Marketing

Connecting Messages For maximum Persuasiveness

For messages to spread and subliminally persuade, there has to be a continuity of messaging so that people receive the message often enough to accept it.

There are three types of memory that we will concern ourselves with as they relate to subliminal persuasion.

Semantic Memory

The first type of memory is semantic memory. That is memory that is short term in nature, echoic and that is diminished by sleep and short periods of time when the information is not repeated. This short term memory must be impacted when you want people to take an instant action. The more charged the event around the memory, the more likely you are to remember what took place.
If a beautiful woman gives you her phone number, you are much more likely to remember it than a list of things to pick up at the store. But if you don’t write that woman’s number down quickly, you’ll lose it.

When you are creating messages that you want to spread and building big ideas, you must go beyond this short term memory and the only way to bypass it is through repetition. The more people are exposed to a message in a short period of time the more it moves from short term semantic memory into long term procedural memory.

Episodic Memory

Episodic memory is grouped memories, memories of things, times, or places. For example, you remember Disneyland if you went, but don’t have a moment by moment recall of what happened. You do have a grouping of memories that you relate and that create a certain set of experiences and emotions when you bring the episode in your life to mind. Semantic and episodic memories make up one of the two major divisions of memmory called declarative memory. Declarative memory includes those memories that can be consiously discussed; they tend to be facts.

Procedural Memory

Procedural memory is the third type of memory and also the second general division of memory. Procedural memory is lomg-term memory, where processes, skills, and procedures are stored. Procedural memory is also referred to as implicit memory, and is often not easy to verbalize, but the process and procedures stored can be performed without consiously thinking anout them. Strategies for making good buying decisions, motivational strategies, and so forth, are procedural memories.

Subliminal Sales Secret

If you want to get people to take an immediate action, you need to focus on affecting the short term semantic memory. Repitition combined with emotion, urgency, and scarcity will work to create an intense impact that will result in holding the idea in mind long enough to take a prescribed action.

When you want to condition an audience that may not have an immediate need for, or is resistent to, your product, service, or idea, you need to connect memories, ideas, desires, actions, and beliefs to create new conclusions, which become emotional desires and beliefs.

Once an idea becomes a belief, it moves to long term procedural memory, where beliefs are held. When you can create an event or situation that connects the belief or procedural memory to create a new episodic memory, you reinforce the long-term memory, and encoding messages that are accepted subliminally is very easy. When you present information that fits the person or group you are persuading, you implant below the radar; acceptance and compliance are much more likely.

Another memory key that you can leverage is expectation. We all experience information through a set of filters that we have developed and stored in our procedural memory and we view the world through these series o filters. We also attach the descriptions derived from our filters to situations, experiences, or people that tend to fit our expectations. So, for example, if I hold a belief that all skateboarders are not smart and cause problems. I’ll see all skateboarders through that filter and find the support of my belief and that filter, not the exception. If I do find the exception, I’ll identify it as an exception and probably view it as something that is going to change to fit my belief or schema.

Leverage the idea that if you present information that is congruent with a belief, with a procedural memory, it is much more likely to be accepted without conscious scrutiny. Reducing the need for critical thinking and encouraging acceptance is one of your overriding goals as a marketer.

–Dave Lakhani–