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Why telephone numbers don’t work. Why directories should be the exception and not the rule. Why your advertising spend benefits your competitors. Why you can now gain a marketing advantage. |
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George Miller founded the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University and authored one of the most cited papers in psychology on the limitations of our short-term memory. His research showed that the limit on the number of unrelated, non descript items we can hold in our short-term memory and immediately accurately recall is seven plus or minus two. He refers to an item as a number, word or picture. |
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When several items are stored in the short-term memory simultaneously their representations fight with each other for recall meaning new content pushes out older content unless older content is rehearsed and this is all happening in a few short seconds. Everything we see and hear becomes a representation in our short-term memory so in order to recall a telephone number consisting of six items we have to immediately and constantly rehearse it once moving away from the data source.
As you work through this page the words you are reading go into your short-term memory for a few seconds where you extract some meaning before the next sentence discards the previous. Later you will have a recollection of the subject matter but not the detail. If you put this in the context of prospects experiencing your advertisments it's easy to relate to how the same applies. |
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George Miller came up with a cognitive architecture called chunking as a method of reducing the amount of memory items take up. For example a telephone number can be broken down into groups of three chunks. Further research showed that the ideal size for a chunk was three pieces of information but Nelson Cowan determined that whilst this increased our capacity to remember a string of numbers to twelve it reduced the number of items we can accurately recall to four. Putting this into a telephone number and marketing context our telephone number is zero twenty, seven seventy five, four thirty seven, thirty. Four chunks. If someone asks you how your dog is today you’ve lost it. |
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The upshot is that telephone numbers used in advertising are of no value unless the prospect has the time and is suitably placed to take a pen at that moment and write it down - a very small percentage group of your total exposure. Prospects who experience advertising on radio, digital media, cinema and commercial vehicles are rarely suitably placed but you have given them an opportunity to remember a single chunk of information; your business name. However, this also raises an issue for you in marketing terms because they will search for you in a directory where you sit among your competitors. Advertising relying predominately on prospect directory searches is broadly weakened yet this is normal to the industry. Pairing your advertising with the reliance of directory searches should be the exception and not the rule.
The main priority of a successful marketeer is always direct response. |
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Test your recall here |
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George Miller carried out additional exercises in remembering words and found that more words can be remembered when they are highly familiar, occur frequently in the language or are included in a sentence natural to the targets language. We have taken these findings and created a cognitive architecture that combines natural languaging with a single chunk of memorable data and adapted that into a system for contacting advertisers. In its purest form it is a string that can enter the long-term memory almost immediately avoiding the interference process. |
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Our solution is 2findus.net where by entering a single word or 3 digit chunk into a search engine leads the consumer directly to the advertisers initial and exclusive sales platform. There are no competitors to distract the prospect and no means to search for them. There can be multiple communicators, audio and visual, to reaffirm the sales message and there are tools to measure effectiveness. As a mechanic one of our customers simply states; remember MECHANIC 2findus.net. |
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We provide advertisers with a differentiator and a major marketing advantage and the good news is a wrong decision isn't forever, it can always be reversed but the losses from a delayed decision are forever because they can't be retrieved. |
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Our solution is detailed here |
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