Make Yourself Memorable

Now that you’re familiar with how memories are created, stored, and retrieved, we can explore ways to make sure that you are memorable.

Build relationships but keep them simple

As we’ve discussed, working memory involves the ability to create mental relationships between different things. Australian researchers from the University of Queensland gave people a sentence like the following:

If the cake is from France, then it has more sugar if it is made with chocolate than if it is made with cream, but if the cake is from Italy, then it has more sugar if it is made with cream than if it is made of chocolate.

They asked people to remember the relationships between the different types of cake, country, and sugar content.

Most people could remember statements like this one that had a three-way interaction (country, ingredient, sugar). When the researchers introduced a four-way interaction, a significant decline in accuracy was observed, and five-way interactions produced an accuracy level the same as chance or guessing.

Creating relationships between things gets people involved and helps them to form a memory. What can you create relationships between? Ideally between you (or your services) and other things of interest to your audience. For example, one client, an attorney with a midsized firm in New York City, wrote a series of articles and blog posts that related his services to sports because he and many of his clients were sports enthusiasts.

Remind people of themselves (or those they love)

As you create relationships in your marketing communications, consider how to remind people of themselves. Brain studies reveal some interesting things about how we remember things connected to ourselves. Dartmouth College researchers recruited 24 participants ages 18 to 30 and set them up with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity. The participants’ brains were imaged while they made judgments about adjectives on a computer screen. The adjectives were about themselves (they were asked, “Does this adjective describe you?”), someone else (a political figure—“Does this adjective describe the current U.S. president?”), or the case of the letters (“Is this adjective printed in uppercase letters?”). An adjective, such as “polite,” would appear on the screen along with a cue word (self, president, or case) for just 2000 milliseconds.

When their memories were tested, it was clear that they remembered the words that they related to themselves the best. In fact, the fMRI results showed that memories about themselves activated a different part of their brains. In general, the relevance judgments (self or president) activated a different part of the brain (the left inferior frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate) compared with the case judgments. In addition, the self judgments activated a separate region of the medial prefrontal cortex.

This means that we process information that we view as relevant to ourselves differently on a neurocognitive level than we process other information. Studies have shown that this powerful self-referential effect is reduced if the judgments about others are for those we are closely connected to, such as our family members or good friends.

So to be memorable, you want to draw connections between your business and things that people associate with themselves. And if not themselves, then things that they associate with people who they are closely connected to. You’ll need to know some information about the person with whom you’re connecting to make this work, so the first step is to ask questions to find out what people associate with themselves. For instance, one of my clients, a communications coach, made it her goal to find out something important that she had in common with the person she was networking with. By asking questions and listening carefully to the answers, she was able to draw connections and even explain her services in a way the person would understand and remember. If she found out that someone was into horseback riding, when explaining her services she would say, “You know how with horseback riding you need to first learn how to walk and stop before learning to trot, then canter, and then jump? That is exactly what I help my clients to do in their presentations.”

Stand out

There are a few more things that you can do to increase the likelihood of going from short-term memory into long-term memory. One is known as the Von Restorff effect, which essentially means that when things are presented together, whatever stands out the most would be remembered better than the others. You can use the visual aids we discussed in Chapter 2 (color, form, luminance) or informational aids, such an intriguing story or something else that is remarkable and therefore memorable about you.

Imagine that you’re at a networking event and consider how other people will present themselves. What can you do so that you will stand out and be more memorable than the others? It does not have to be something dramatic. Because communication is more about how we say something than what we say, don’t put too much pressure on yourself to say something remarkable and intriguing. It may be that you have excellent listening skills and make someone feel that you’re curious and interested to learn more about them. A memory can be a feeling, so if you pair yourself with that positive feeling, you’re much more likely to be remembered.

One of my favorite ways to stand out is to give a creative demonstration of what you do. You can do this by using a visual object as a metaphor for you or your services. For example, one of my clients used fruit salad as a metaphor for his service (each fruit represented a component) during a presentation. He put together the fruit salad as he spoke and the audience had an awesome visual—and tasty treat. Food always helps, and when you give people something you activate the law of reciprocity, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 10.

Go first

Another memory trick involves the position in which things are presented. This is called the serial positioning effect, with items being remembered more if they are presented in the first or the last part of the sequence.

There is some evidence that the first position is remembered even better than the last. Research on ad placements during the 2006 Super Bowl showed that the first ads were remembered best. If you were going to speak on a panel, you’d want to be the first or the last speaker. Going first may be the last thing you want to do, so remember this data because it can be worth it. Even though you may want to wait to introduce yourself at the networking event or speak on a panel, go first to be best remembered. Going first can also reduce speaking anxiety because you don’t have time for your anxious anticipation to build and to compare yourself with others. So go first to reduce anxiety and improve memorability.

Break up information

Another useful memory device is called “chunking.” This involves pairing similar objects together. Since most people can work with around five pieces of information, if you have more, you want to group them. Consider how the telephone number (555) 555-5555 is more memorable than 5555555555.

You can use this strategy on your Web site by including lists of bullets. (Pop quiz: How many items do you want to have on a list of bullets so people pay attention and remember them? Ideally less than five and definitely no more than seven.) You can also break up text into boxes that fit together but are visually distinct. (Again, how many boxes of text do you want to have? Yup, no more than five.)