously effective when used over time. Prudential Life's
Rock of Gibraltar
has been an effective mnemonic device for decades.
10. Word play:
Government Employees Insurance
Corporation sounds bureaucratic. And most people would
probably think you have to be a government employee to buy from
them. Changing the name to Geico eliminates that problem, but the
name doesn't sound like anything you might remember except, maybe, a
small lizard. And so Geico
uses a
gecko
to play on the similar names and create
monster recall.
Although they're not appropriate for every marketer, Mnemonic
devices can be enormously powerful multipliers of advertising
recall. And the ten types listed here are just a few of the ways of
establishing a brand or benefit in target audiences' minds and
memories.
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