How to Create Familiarity for Your Brand Products or Services

Most marketers know how important it is to expose their target consumers to their products regularly. Exposure allows consumers to build brand recall and can eventually lead to brand loyalty. Take this one study reported by ScienceDirect as an example. A group of undergraduate students from the University of Toronto was asked to taste and judge different fruit juices that they hadn’t had prior exposure to before.

The results of this study showed that the students who were exposed to a juice brand more frequently had a tendency to rate it better. From this study alone, exposure and creating familiarity with a product among consumers is shown to be incredibly powerful.

That’s why it’s important to include these methods in your marketing practices.

Of course, I don’t mean to bombard your target consumers with excessive marketing messages, ads, and other promotional material. That’s overexposure, and it will do is annoy and alienate your target audience. In order to stand out from competitors, you have to be innovative in the ways you create familiarity for your products. In this article, we’ll explore a few tips that you can use to generate that much-needed familiarity for your products or services.

Use sensory memory to its fullest power.

Sensory memory is the briefest type of memory that gives people the opportunity to obtain information from sensory stimuli, such as touch, smell, sight, sound, and taste after the original stimuli have ended. Don’t forget to use it to your fullest advantage. Triggering sensory memory in your target consumers allows them to perceive products in a certain way. When exposed to a product frequently through sensory stimuli (as in the study mentioned previously), you can help your audience build preferences for your brand due to familiarity with its product.

Repetition is your best friend.

Shopping lists, study questions, phone numbers—many consumers use repetition to remember things. Marketers can utilize repetition to keep their products in their consumer’s minds as often as possible. As with incorporating sensory memory, repetition paves the way for familiarity with a brand’s products, which can push consumers to choose over competitors.

Unfortunately, repetition also has a dark side. Many consumers can actually develop ad fatigue if they’re exposed to too many ads from a brand on a constant basis. According to Promo, as many as 77.4% of US consumers reported seeing too many ads from the same brand, and an even higher 78% opined that there was no excuse for the bombardment of ads. Repetition is only effective when done at the right time and place.

Create an environment of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is rampant in today’s world, especially through our media and entertainment sources. Just take a look at our society’s current penchant for the classic 80s era. In many ways, nostalgia is an emotional state as the consumer yearns to return to the past (“the good old days”). Marketers aren’t staying behind on this wave of nostalgia—and that’s because it works!

Through nostalgia, you can evoke feelings of warmth, comfort, and even affection since it draws from something that’s familiar to your target audiences. As Lauren Friedman writes on Forbes, using nostalgia in your marketing must be carefully planned out to avoid being seen as irrelevant. What’s important is to pay attention to what audiences are saying and maintain authenticity for optimal success.

Creating familiarity with your products is not a walk in the park. For these methods to work, you need to consider the emotional aspects of your target audiences and understand how their minds may process any information you give them. Remember you’re not the only one vying for your competitor’s attention. As such, don’t assume that your audiences will always choose your products for their needs.

By creating positive experiences and familiarity with your target consumers, you can ensure your brand is the one that always stands out from the crowd.