Brain Bombs for Your Strategy Comms

How Visual Language Makes Your Words More Memorable

In a pitch, the planning slides are the ‘appetizers’ to the main creative ‘meal’. That is to say, they are the ‘explosive tasty treat’ that signals that the presentation is going to be a ‘nothing-left-on-the-plate’ type of affair.

As cheesy as that may sound, the language I used above helped bring memorable visual language to life.

A planner’s aim should be to reduce their thinking to the one ‘sound bite’ that the client will remember and talk about later on.

We spend a lot of time getting to the insight, we should spend the same amount of time packaging up that thought to be memorable.

I am currently reading Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, a book about the art and science behind remembering. Closely following the World Memory Championships, the book gives some some great tips regarding how to make a statement memorable.

‘Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.’

So, what can we learn from this book? Here are three tips to unlocking the key to a planner’s best sound bites.

1. Concrete Nouns

Humans are better at remembering imagery than abstract concepts. Therefore, we should aim to paint a picture with the words we used to explain the strategy to better impact the client’s mind. Concrete nouns are things that we can sense: Taste, Sound, Sight, Touch, Smell.

Concrete nouns are things that we can sense: Taste, Sound, Sight, Touch, Smell.

For instance, let’s take a potential title I thought of to name this blog post, ‘How to Make Insights Memorable for Pitch Presentations’. Words like ‘insights’ and ‘memory’ are abstract nouns, so it’s not going to feel very memorable.

How do I come up with concrete nouns?

To get to concrete nouns and thoughts, firstly think about what physically embodies the statement you’re making out in the world. This would work better if I explained it, so try this:

What concrete nouns represent the feeling an insight gives? This could be: A well known person you could link ‘insights’, or an object (like a lightbulb in your head).

Which could’ve led to a visually descriptive titles like: “How to Make the Light Bulb Go Off in your Client’s Heads”.

For me, the first two things that came to my mind when thinking about the purpose of this article was two nouns related to the ‘explosive’ feeling finding an insight can provide: lightning bolts and bombs.

The great thing about these two words is that they have movement in them. They are not just static images, but something the client can visualize playing out.

The idea of concrete nouns, along with the visualization they provide, can be attributed to “the Method of loci”, a technique in which you associate the new with the familiar as a way of remembering novel things [source]. As marketers, we use a lot of novel words, so this method can be helpful.

2. Alliteration Aids Memory

Alliteration, as most know, is the concept of using words that have the same sound at the beginning in a sentence or title. So in our case, we can change the potential title to something like “How to Ingrain Insights in your Client’s Brain”, or “Brain Bombs to Bring to your Next Client Meeting”

We often associate memory with the brain, so the word ‘brain bombs’ or helps to start to tell the story of the statement.

3. Words that Rhyme

“By rhyming information, our brains can encode…more easily. This is known as “acoustic encoding” and refers to the ability to remember and understand something learned through hearing. When we see a rhyme, we break the words into phonemes — the first step in decoding a word. Essentially, we use rhymes to understand and remember a word’s sound structure [sources: Psych Central, Kolata].”

Rhyming also is definitely my weak spot, so thankfully there is Rhymezone. Quickly looking up “bolts”, I found “jolt, revolt, colt”, and with ‘bombs’, I got back ‘palms, qualms, coms, roms, hommes’.

I ended up just playing around with the words and got the following:

“Lightning Bolts in your Deck Vaults”…….

“A Brain Bolt, to Make Your Deck Jolt”…..

“Brain Bombs for Your Strategy Comms”.