Your Brand Is Forgettable
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Written by Arnt Eriksen, Brand & Creative Strategist
Arnt Eriksen is a global brand strategist, creative architect, and author of Brand You Economics. Founder of Conquer OS™, he helps founders and companies transform brand truth into strategic power, building clarity, conviction, and legacy in a noisy world.
You don’t have a traffic problem, you have a memory problem. While most founders chase impressions, clicks, and reach, their brands vanish from people’s minds moments later. This article explores why visibility without memorability is costing businesses millions, how the “attention gap” quietly kills growth, and why fixing brand memory is the fastest way to turn traffic into real, compounding results.
Traffic is not what’s holding you back
Most founders chase impressions, clicks, and reach. The dashboards look healthy. Leadership sees activity. The board sees growth signals.
But Nielsen research reveals the expensive truth. Sixty seven to seventy four percent of viewers cannot recall the brand they saw in a digital ad 24 hours later. That means for every £100,000 spent on digital advertising, roughly £70,000 creates zero lasting memory.
Then nothing converts. Meetings go nowhere. Prospects cannot explain what you do when they talk to colleagues.
The real problem is simpler and more expensive than a traffic problem. People forget you the moment they look away. Your brand disappears from memory before it ever had a chance to matter.
This is not a creativity problem or a budget problem. It is a memory problem disguised as a marketing problem. And it is costing you every pound you spend on traffic that goes nowhere.
What is the attention gap?
The attention gap is the distance between being visible and being memorable. You show up. People see you. Then they move on.
Your brand enters their field of vision but never enters their memory. They cannot recall what you do. They cannot explain why you matter. They cannot repeat your story to someone else. This gap exists in every business. But it destroys founders who mistake visibility for progress.
Traffic measures how many people saw you. Memory measures how many people understood you enough to act. One is a vanity metric. The other is the only metric that compounds into revenue. Most marketing platforms sell you the first number. They show you impressions, reach, and engagement. These feel like progress. They are not.
Lumen Research found the average digital ad receives just 1.3 seconds of attention, below the two to three seconds required for memory encoding. Over 60 percent of ads are seen but never remembered. If someone cannot remember what you mean three hours after encountering your brand, that impression was worthless.
Why traffic feels like progress
Traffic gives you numbers to report. Numbers feel like evidence. Ten thousand impressions this month. Five thousand clicks. Three hundred conversations started. But here is what is actually happening behind those numbers.
Human brains evolved to survive information overload, not to remember brands. The brain defaults to mental shortcuts that reduce cognitive load. When your brand does not compress cleanly, the brain discards it. This is not a choice. It is survival.
Think about the last ten websites you visited today. How many can you describe right now? Maybe two. Possibly three. The other seven created impressions but zero memory. You saw them. You forgot them. They paid for your attention and got nothing back.
Research by cognitive psychologist George Miller showed working memory holds only seven, plus or minus two, chunks of information. When your brand positioning requires multiple chunks to explain, such as “We’re a B2B SaaS platform for enterprise analytics with AI powered insights,” it exceeds cognitive capacity and gets discarded.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s research on decision making confirms people default to fast thinking when evaluating brands. They do not analyse. They pattern match. Brands that require effortful processing to understand simply get skipped. This is what is happening to your brand when memory fails.
The multiplication principle
Every brand outcome follows a pattern I have observed across hundreds of engagements. Interactions multiplied by memory equals results. This is not a literal equation. It is a mental model for how attention converts to outcome.
Interactions are touchpoints. Every ad, post, email, meeting, or conversation. Memory is how clearly people understand what you mean after the interaction ends. Results are changed behaviours that matter to your business.
The pattern holds because human decision making relies on retrieval. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research shows people act on what they feel about remembered information, not what they rationally analysed. If your brand does not create emotional memory, just informational exposure, it does not drive action.
Here is what happens when memory strength varies.
Scenario one: Quibi
The short form video streaming service spent $1.75 billion on marketing. They generated millions of impressions. Six months after launch, they shut down.
Why? Because no one, not even users, could clearly explain what the service actually was. Was it mobile TV? Was it premium social video? Was it something else? Millions of interactions multiplied by zero memory equals zero results.
Scenario two: Google Plus
Google spent an estimated $585 million on marketing but never captured more than 0.5 percent market share.
The positioning was derivative, “Facebook but Google,” which created zero memorable differentiation. Even Google’s own employees could not consistently explain why it existed. Hundreds of millions of interactions multiplied by weak memory equals negligible results.
Scenario three: Liquid Death
Now consider the opposite pattern. The brand compresses instantly. Water in a can that looks like beer. That signal is so clear that customers became evangelists without prompting.
The brand grew to $130 million in revenue and a $700 million valuation largely through word of mouth because memory was perfect from day one. Fewer initial interactions multiplied by perfect memory equals exponential results.
Most founders optimise the wrong variable. They chase more interactions when they should fix memory first. When memory equals zero, every pound spent on traffic multiplies to nothing.
What happens when memory fails
Memory failure shows up in three ways that bottleneck growth.
Your team restarts from scratch
Your narrative lives in your head. When someone asks your team to explain the brand, they each tell different stories. Sales pitches differently than marketing. Marketing positions differently than product. Product explains differently than customer success.
Every department interprets the brand through its own lens because no precise, repeatable positioning exists. New hires spend months figuring out what the company actually means. This is not a training problem. It is a clarity problem.
Research by Marq found that brand inconsistency reduces employee productivity by 24%. Teams spend three to five hours per week searching for approved assets because there is no clear, memorable framework to work from.
When positioning cannot be memorised and consistently repeated, the business cannot scale beyond the founder’s personal involvement.
Agencies and contractors rebuild your strategy
Every external partner you hire starts from zero. They ask the same questions previous agencies asked. They rebuild positioning from their interpretation. They create campaigns based on guesswork about what you mean.
Six months later, you replace them. The next agency starts over. This cycle costs you time, money, and momentum. But it is not the agencies’ fault. They are working without a foundation. When your positioning is not precise enough for outsiders to execute without you, growth requires you to manage every marketing decision personally.
You become the bottleneck
Every pitch needs you. Every campaign needs your approval. Every piece of content needs your review. Not because you are a micromanager. Because you are the only person who knows what the brand actually means.
Your calendar fills with meetings where you repeat the same information. Your team waits for your input before moving forward. Growth stalls because nothing happens without you. This does not scale. You cannot clone yourself. The business plateaus at the limit of your personal bandwidth.
How to know if you have this problem
Most founders do not realise memory has failed until growth mysteriously stops. Here is how to diagnose it now.
The five person test
Pick five people who know your business well. Customers, team members, advisors, or partners. Ask each person individually, “If someone asked you what I am known for, what would you say?”
Do not correct them. Do not guide them. Just listen. If all five answers match, you have memory. If the answers vary, you have a memory problem. This test reveals whether your positioning has compressed into a clear, repeatable signal or remains fuzzy and open to interpretation.
Warning signs to watch
Your conversion rates stay flat even as traffic increases: This means more people see you but do not understand you enough to act. Analysis of our client base shows companies with unclear positioning see conversion rates plateau at two to three percent, regardless of traffic volume.
Prospects ask, “What do you actually do?” even after reading your website: This means your positioning did not create memory.
Your team cannot pitch without pulling up slides: This means the story has not compressed into something memorable. Research on working memory by Baddeley and Hitch shows the phonological loop, the part that holds verbal information, can store roughly seven plus or minus two units or about two seconds of speech. If your positioning takes longer to state than that, it exceeds cognitive capacity.
Sales cycles lengthen because prospects need multiple touchpoints to understand what you offer: This indicates that memory formation is slow or impaired.
Referrals struggle to explain why they referred you: This means even happy customers cannot compress your value into a clear signal.
Why memory compounds differently than traffic
Traffic compounds linearly. Double your spend, double your impressions. Memory compounds exponentially. When someone remembers you clearly, they become a signal multiplier. They repeat your positioning to others. They explain what you mean when you are not present. They create new interactions you did not pay for.
Strong memory turns customers into distribution. Weak memory turns customers into single transactions. Lucidpress’s analysis of more than 500 companies found that those with inconsistent brand positioning spend 23% more on customer acquisition while generating 23% less revenue than competitors with clear, consistent branding. McKinsey research shows that companies where stakeholders can clearly explain brand positioning achieve 1.8 times higher customer lifetime value and command a 20% premium in market valuation.
Consider Oatly. The brand became category defining despite being the fortieth oat milk to market. The positioning, “oat milk with attitude” and “It’s like milk, but made for humans,” compressed so cleanly that customers became evangelists. The company reached a $10 billion valuation at IPO in 2021, mainly through word of mouth.
Or Dollar Shave Club. “Our blades are f***ing great.” That compression was so precise that the launch video reached 27 million views, and the company was acquired by Unilever for $1 billion in 2016. Now compare those success stories to the opposite pattern.
Juicero raised $120 million to sell a $400 WiFi connected juice press. The positioning, “tech enabled fresh juice,” collapsed when Bloomberg showed the juice packets could be squeezed by hand. The brand became a punchline because the story was too absurd to compress into credible value. The company shut down after 16 months.
Or Pets.com, which spent $27 million on Super Bowl ads and created one of the most memorable mascots of the dot com era. But the sock puppet could not save the business because no one could explain why to buy pet food there rather than on Amazon or at a local store.
Mascot memory does not equal brand memory. The company shut down nine months after the IPO. Same category dynamics. Opposite memory outcomes. This is why two companies with identical traffic can have completely different growth trajectories. One built memory. The other built noise. Memory creates compounding. Traffic creates expense.
The three elements memory requires
Memory does not form by accident. It forms when three conditions exist.
Clear positioning
People need to answer one question instantly, “Why would I choose you instead of alternatives?” If that answer requires explanation, you do not have precise positioning. If five people give five different answers, you do not have precise positioning.
Precise positioning is condensed into a single sentence that anyone can repeat. Not a tagline. Not marketing copy. A true statement about what you mean that is impossible to misunderstand.
Marketing scientist Jenni Romaniuk’s research on brand distinctiveness shows that fame, being noticed, does not equal distinctiveness, being remembered correctly. Brands fail when visual and verbal assets do not link clearly to the brand name in memory.
Consistent signal
Every touchpoint must reinforce the exact positioning. When your website says one thing, your sales team says another, and your marketing says something different, memory fractures. People receive conflicting signals and store nothing.
Consistency does not mean repetition of words. It means redundancy of meaning. Every interaction should strengthen the same understanding of what you mean. Most brands change messaging based on channel, audience, or the content creator that week. This destroys memory formation.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve. Without reinforcement, people forget 70% of new information within 24 hours. For brands, this means a single impressive ad creates memory that decays rapidly unless reinforced through consistency.
Governable system
Positioning must be simple enough for your team to execute without you. If you are the only one who can explain what the brand means, it is not governable. If every piece of content needs your review to stay on brand, it is not governable.
Governable positioning means anyone on your team can create brand aligned content, pitches, or conversations without checking with you first.
This requires documentation. Clear examples. Simple rules. Most founders skip this step because it feels bureaucratic. But without it, clarity lives in your head and dies when you are not in the room.
The discipline clarity demands
Most founders will read this and take no action. They will return to optimising campaigns, testing new channels, and chasing the next growth tactic. The dashboards will show activity. The business will stay stuck.
Fixing memory requires stopping. Stopping the campaigns. Stopping the spending. Stopping the motion that feels like progress but multiplies by zero.
It requires asking five people one question and accepting their responses. It requires writing one sentence that survives scrutiny from everyone on your team. It requires checking every touchpoint against that sentence and removing anything that contradicts it. This feels slow. It feels like lost momentum. It is not.
Kantar’s 2024 analysis of advertising effectiveness found that only 9% of ads build long term brand equity. The rest create temporary visibility that vanishes within days. Brands with distinctive, memorable assets saw 2.4 times higher recall.
Clarity is the only leverage that compounds. Everything else is just expensive noise. If you want traffic to turn into revenue instead of vanishing into the forgetting curve, fix memory first.
Read more from Arnt Eriksen
Arnt Eriksen, Brand & Creative Strategist
Arnt Eriksen is an award-winning brand and creative strategist with over three decades of experience helping 75+ global brands—from PayPal and American Express to fast-growth startups—turn clarity into growth. He is the founder of Conquer OS™, a complete operating system for fearless founders who want to build brands that outlast trends. His work bridges behavioural psychology, storytelling, and commercial execution, proving that clarity isn’t optional—it’s everything. Arnt is also the author of Brand You Economics and a keynote speaker across Europe, the UK, and the US. His mission: to fuel the vision and craft the legacy of brands the world remembers.
