We are not guiding people down a path; we are planting memories in a probabilistic field. Every exposure is a chance to create or refresh one of those memory structures. Most will fail, a few will stick, and the ones that stick will determine market share.

Cognitive psychology explains this even more accurately. The brain does not record events in order; it creates a web of connections that are triggered later by need or emotion. The brands that win are those that occupy more nodes in that web and are therefore easier to retrieve when a choice must be made. Byron Sharp obviously calls this mental... See more