Creating a lasting impression

One of the ways the world’s most successful brands stay on top is not through innovation, but through repetition.

By Guy Cookson, marketing director, Hotfoot Design

Day after day, year after year, popular brands produce marketing messages that seek to form indelible cultural associations with their products.

These messages are spread far and wide using all the firepower brands with big budgets can muster, from social media and billboard campaigns to magazine and television advertisements, and everything in-between.

Repeating the same consistent messages is one of the surest ways a brand can cut through the noise.

This is how Coca-Cola muscled their way into Christmas, how Corona became synonymous with the beach, and how Kellogg’s took ownership of breakfast.

It is part of a process the writer Kevin Simler calls 'cultural imprinting.'

This only works, of course, if the meaning a brand conveys is broadly understood by others.

Smaller companies do not have the luxury of being able to change the cultural landscape by running high profile ad campaigns over a long period of time, but they can develop compelling stories about what their business means – and then reinforce those messages through all of their marketing.

As the co-founder of Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson, puts it: “If you want to leave a dent in the universe, you have to be willing to punch in the same place over and over and over and over again. “For every person who has heard your point or story ad nauseam, there’s a thousand new ones who never even knew you existed. Keep repeating.”