Sorry to break this to you, but people don’t take much notice of you.

It’s not just you, I should add. Generally speaking, people don’t take much notice of anyone except themselves.

Knowing this can be quite liberating. In fact, it’s used in the treatment of people who suffer from social anxiety.

A counselling service puts it this way:

“The reality is that most people are more interested in what is going on in their lives rather than thinking about you. Other people probably take much less notice of you than you think.”

That’s the sobering truth about how people think. And I can assure you: they pay much less attention to brands than they do to other people.

So, if people are naturally inclined to take practically no notice of brands, what does that mean for your marketing?

It means you need to accept that your potential customers have better things to do than ‘engage’ with your brand.

You’re always paying attention to your brand, but your customers aren’t. They won’t remember your brand after being exposed to it once or twice.

And that means you have to bore yourself.

You need to keep putting the same stuff out there – the same logo, the same colours, the same tagline – over and over again.

These are the distinctive brand assets (to use Byron Sharp’s term) that cue your brand to a largely uninterested audience. And they can only be built by consistent use over time.

To be clear, this is not to say that your communications themselves should all be the same. That will only exacerbate the risk of their being glossed over.

I think this quote from How Brands Grow Part 2 (with my bolding) explains the situation perfectly:

“Advertise messages for the short term but build a brand identity for the long term. Mixing the two makes it more difficult to achieve either.”

So resist the temptation to create a ‘fresh identity’ every few years. Forget rebranding (unless there’s a very good reason for it) and reinvention and all the rest of it.

Your primary goal should be to get your brand noticed and keep it noticed.

Much better to be bored than ignored.

By Ryan Wallman, Head of Copy at Wellmark.

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