Module 6.15 – Keep Repeating Your Message
If you are sending a message, you usually have to keep repeating yourself in order to be heard above all the other competing messages, and to make sure the message registers with its target audience and that they can remember it. We live in a media-intense world in which messages are constantly being sent. We are bombarded with them. Messages, especially the important ones, have to be repeated. You have to keep the message fresh and interesting, however, if you expect people to keep listening.
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1. Keep Repeating Your Message
If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times…
If you are
sending a message, you usually have to keep repeating yourself in order to be heard above
all the other competing messages, and to make sure the message registers with its target
audience—and that they can remember it.
We live in a
media-intense world in which messages are constantly being sent. We are bombarded with
them.
We see the same commercials and hear the same advertising jingles on radio and TV over and over again.
In school the teachers kept repeating the rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
When we get ready to tee off on the golf course, serve on the tennis court, or line up a direct shot on the eight-ball, we stop and mentally repeat exactly what we are going to do, first; how we will stand, how we will move, the follow through, and so on.
Messages,
especially the important ones, have to be repeated.
While teachers are more concerned with memorization than entertainment, they don’t worry as much about a message becoming boring the 300th time they deliver it. If you are dealing with the media or the public, you cannot afford to bore them during those 300 repetitions.
You have to
keep the message fresh and interesting.
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2. Three
Rules of Public Speaking
There are
three rules of public speaking:
According to
Bill Wilson (http://brightpath.hypermart.net/),
a consultant and professional speaker from
“Certainly, you don’t want to repeat the same thing over and over again… to your audience, you’ll sound like fingernails on a blackboard. But you can make an important point and use several different illustrations to drive that point home. Listen to the pros sometime and you’ll see this done expertly.”
He says you have to make each important point in three to six different ways. He says one study shows that if you make a point only once “just 10 percent of the audience will remember it. If you repeat a point six times, retention jumps to 90 percent. Without repetition, 40 percent of your audience will forget virtually everything you said within 20 minutes of your conclusion. Within 24 hours, 70 percent of the audience will forget almost 100 percent.”
He points out to the famous “I have a dream” speech of American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King in which he uses the word “dream” nine times and the phrase “I have a dream...” seven times, all within three minutes.
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3. How
Winston Churchill Did It
This is not the end. (given November 10, 1942)
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Never Give In. (given October 29, 1941)
“Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.’’
We Shall Fight on the Beaches. (given June 4, 1940)
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
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4. Learn When to Ignore Your Computer
Modern word
processing programs equip your computer to perform all sorts of labor-saving tasks to make
your writing simpler, easier, more technically correct—and more boring.
When you are looking for new ways to repeat an old message, searching for new metaphors, phrases or allusions to re-state the message without being boring, your word processing program can make your job a lot harder.
One of the most famous phrases in English literature is the opening to Charles Dickens’ classic story, “A Tale of Two Cities:”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
When the 118-word sentence was typed into one word processing program, the program’s helpful “grammar checker” kicked in and suggested that it be changed to:
“Things were bad.”
A hammer works
perfectly as long as the hand holding it knows where the nail is and how hard to hit it. Don’t
let your hammer—or your computer—dictate what you do.
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5. Say
It Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and…
How often do
you have to repeat yourself? And how do you know if the repetition worked; how do you
measure success?
In an article in project/programme purposeKnowHow.com, writer by Barrett Niehus (http://www.project/programme purposeknowhow.com/marketing//markmetrics.htm), reports that while statistics may vary, “it takes the average person at least five exposures to a brand name or product before he or she will make the commitment to purchase it. In addition, it usually takes more than 30 exposures to a marketing piece before the beneficiary can remember it at will.
“The simple lesson from these facts is that you must run advertisements multiple times, and consistently use the same or similar images to market your product. Run the same advertisement in multiple mediums, with the same logos, images, and themes as it has been proven to be the best mass media approach to marketing your product.
“Repetition is the key to creating a successful marketing program, but how exactly do you measure the success? A successful marketing campaign develops awareness of your product, which translate into larger sales volumes, but what part of the campaign has had the greatest effect on awareness and increased sales? To answer these questions, you must approach your marketing program with some pre-defined ideas on how you are going to measure results, and how you are going to tell the results of one marketing medium from another.
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6. Say
It Again, and Again, and Again, and Again, and…
(Continued)
“To
define exactly how you are going to measure the results of a specific marketing program,
you must evaluate the message of your campaign.
“You must determine exactly what is going to close your beneficiary, and if anything in the message can be echoed back to you in a quantifiable form. Many times, you can include an offer, coupon, or discount in the advertisement which can be documented at the time of sale. This provides an easy metric for tracing the effectiveness of an advertisement.
“If a traceable coupon or discount is not available, you may need to rely on measurements of increased sales and statistical analysis to quantify the results of your program.”
Many
organizations follow up advertising and marketing campaign with surveys to see who remembers
what the campaign was all about.
“The two fundamental themes in marketing are repetition and measurement. A marketing program will be ineffective if it does not provide sufficient repetition and exposure. In addition, the program will be useless unless it can provide a quantifiable response. Both provide the foundation with which to build an effective marketing campaign.”
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7. Case Study: The Power of Advertising in the
According to
research by Don Langrehr, found at (http:garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~db12291/adtest.html), of
Florida State University, in 1996, the U.S. advertising sector of activity spent US$181 billion
dollars on direct advertising, which worked out to about US$12 per person per week.
Studies have also shown that the average American TV watcher will have seen 350,000
television commercials by the age of 17.
“With some quick and simple arithmetic, we can approximate that close to three school years of viewing time has been entirely allocated to television commercial advertisements; this figure equals 25 percent of the total time a typical student spends in primary and secondary classrooms and does not include any additional contact time spent with print and environmental ads (billboards, banners, “swoosh symbols”, blimps, radio ads, lunch room ads, t-shirts, etc.).”
The presence of TV and TV advertising is so pervasive that “literature is overmatched and has become a secondary media form. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when many of our students are unable to properly interpret narrative and expository print text forms…. (The) traditionally-accepted preeminence of the literary medium has been relegated to minority class status in relation to commercial mass media forms.”
Langrehr adds, “television advertising has evolved into the most omnipotent of media applications. Regrettable as it appears, our students may be learning more from television commercials than from any other informal or formal educational setting.”
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8. How Memory Works… and Doesn’t Work
We send out news releases, write speeches, launch marketing and advertising campaigns, and then what?
How much do we remember? And how much of what we do remember do we remember correctly? For that matter, how much of what we remember happening ever actually happened in the first place?
According to
Tim Bliss of England’s National Institute for Medical Research (http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/MillHillEssays/1996/memory.htm),
memory is not nearly as effective or efficient as we like to think it is.
“The fact is our memories are distressingly fallible; we remember things that never happened, and forget completely things that did happen. One researcher asked college students about an event in their childhood, which, as their parents con organizationed, had never occurred. One example was an overnight stay in hospital for an ear infection when they were five years old. After repeated questioning, one fifth of the students began to evolve a memory of this event, usually based on memories of unrelated actual events, which could be appropriated into this false hospital-based history. Another psychologist kept a personal diary for six years, noting the events of each day. At the end of this period, he re-read the events he had recorded in the first year, and found he could remember nothing at all about one third of them.
“So episodic memories which certainly enter the long-term memory stream can be wholly forgotten, either because they were never consolidated into long-term memory or because they are buried so deep in the long-term memory store that they are effectively irretrievable.”
9. How Memory Works… and Doesn’t Work
While we don’t
always remember what happened, we are more likely to remember things that caused an
emotional reaction.
Stress is also a factor.
While mild
stress levels have been shown to improve our ability to remember things, too much stress
blocks it.
Those events, which are in some way emotionally arousing or stressful, are stored in the brain more efficiently and therefore are easier to get access to—to remember.
“In a recent experiment,” Bliss writes, “volunteers were read one of two stories, which had the same beginning—a boy and his mother leaving home to visit the boy’s father, a surgeon at a local hospital—and the same ending—the boy leaves the hospital, with his parents.
“The middle part of the story was different.
“In one case the boy’s father shows him around the operating theatre and talks to him about his work. In the other the boy is run over on the way to the hospital, and emergency surgery has to be carried out in his father’s theatre. The volunteers were tested 24 hours later. Recall of the beginning and end of the story was the same for both groups, but recall of the middle section was better in the group that had been read the emotionally loaded version. If, however, the volunteers were given a drug which blocks the effect of emotional stress before being read the story the difference between the two groups disappeared; the drug, in other words, had selectively blocked memory of the emotionally arousing episodes.”
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10. The Science of Memory
Why does repeating something and associating it with something else—like a name with a face—make it easier to learn?
As Dr. George Johnson writes in On Science, found at (http://www.txtwrite.com/Onscience/Articles/repitionlearn.html),
recent advances
in understanding the molecular basis of learning by
“Neurobiologists have long known that learning takes place when new connections are made between brain nerve cells. Tsien’s great advance was to prove that special communications channels in the nerve cells of our brains called NMDA receptors produce associative learning by facilitating the process of making new connections.
Tsien found that altering a key subunit of mouse NMDA receptors made the mice smarter. It turns out that the NMDA receptor is also sensitive to the activity of surrounding nerve cells.
“Imagine if I were talking with you in a crowd and say your first name. If you reply with your last name when I speak, I reward you with $100. Because it is the specific word I am keying in to, anyone else that happens to say that word at exactly the same time gets $100 too. Soon that person will be speaking whenever you do.
“Associative learning works just this way. When you say a name and see a face, the two brain patterns become associated because NMDA receptors strengthening one set of connections strengthen the other as well.”
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Assignments
1. US $12 a week |
A. If you are to be heard |
|
2. TV has caused… |
B. A molecular process |
|
C. The amount of direct
advertising spent on each person in the |
||
4. You had to keep repeating yourself… |
D. Literature to become a secondary media form |
|
5. Learning is … |
E. Than from any other educational setting |
|
6. Students learn more from commercials |
F. Increases memory capacity |
Answers:
1.) C
2.) D
3.) F
4.) A
5.) B
6.) E
Multiple-Choice
1. If you expect people to keep listening, you have to keep the message _______ .
a. Fresh
b. To
the point
c. Interesting
d. Both
A and C
2. When repeating a message, use _______ .
a. Metaphors
b. Phrases
c. Allusions
d. All
of the Above
3. A metric(s) for measuring a campaign message is/are _______ .
a. Coupons
b. Statistical
analyses
c. Warranties
d. Both
A and B
4. The two fundamental themes in marketing are _________ .
a. Repetition and success
b. Repetition and sales
c. Measurement and repulsion
d. None of the above
True / False
1. _____ Evaluating the message is necessary when measuring a marketing campaign.
2. _____ The average high school graduate has seen the equivalent of three school years of commercials.
3. _____ A marketing program is useless without qualitative results.
4. _____ Memories are always accessible if we look deeply enough
5. _____ Emotions help us remember better.
6. _____ TV advertising is the most omnipotent media application.
Answers:
1. T
2. T
3. F - Quantitative results.
4. F – Memories are very fallible.
5. T
6. T
Summary
As we have
seen, if you are sending a message, you usually have to keep repeating yourself in order
to be heard above all the other competing messages, and to make sure the message registers
with its target audience—and that they can remember it. We live in a
media-intense world in which messages are constantly being sent. We are bombarded with
them. Messages, especially the important ones, have to be repeated. You have to keep
the message fresh and interesting, however, if you expect people to keep listening.
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Test
1. _____ The two fundamental themes in marketing are repetition and measurement.
2. _____ Even mild stress shorts out the memory.
3. _____ Winston Churchill repeated words with magnificent results.
4. _____ An axiom of advertising might be “repetition bears repeating.”
5. _____ Computer spell check and grammar check programs are incredible boons to writers of advertising.
6. _____ The three rules of public speaking are tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then leave.
7. _____
8. _____ Surveys discover if the target audience remembers what the campaign was about.
9. _____ Without repetition, an audience will forget 70% of the message within a day.
10. ____ Without any emotional stimulus, people are more apt to remember the beginning and end of a story.
Answers:
1. T
2. F – It actually enhances remembering
3. T
4. T
5. F – Although they are of some help, they can help write boring advertising copy.
6. F – Then tell them what you’ve told them.
7. T
8. T
9. T
10. T
Bibliography
Wiebusch, Bruce (1998). Guidelines for Maximizing Your organization’s Public Relations Campaign, Bruce Wiebusch Publishers.
Rice, Ronald & Atkin, Charles (2000). Public Communication Campaigns, Sage Publications.
Schultz, Don & Walters, Jeffrey (1997). Measuring Brand Communication ROI, Association of National Advertisers.
Caples, John & Hahn, Fred (1998). Tested Advertising Methods, Prentice-Hall Trade.
Glossary
Omnipotent – All powerful
Fallible – Can’t always be trusted or relied on
Episodic memories – Memories of an incident
Learning Objectives
· Repetition of a message is the key to having your message remembered.
· You must evaluate your marketing campaign message to define how you are going to measure the campaign’s effectiveness.
Q&A
1. How do I use repetition when
speaking in public?
The three rules of public speaking areas follows: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. Use different illustrations to drive the point home. Use analogies, stories, allusions, interesting and provocative phrases. Try to stir their emotions a bit and keep repeating the central theme to your message. Use visual media as well – charts, graphs, slides – and make sure to use vibrant colors. You need to make your point at least six times to get retention up to the 90% mark. Without repetition, your message will be forgotten.
2. If
we’re doing a media campaign, how do we know our repeated message is successful?
First of all, research has shown that it takes five exposures to a brand name or product before they’ll commit to buying it and 30 exposures to a marketing piece before a person remembers it well. It is best to run the message often, using the same imagery and theme for the best mass media return.
However, to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, you need to have some pre-defined measures of success. Trying to tell which media has performed best will be very difficult, but you can do statistical analyses on the results of different responses to give you an idea.
3. Is
repetition really the best way to advertise? Don’t
people get tired of hearing the same messages each day?
The answer to the first question is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! There are so many competing messages that you have to make sure your message is heard and not confused with someone else’s. Television, radio, print, and electronic advertising bombard us 24 hours a day. The main thing is to keep the message fresh and interesting. When we learn something different ways, we tend to remember it better. If the message isn't repeated, it becomes background noise. Research has indicated that a message has to be heard 30 times for it to be remembered.
As to the second question, people do get tired of hearing the same thing the same way, so be creative. Add some emotional appeal and colorful phrases. That way the audience will not mind it as much, and they’ll remember it better.