To say Facebook has experienced a tough couple of months is an understatement. The social media giant has been caught up in data misuse, fake news, spam and ultimately the loss of user confidence. As a result, its stock set a Wall Street record for single day value decline, and the company has launched a television campaign to stabilize its brand. Will the advertising work? I can’t really say, but I’d like to explain the neuroscience behind the advertising, and why it could.
Post-experience brand advertising serves one important function: it helps organize our memories. Bruce Hall, a PhD from the University of California Berkley, explained how this works in his article, “A New Model for Measuring Advertising Effectiveness” in the Journal of Advertising Research. When we recall a brand experience, it is not like “replaying a piece of mental videotape of an experience.” Instead, our brain reconstructs memories by accessing different parts of gray matter where memory components are stored. “In the process of viewing post-experience advertising, a new memory is created, and when the respondent returns to the experience, it is framed by a new perception that corresponds to the new memory.”
Mariano Sigman, founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory of the University of Buenos Aires, explained it this way in a recent Forbes article: “Each time [memories] are evoked, they are slightly changed, trimmed, incorporated to new items that were floating at the moment it was evoked…and the new memory is stored again with all these changes but without a register that these changes have been made.”
In other words, Facebook wants to reinforce all the “good memory experiences” we have had with its platform, hoping to override the recent negative ones. This memory organization might work if the evoked “positive memories” can be seen in this revised brand experience. Only time will tell. Let us help you with your brand strategy. Visit the Services section of our website for more details.