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Understanding how memories are made and the impact for brands.

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A young man walks into his local bar and as his attention focuses on a bottle of Corona, his mind suddenly turns to a girl he kissed on a beach holiday in Mexico five years before; a 21-year-old girl walks out of the cinema after watching The Social Network and feels an overriding urge to eat a Big Mac; a taste tester swiftly changes his preference when told which of the drinks he is comparing is Coca-Cola; and in Switzerland, a student of wine stares incredulously when he is told that the vintage that he has just praised profusely is in fact the same cheap plonk that he has tasted and dismissed as worthless a few minutes before.

Making memories

These are all examples of the power of affective memories, powerful associations that can leap unbidden to our attention through the activation of patterns of neurons in our brains, often by seemingly unrelated triggers. The first two are everyday examples of the ways in which these memories influence the fortunes of brands. The final two are taken from groundbreaking experiments that have sought to shed light on how.

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Memory gamesIn the first of these experiments, a famous taste-off between The Coca-Cola company and Pepsi orchestrated by the neuroscientist Samuel McClure in 2004, tasters were first asked to sample the two drinks in a blind test. When they did so, preference was split roughly equally between the rival colas. However, when they were then served the drinks from branded containers, Coke became the favourite. Interestingly, fMRI scans of the tasters’ brains showed significantly different brain activity when knowingly drinking Coca-Cola than when consuming it blind. When it comes to enjoying Coca-Cola, something other than tastebuds is clearly at work.

The wine experiment provides more evidence as to what. In it, students of oenology were presented with four different bottles of wine and asked to taste them, rate them and then justify the scores that they gave to each. Unbeknownst to them, their drinks had been tampered with. A mediocre wine of poor quality

had been poured into two of the bottles: one the bottle of a prestigious vintage; the other a younger, less prestigious label. The labels exerted a great influence on the scores this wine received: it drew positive scores and

Making memories

reviews when poured from an expensive bottle, and scathing ones when associated with a cheaper label. When told what had happened, all students had a hard time believing they had actually tasted the same wine on both occasions.

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In his landmark book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explores the potential difference between our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self”, pointing out in the process that our memories of an event can be reconsolidated while the event itself is still on-going. If a diner in a restaurant experiences a wonderful five-course meal only to have a waiter spill a glass of red wine all over his finest suit at the end of it, it is this final memory that dominates

how the event itself is remembered (in this case as a negative experience). Likewise a bad experience that ends well will be remembered positively and recalled as a positive memory. As Kahneman puts it: “The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of our future memories”.

The remembering self and the experiencing self

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The triumph of memory over (present) experienceBoth the wine tasters and their cola equivalents had been fooled by the powerful role that traces of the past play in preparing our brains for the future. As neuroscientists come to understand more about how memories form and re-form, they are realizing that anticipating experiences in this way is a vital part of their role. So much so that our most powerful memories may actually supplant or override our experiences in the present.

In our wine example, the brains of the students were already equipped with knowledge of the prestigious vintages and this memory trumped actual taste when it came to experiencing the wine. Could brands play a similar role, acting not just as the promise of enjoyment but actually causing us to experience that enjoyment as well? The cola example appears to show that they can, with the presence of a favoured brand bringing memory networks into play and producing a more positive experience. Such influence within the mind is a powerful asset for any brand to possess.

But our understanding of exactly how it forms – and how brands can act to improve their position within the brain – is only beginning to emerge.

The busy librarianOur knowledge of how memories are recorded, consolidated, recalled and reconsolidated has been transformed in recent years. We now understand that memory is dispersed, with various representations of an experience encoded in different parts of the brain simultaneously. These different perspectives on our memories are connected together through the direction of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure located near the brain’s temporal lobe. Imagine a librarian surrounded by shelves that contain not carefully bound, complete books relating different episodes and aspects of our lives, but simply piles and piles of individual pages. When a visitor requests information on a specific subject (when a memory is evoked), the librarian must fly around these shelves, pulling together as many pages as it can find that were recorded at the time and then compiling them together into a coherent volume:

this is the hippocampus at work. Its business, the business of memory, is connecting different elements of our experience together.

At the intersection of past and presentThis process of connecting one set of information with another is as relevant to our future as it is to our past. The evidence of fMRI scans shows that the parts of our brain we use when remembering overlap substantially with the parts that we use when anticipating or imagining the future. Memories are the basis of our learning and planning, and their intersection with the present is a complex one. It is our present circumstances that influence which memories rush to our minds and the form that they take when they are recalled. And as our wine example shows, present and remembered experience can compete with one another when it comes to establishing what is actually happening. Evidence is even emerging that our present experiences may cause certain parts of our memories to be “reconsolidated”, editing associations, replacing them with new ones and colouring our recall of the past.

Making memories

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Proust on NeuroscienceDespite this impressive recent accumulation of neuroscientific knowledge, the best evocation of how memory intersects with present experience remains that written by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past (1913), in which he describes how the unfamiliar taste of Madeleine biscuit mixed with tea causes happy memories of a long-forgotten aunt to rush to

his mind. The sensation that Proust describes is powerfully emotional, enough to make him shudder and pause, even though it seems to relate to a very ordinary experience. It is a classic example of an affective memory, which takes its power from emotional resonance and deep personal relevance rather than the detail of what it describes, and which has immense potential to influence actions in the present.

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Neuroscientists think of our memories as collections of independent but interconnected sub-systems that deal with different types of information and knowledge: autobiographic memory storing personal events and details (such as the memory of the aunt hidden away in Proust’s head), semantic memory handling general knowledge about the world (which informed him that the biscuit he was eating was known as a Madeleine), procedural memory governing how we carry out tasks and routines (which helped him to sip his tea) and perceptive memory relating to images, sounds and other senses (which helped him to recognise the taste of it). These memories become “affective”, with the ability to spring powerfully to mind and influence our experience and anticipation in the present, when they are associated with events of emotional or other significance to the individual in question. In Proust’s case, he recognises the emotion of happiness that connects the different aspects of his Madeleine memory together – even though it refers to events so long ago that his autobiographic memory cannot recall the detail of them.

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One day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,”. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents.

Marcel Proust on affective memoriesAn extract from Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

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The power of affectThe connections between the neurons constituting our memories can be strengthened or weakened by chemical processes. It is well established that “neurons that fire together, wire together” reinforcing their connections through a process knows as Long-term Potentiation (LTP) and thus springing to mind as a cohesive memory more readily than others. In our library analogy, the hippocampus-librarian quickly finds that some pages stick together automatically, making it easier to organise them into the right book – and that these books start to fall open at the same pages time and time again. In this way, our brain begins to classify certain memories as more relevant and significant than others. Over time, these well-established memories can even be accessed independently of the hippocampus, since the connections between them are so powerful. And the memories that dominate this ranking system are those strengthened by affective forces.

We have long known that emotion plays a powerful role in directing our attention, and prioritising what we remember. Emotion signals to the brain that we care about something – and therefore that our attention should be focused on it. Through the chemicals that it releases, it strengthens neural connections, increasing the chances of memories being recalled as a powerful, cohesive whole to help guide our future actions. It is often the most emotion-inducing elements of an event that dominate our recall of it (explaining why witnesses to an armed robbery can often describe the gun in far more detail than the person holding it). However, it is not simply the emotional content of a memory that categorises it as important. Memories that intersect closely with goals, motivations, ambitions and identity can equally become strengthened through Long-term Potentiation. The most powerful affective memories occur when these two forces align – when an emotionally resonant memory

Making memories

is particularly significant to the individual concerned, ensuring a strong and regularly reinforced memory pattern.

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Brands and memoryReturning to our everyday examples, we can see how individual emotional significance, and the way in which it creates affective memories, can work to the benefit of brands. Our visitor to his local bar is affected by the bottle of Corona, not just because it is associated with emotion, but because it is associated with a particularly significant emotion for him personally. He was drinking Corona when he kissed the girl. It brings vivid memories, thoughts and feelings not just of a beach and the sun, but of a younger, more romantic version of himself.

But the association of Corona with his Mexican fling isn’t just the result of his memory of the event itself. On various occasions in the five years’ since, he has encountered Corona advertising linking the brand with sunny climes, partying lifestyles and sexy women, and this advertising has reinforced the connections between these constituent elements that form his affective memory.

In understanding the context in which its target audience experiences its brand, and reinforcing the resultant affective memories through consistent advertising messages, Corona’s advertising has regularly reminded the pages in the hippocampus-librarian’s book that they

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belong together; it has ensured that this is a book that is very easy to recreate when the circumstances suggest it. Corona is in control of its brand narrative and can predict with some certainty how the narrative will play out in the mind of a great many individuals.

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In a recent experiment, the neuroscientist Quian Quiroga demonstrated how single brain cells may become associated both with specific concepts and broader memories, through following the activity of what he termed the Jennifer Aniston neuron. This is the neuron that fired within the brain of a subject when they were shown pictures of the Friends actress, but not when they were shown pictures of other famous actresses or completely unrelated objects such as the Sydney Opera House. The Jennifer Aniston neuron was associated specifically with Jennifer Aniston. It fired in response to photographs of her in different

outfits; even in response to the mention of her name; but never to, for example, Katie Holmes wearing a dress previously worn by Jennifer Aniston. Intriguingly though, in the case of some people, the Jennifer Aniston neuron also fired in response other actors or actresses from Friends. As well as being associated with Jen specifically, it also appeared to form part of a network of neurons that related to the TV show as a whole. For this reason, some researchers believe that small number of cells in our brain might become attached to a concept (either Jennifer Aniston or a particular brand), firing whenever that concept is evoked.

The Jennifer Aniston neuron

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Networking with JustinThe affective memories reinforced by McDonalds in the mind of our cinemagoer are rooted less in personal experience than in association with an emotionally resonant figure. The girl in question has been a Justin Timberlake fan since her early teenage years. Back then, a sight of Justin would reliably trigger a flood of hormone-driven emotions and in her early twenties, the legacy of those hormones are especially strengthened networks of Timberlake-related memories. McDonalds earned a place within these affective memory networks when it hired Justin Timberlake to perform the vocal for its “I’m lovin’ it” global advertising campaign. When our 21-year old girl saw Justin playing a supporting role in The Social Network film, her Timberlake memory networks fired up, and McDonalds sprang unconsciously to mind.

Both of these examples show the power of developing brand strategies that do not just trigger emotion, but recall emotions that

are particularly resonant and relevant to the individuals constituting a target audience. The strategies are not simply emotional; they are affective, aligning with personal motivations, goals and identities. However, creating and

Making memories

reinforcing affective memories does not in itself guarantee outcomes. In both cases, the circumstances of the present have a powerful role to play in influencing how the memory will be perceived and acted upon.

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In investing in Justin Timberlake as the audio hook for its brand, McDonalds has followed a well-established strategy. The power of music in influencing choice has been demonstrated by an experiment in which supermarket shoppers were played “recognisably” French or German music (featuring accordians and oompah bands

to appeal to established national stereotypes in their minds). When the “French” music was played, French wine outsold German by five to one. When the German music was heard, German wines achieved double the sales of their French rivals.

Beyond Justin: audio hooks and affective memories

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Circumstance takes a handThe likelihood of the young man actually ordering the bottle of Corona that he sees in the pub depends upon his present social context – and how he views the younger version of himself that rushes to mind when he sees it. Does he view this self as immature and reckless compared to the present day? Or does he see him as a youthful ideal with emotions and experiences with which he would love to reconnect? In dealing with affective memories, an understanding of their present context for a target audience is equally as important as understanding the triggers that are likely to recall them to mind.

Some researchers have suggested that in certain situations, the changed circumstances in which a memory is recalled can actually cause the memory itself to be changed or “reconsolidated”, with certain connections being eroded, others being reinforced and new ones being added (bearing in mind that we remember things far more effectively when they relate to something we already know).

Our cinema-goer’s memories have learned over time that Justin Timberlake is no longer connected to Britney Spears, despite their once being the most famous couple in the world. If the association is not consistently reinforced, they may one day learn that he is no longer connected to McDonald’s. In the case of our Swiss wine students, the affective memories associated with the prestigious vintage were

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strong and relevant enough to override present experience when they believed themselves to be tasting that wine. Among amateur wine buffs, with weaker memories associated with that vineyard, present-day experience may have won out instead – and caused the prestigious label to become associated, cruelly and unfairly, with the taste of cheap plonk.

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Updating the brand narrativeWhen our learned experience is contradicted by present experience, the potential emerges for memories to become reconsolidated, taking on different connotations and influencing our actions in new ways.

Neuroscientists disagree about the extent and frequency of reconsolidation, but the possibility of shifts in the form of our memories is a significant one for brands. Memory reconsolidation emphasises the importance of understanding how consumers experience a brand across a range of different touchpoints. It also suggests tactical approaches that can keep a brand in control of its narrative even if it becomes fragmented and distorted within our memories. And it provides an opportunity to associate a brand more closely with the things that its target audience already cares about.

Those neuroscientists that argue for the fairly regular occurrence of reconsolidation suggest that novelty is one of the triggers that enable

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it to take place. When we recognise that an experience differs significantly from our learned expectations, the hippocampus appears alerted to the possibility of connecting it up differently. However not all new things are important enough to invest in updating our memories – it is those that we care about (and that relate to strong networks already established in our brain) that are most likely to be integrated into our memories. Balancing novelty and consistency in brand messaging and finding new ways to connect to an audience members’ affective networks, can help to keep a brand in control of its narrative – and it can extend that narrative to new areas, connecting it to existing memories within our neural networks.

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Affective brand planningIt is becoming clear that effective brand planning is affective brand planning. A brand that has established genuine power in the minds of consumers is itself a form of affective memory. As such it is a powerful asset, but one that cannot be wholly controlled from a distance. As Proust understood so well,

Making memories

our memories are very much our own. They are the product of individual experience and the particular paths that our lives take. Affective brand planning requires marketers to develop strategies that reflect the different forces forming and shaping associations within consumers’ brains, and enlisting tools such as emotion and novelty to help create

powerful affective memories. Equally though, it requires brands to develop an individual-based understanding of the minds and memories of the consumers they target. It is by understanding more deeply the various circumstances in which affective memories are formed, consolidated and recalled that we can most reliably direct them towards fulfilling brand objectives.

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About the authorFranck Sarrazit is Global Director of TNS’s Brand & Communications practice, focusing on developing complete solutions that help key clients grow their brands, assess obstacles to strategic effectiveness and track performance.

Prior to joining TNS in 2012, Franck held roles with Procter & Gamble and Synovate, as well as working in brand consulting, delivering high profile global research projects. Franck is an expert in psychoanalytic research and uses this expertise to build brands.

Franck was born in France but has been living abroad for the past 20 years. He obtained both his Masters and Ph.D. while studying in England.

You may be interested in...

The secret life of the brain – Kyle Findlay >

The trouble with tracking – Jan Hofmeyr >

Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust

Memory in the Real World, third edition - edited by Gillian Cohen and Martin Conway; Psychology Press

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers - by Daniel L. Schacter; Souvenir Press Ltd

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Conciousness – by Antonio Damasio; Harcourt: New York

Thinking, Fast and Slow – by Daniel Kahneman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York

Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making – by Alain Berthoz, translated by Giselle Weiss; OUP Oxford

Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks - by Samuel M. McClure, Jian Li, Damon Tomlin, Kim S. Cypert, Latane´ M. Montague and P. Read Montague; Baylor College of Medicine

References

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About In FocusIn Focus is part of a regular series of articles that takes an in-depth look at a particular subject, region or demographic in more detail. All articles are written by TNS consultants and based on their expertise gathered through working on client assignments in over 80 markets globally, with additional insights gained through TNS proprietary studies such as Digital Life, Mobile Life and The Commitment Economy.

About TNS TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and stakeholder management, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With a presence in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and understands individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of the world. TNS is part of Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups.

Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.

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