Marketing science

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

spent two hours this week discussing the intracacies of a brand’s ‘funnel’.

And it was two hours utterly wasted.

Marketers love frameworks almost as much as they love jargon. None has endured longer than AIDA, that neat little ladder from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action. It was written in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a copywriter trying... See more

You’ve cut through the noise to show why creators work so well: they’re not just content machines, they’re memory-building systems. It’s not about “influence” - it’s about encoding familiarity, emotion and trust in a way traditional media just can’t match.

They know penetration drives growth until depth matters more.

Distinctive assets trapping memory: When a brand becomes so tied to its historical codes that it can’t evolve. Think of Kodak’s yellow or Nokia’s ringtone - both still trigger instant recognition, but for categories that moved on without them. Recognition without relevance.

Depth driving growth more than penetration: In subscription or usage-based... See more

The most effective brands do not persuade. They embed themselves as inevitabilities. Defaults that feel less like choices and more like recognition. Think about the last time you reached for a familiar brand without thinking. You did not weigh features or recall an ad. The alternative simply felt like more effort.

Low Attention Processing. Still True. Still Ignored.

That does not mean attention is useless. High-attention work can build emotion fast. Big, engaging campaigns and creative outliers can and do accelerate mental availability and should absolutely be aimed for. But those moments are the peaks, not the landscape. The everyday work of brand building happens through what Heath called “learning without... See more