The old adage, "a picture is worth a thousand words” is never truer than it is today. We live in a visually bombastic society. Some have postulated that we see between 3,000 – 20,000 marketing messages every day. (That means during your waking hours of the day, you are seeing a new message every 2.9–19.2 seconds!) Those same people claim that we only catch about 200-300 of those daily messages. You don’t have to be a brain scientist to realize that most of what we see we don’t remember – at least consciously. And if you are in charge of marketing, you have a daunting task: capture people’s attention in a sea of other marketing messages that are trying to do the same thing.

The human brain does amazing things with visuals that we find impactful. It stores them away and can call them up again in our memory. All it takes is the correct stimulation and we remember pictures in great detail. Try this little quiz. I am going to give you a word or a phrase. In some cases, I will leave out words in a phrase. See what visuals pop into your head. Click on each to see if the visual in your head matches the link.

First, we will try movie clips:

• Planet of the _________, Statue of _________. 

• Darth ________, I am your _________! 

• Somewhere over the _____________ 

• The hills are ______ with the sound of ________ 

Okay, try these images of famous people:

• Muhammad Ali

• George Washington 

• Einstein 

• Mother Teresa 

Now, let’s try some brands of companies. See what visuals come to mind when you see these names:

• Geico 

• Energizer

• Campbell’s _______

• Corona 

In today’s marketing, the images you use on your web site, in your advertising, on your brochures, in your packaging, all make a huge difference. In marketing, we want to guide people to remember a specific image. Here are some images of the people I asked you about before. They are all the same people, but my guess is these are not the images you thought of when you thought of them.

• Einstein

• Washington 

• Muhammad Ali 

• Mother Teresa 

Why didn’t you think of these images? All of them are from a different time period in the life of each of the people mentioned than what we usually think of. Some are younger and some are older. Why is it we remember one image of all the visuals that are out there? It has to do with the way our brains work. Call it the law of the familiar. We remember what we have seen repeatedly. It becomes locked away in our brains, like a filing cabinet. When we hear a phrase, we pull out the image from the file. This is very important to remember when you are putting together the images that define your brand. Creating a multitude of images is confusing to people. Pick one image that best defines what you are trying to say and stick with it. This is one reason web site home pages are leaning towards one large photo. It gets filed in your memory cabinet.

We also tend to lock time up in our minds. No one ages past the image we have of them, nor are they younger than our memory file. We don’t think of Einstein as a brunette with well-groomed locks. Neither do we think of Muhammad Ali as a 70 year old man. If you are using people in your marketing images, understand that you will get two or three years at best before you will violate the memory file’s definition of what that person should look like and you will need to change your images. Styles change and people age. This is why the inanimate Energizer Bunny has been effectively beating that drum for 25 years, but in the same amount of time, Pepsi has gone through over 20 celebrity spokespersons, each lasting a year or two.

Never underestimate the power of one good image. It is still worth it to pick the winning photograph, a piece of dramatic video, or a dynamic visual design to grab people’s attention. It is imperative if you are going to make your marketing work. There are simply too many other marketing messages vying for people’s attention. Make sure yours is the one that gets filed in the memory cabinet.