Why advertising is crucial to business
In August 2014, two researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States conducted an experiment to test human memory and how much our minds retain the images we see on familiar brands that are all around us.
The study got 85 undergraduate students to attempt two experiments.
The first was to try and draw on a piece of paper from memory the logo of the consumer electronics company Apple, maker of the iPad, iPhone and owners of the online music steaming service iTunes.
The second test required participants to click or indicate from a range of images which they thought was the accurate Apple logo.
The Apple logo, as most of us know, is an apple with part of it bitten off and with one apple leaf at the top.
Of the 85 who took part on the test, 52 used only Apple products, 23 used Apple and other computers products and ten used strictly only personal computers (PC).
The report stated:
“The ubiquitous Apple logo is a simple design and is often referred to as one of the most recognizable logos in the world. The present study examined recall and recognition for this simple and pervasive logo…Participants showed surprisingly poor memory for the details of the logo as measured through recall (drawings) and forced-choice recognition. Only 1 participant out of 85 correctly recalled the Apple logo, and fewer than half of all participants correctly identified the logo.”
These were students of UCLA, one of the best-known universities in the United States and the world.
Apple produces some of the best-known electronic goods in the world, especially the iPhone that most of us see at least once a week in the hand of a friend, office colleague, online, in TV footage and magazine pages.
But, as the researchers noted in their report, only one of the 85 participants -- all of whom heavily use computers, smartphones and the Internet on a daily basis in class, in their dormitories and at home – got the Apple logo right.
Yesterday, June 14, 2016, I tried a similar experiment. I asked several people to describe to me, from memory, the colours of each Ugandan bank note from the 1,000 shilling to the 50,000 shilling note.
Only one person, the Daily Monitor’s Digital Managing Editor Carol Beyanga, got all the colours right. This is money we use every day and the notes are in basic colours, but most confused the 1,000 shilling and 50,000 shilling notes wrong.
Anyone can try this. Just ask ten of one’s friends to describe the corporate colours of some of our leading telecom companies or even the colours of the package of the milk we buy from shops and supermarkets. It will be very interesting to see how many get these colours wrong.
(Test: describe from memory the colour of the masthead of the print edition of the Sunday Monitor and the Saturday Monitor.)
The lesson in this helps us start to understand why well-known global brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nike, Pepsi, BMW, Shell, Colgate and others pump tens of millions of dollars into advertising each year when it would seem that they are so familiar that they no longer need to advertise.
It is the reason advertising messages are often kept simple and repeated day in, day out, year in, year out. A few people find these adverts annoying and monotonous.
But those who are experienced in marketing and advertising know that the human mind is much less attentive than we realise.
To get a message to stick, it almost has to be repeated to the point of disgusting.
Most businesses in Uganda view advertising as an extra cost they cannot justify. They believe that just by putting up shop, customers will come by themselves and sales will increase.
That is not the case. In a market where there are competing brands of products that roughly do the same thing and are priced roughly the same, from cooking oil to toothpaste, sugar, pencils, bar soap, the only difference between success and failure is in branding and name recognition.
So next time a sales representative comes knocking at your door, listen to him or her. If owners of globally-famous brands like Apple can still get the brand’s logo wrong, chances are that much less known brands simply don’t exist in the public’s mind.
That’s part of the reason many quality Chinese phones and TVs are yet to break into the global market. The Chinese are only starting to wake up to the fact that half of the success of a business is in name recognition and brand loyalty.
