Why We Remember

The first time you met your life partner.  Birth of your child.  The destruction and death of 9/11/2001. They are seared into your memory. 

Dr. Eric Kandel was awarded the 2000 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for identifying how the brain forms long-term memories.  He showed that facts like your phone number, address, and your social security number are remembered for decades because their constant use strengthens connections between neurons.

Emotional memories supercharge this effect.   Emotions tag experiences as valuable and are stored in the brain without the need for repetition.  Think of a new experience as a soccer ball sitting inside your brain.  The brain is wet so the soccer ball is slippery and hard to pick up.  Emotions are like spikes sticking out of the soccer ball with grippy handles.  Even when wet, the handles make the soccer ball easy to pick up.  The larger the emotional spikes on the soccer ball, the easier it is to pull memories from your brain. 

Immersion puts emotional spikes into experiences. 

When content produces emotional resonance in those who consume it, information is more likely to be remembered after the experience is over, shared with others, and acted on.  

Data from our client Electrolux recently demonstrated how immersion drives recall.  Brett Townsend, Head of North America Insights measured Immersion while 63 people interested in Electrolux's appliances, including their Frigidaire brand, watched commercials. He also asked participants if they "liked" the commercials and queried them about details in them.

Traditional marketers think that if consumers "like" a commercial it will be remembered and thereby influence purchase decisions.   In Electrolux's study, recall of the commercial's information and "liking" had a negative correlation, -0.25.  In other words, the more people said they "liked" the commercial, the less they remembered about product features and branding. 

Immersion and recall?  A powerful positive 0.60 correlation. 

Brett's team used second-by-second Immersion to improve Frigidaire's TV commercials.  They worked with their ad agency to eliminate immersion troughs and ensure branding occurred during peak immersion moments to increase recall.  This resulted in a significant sales bump in 2019. 

Immersion's platform showed Brett how to put spikes into Frigidaire commercials.  As a result, people could easily pull information about Electrolux's products out of their brains and this caused some people to open their wallets.  Scientists at Immersion have proven the same impact on information recall for corporate training, K-12 education, and music. 

When your content matters, it needs to be immersive. Stop guessing and start driving up the ROI from the content you create. Our platform makes it easy for you to measure immersion in real-time so that consumers remember what you tell them and will act on it. 

You create content in order to influence future audience behavior.  Why not take a minute to schedule a demo and see how Immersion is helping others just like you and Brett.