Brand research: The gift of sound and vision

Editor's note: Charles Young is founder and CEO of research firm Ameritest.

One consumer-centric way of organizing our thinking about the rapidly evolving media landscape is to use a framework that’s based on the widely read work of the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. In his book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” he discusses two important ideas. First, the difference between two processing systems in the brain – System 1 (fast system) and System 2 (slow system). Second, the difference between our experiencer self and our remembered self.

If we put these ideas together, we get a mental framework that looks like the one shown in Figure 1. If we just look at the differences on the left side of this grid, System 1 versus System 2, we simply have a reinterpretation of the classic division between low-involvement and high-involvement (or lean-back versus lean-forward) media. Basically, it’s the difference between watching TV or scrolling through an Instagram feed (System 1); versus reading a newspaper or magazine article – or an Amazon review (System 2).

But if we put that idea together with the differences between an experience and the memory of that experience – the part of the grid on the right side – we can get some clarity and insight into the different roles that different creative content and different media platforms and ad formats play in the brand-building process in the customer’s mind.

From a creative point-of-view, System 1 is the key to a visual-centric, filmmaker’s worldview, while System 2 is the key to the writer’s world. Both are growing.

Living in a visual world

In a world where everyone has a camera full of memories in their pocket – on my iPhone I have 20,000 still photographs and 700 short videos of my life experiences – it’s easy to see that we are now living in a visual world of communication.

But just as we learned in kindergarten, communication always comes down to show-and-tell. For effective brand-building, advertising the two must work together – like the writer and art director creative teams that the late, great Bill Bernbach innovated in the ad agency business during the 1960s. 

TV, of course, is a “show” medium. If you watch old commercials from the “Mad Men” days, you quickly realize how out-of-date they feel, not just because of the more primitive video technology available but because the ads seem so wordy. As we saw in the character of Don Draper, the advertising world in those days was a writer’s world.

In a five-year review of TV commercials that my late colleague Martin James tested in Australia a few years back for a major Japanese car manufacturer, he found a strong negative correlation between the amount of attention a commercial got and how much talking was going on in the ad – typically with voice-overs pushing product messages. 

For show media the lesson is to tell the story in pictures first. Words come second. Images, after all, are key to building a brand’s image.

Yet the data in this model does not say to use no words, just fewer of them. A montage of diverse images in a video with no copy or controlling verbal idea, or an image in a newspaper without a caption, are difficult for an audience to interpret. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, it contains a thousand potential meanings. Fewer words make it easier for the reader’s mind to sort through the potential meanings of imagery and pin the images with the proper meaning on the wall of memory.

Concepts and brand-differentiating ideas are necessary for anchoring a brand’s positioning in the mind of the consumer. 

Add another growth ring 

As I look at the right side of the Kahneman grid, the metaphor for a brand that I think of is that the top is the leafy, flowering bough of the tree – the brand image. The conceptual positioning idea, rational messages and reasons-to-believe are the roots anchoring the brand tree in the System 2 part of the mind. Both are needed to achieve the goal of marketing: to add another growth ring to the brand tree each year.

The number of words in our language that we use to describe ideas and concepts grows each year as well. In 2010, Harvard University and Google estimated that there were 1,022,000 words in the English language and that this number would grow by several thousand each year. According to some estimates, there were only 50,000 words in English in the time of Shakespeare – and by himself, Shakespeare added 1,700 new words to the English language.

Humans love to talk and gossip and we learned to tell stories with words long ago. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that “tell” media, such as podcasts, subscription newsletters, audiobooks and other new word-centric forms, are growing as well. 

Think of media brands themselves – which is important for positioning media platforms in a cluttered marketplace for ad dollars. For example, Figure 2 shows where the New York Times brand goes on the Kahneman grid.

As a System 2 media platform, the New York Times is where serious people go to hear news and discuss ideas, perhaps the politics of the day. It’s also the place where marketers go to talk to their customers when they want to reach an audience that’s in System 2 thinking mode. Here they might explain their new product’s reason-for-being, argue how their brand is different from others and communicate what the best value of the day is.

Which of the two Systems – 1 or 2 – is more important? Let me answer it this way: Which would you rather be, blind or deaf?

Kitchen of the mind

Information that your customer takes in from looking and watching versus reading and listening is fused in working memory. Think of working memory as the kitchen of the mind where the raw ingredients of sensory inputs are turned into meaningful experiences, to be served up to the conscious mind. These in turn can be stored as meaningful branded memories – potentially the source of brand loyalty and therefore brand equity.

According to modern theories of cognition, working memory is made up of four components that process the information we receive from the outside world into long-term memory: the central executive, visuo-spatial sketchpad, phonological loop and episodic buffer.

In working memory, which by some estimates lasts only about 30 seconds, our brain integrates the information coming in through the eye, traveling along the neural pathways of the visuo-spatial sketchpad, with information coming in through the ear, traveling on the neural pathways of the phonological loop. Working memory then chunks the information into episodes and sends it on to the gatekeeper – the central executive. The gatekeeper then decides if it is important enough to be forwarded, as a summarized piece of information, to the CEO – our conscious mind.

Our visual pathway is a key component of System 1 processing. It can process visual information very fast, which is why movies work in the first place and why a picture on the cover of a magazine will attract attention faster than a headline will.

When we read a word printed on a page or screen, we are engaged in System 2 processing, which is slow. One reason that the thinking brain is slow is that in reading a word on a page, the mind sounds out the word as a voice inside your head. The audio pattern associated with the word is then stored as an audio file in memory. Verbal comprehension takes place in the same amount of time it takes to say a word out loud. 

That’s much slower than the time it takes for the eye to scan an image. That’s why the verbal system is the slow system. The voice inside your head is attached to your thinking brain. (I don’t know about you but I talk to myself all the time.)

Tag for future retrieval 

Words themselves are merely symbols and abstractions that are used to sort experiences into conceptual categories and tag them for future retrieval from memory, just like you might tag movies or short videos for future retrieval from YouTube.

Words are stored in the semantic memory system. They are used by working memory to retrieve memories of prior experiences for the various search functions of the mind – such as finding the right inputs from past experiences for making predictions and making decisions in our day-to-day lives.

We can tell stories with either words or pictures because words are linked to pictures in the mind. As Aristotle said, the soul never thinks without an image.

But what did he mean by the word “image”?

When I listen to old radio plays from the 1940s I can see in my mind’s eye the image of a door closing when I hear the sound effect of a closing door; I see the characters walking down the street when I hear footsteps or see cowboys riding horses across the American West when I hear the sound of galloping hooves.

When we tell stories with words, we hear and see the story as a movie inside our head. Words are linked to both image files and audio files in our memory. All of this happens in the Theater of the Mind. 

This is relevant when we think of the marketing role of radio, podcasts or audiobooks – all of which are growing media platforms. It should tell you something that Malcolm Gladwell, a well-known author in print, has launched his latest work, “The Bomber Mafia,” as an audiobook first, with the printed version to follow. He knows how to build his brand “image.”

A word-centric media platform like a New York Times podcast, therefore, can be thought of as a “sound” platform – it’s a different way to get imagery inside the head of the consumer than TV; a different tactic for brands that want to capture the hearts and minds of the consumer.

Writers understand the importance of an author’s voice as a way of differentiating their writings. When we talk about a brand’s image, therefore, we should think about a brand voice as an important component of the overall persona that a brand is trying to project consistently. Hemingway sounds recognizably different from Mark Twain in just a few words. Neither sounds like the voice you’re hearing as you read this article.

An example of a voice that conjures up vivid imagery in the mind, is that of Huckleberry Finn. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was quite controversial at the time it came out because it was the first novel to be written in the American vernacular – or the voice of ordinary people. It was written not for the literary set but for the common person. Also, through the voice the character of Jim, Twain gave the world, through written words, the unrecorded sound of the voices of Black American slaves.

The brand voice of the New York Times is perhaps quite opposite of the voice of the illiterate Huck. It’s the voice of the educated, highbrow, urban class of the country.

What their brand image stands for

In competing against other media companies that offer plenty of places for advertisers to spend their money, media companies need to compete based on what their brand image stands for and not just on the size of the audiences they can deliver.

Brand-building advertising delivered on the right media platforms is, in fact, a market tactic of co-branding. From our past work on the multi-billion-dollar Intel Inside campaign, we know that the linkages between two brands in consumers’ associative memory system (System 1) can have very powerful effects in the marketplace. For example, how do you think the meaning of your ad might change if it appeared in the context of the New York Times versus Fox News?

Show and tell

In an age when brand communications seem to be dominated by the likes of Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and other new forms of media, and when reading seems to be at an all-time low, especially among time-stressed Millennials, the conclusion is simple. When it comes to marketing – and building brands – it’s what we’ve known all along: Advertising is not about show or tell, it’s show and tell.