“Smart” people read. Why? A lifetime of learning is often contained in a single book. They’ll take someone else’s “lifetime,” experience it, remember it, and gain that same lifetime of wisdom and knowledge in a few hours. It’s pretty cool. (Really cool, actually.)
Because I love learning, especially about the brain, I’m reading this book called Remember. I’m not very far into it yet, but so far I have learned that there are two types of memory: semantic and episodic.
Semantic Memory
Semantic memories are the facts and figures of life: the details. It’s those facts you remember from high school: the date of WWI, pi is 3.14159…., or the random knowledge that helps the winners of jeopardy. (Or it's what my dad would say makes someone a KOOK: a Keeper Of Odd Knowledge.)
Episodic Memory
Episodic memories are the memories you have of certain events or life experiences. It’s who was at your surprise Birthday party or what you ate at Thanksgiving last year. (Or where you were and who you were with on September 11, 2001.)
How to Get People to Remember
Each memory can be tossed into one of these two categories. But what causes any of these details to actually be remembered is meaning. Either a detail was particularly significant, extremely surprising or shocking, especially emotional, or it made an impression in some way.
However we remember it, it had meaning to us, someway or somehow.
So what does this mean for me or my business? The answer to this question goes so many different directions. But first, it means that if we want to remember something, we need to apply meaning to it. If, on the other hand, we want to make ourselves memorable, we need to tell people why we matter to them — why they should ascribe meaning to us.
Or, as Jim Edwards puts in his book Copywriting Secrets, “emotion is what drives sales” and “meaning creates emotion.” Consequently, to make sales, we must make ourselves meaningful.
If business is all about solving problems, this means we capture our audience’s attention with the problem. We then show and explain how we solve that problem. THAT is how we make ourselves meaningful. That is how we make ourselves memorable.
What problem do you solve for your customers? Why is your business meaningful? How do you show and explain this to them in your marketing?
Contact Inkling Creative today if you need help showing and explaining why your business is meaningful.
