Richard Shotton
Founder; Marketing Week columnist, Astroten
On using concrete, visual messaging in advertising for memorability
Our takeOpinion
The founder and Marketing Week columnist at Astroten raises why a Dutch lower-sugar ad that shows actual sugar cubes sticks better than the usual grams and percentages, and why that matters to anyone paying to be remembered. A reader can take the idea that wording a buyer can picture is recalled far more readily than abstract wording, and the piece describes a recall experiment in which concrete phrases were remembered much more often than abstract ones. This applies most directly to food, consumer goods and any category where claims about quantity or benefit usually arrive as numbers or jargon. Our caution is that the recall test used short two-word phrases after a few minutes, which is a long way from a real ad in a crowded, delayed buying cycle, so the size of the gap should not be expected to carry over to purchase.
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