Designing Messages To Be Remembered

Begin with what people remember and work backwards. That’s the secret to designing messages people remember.

We spend a lot of time designing and optimizing shiny fact-distribution machines. These take our facts and deliver them to the right people at the right time in the right place. They might get attention, but they don’t get stored in memory.

Because we’re not good at remembering facts. We’re exposed to too many too often.

We need to begin with what we do remember and work backwards to design messages that fit within this syntax.

We remember the unexpected. We remember stories. We remember images.

Want someone to remember a rule? Tell a story about someone who didn’t and the damage it caused. Have a beginning, middle, an end.

Want someone to participate? Tell an unexpected story about someone who participated.

Confound expectations. Paint a mental picture for your audience. [tweet_dis]Turn incidents into short, memorable, stories that distribute a message.[/tweet_dis]

And if you can’t find any stories, images, or anything unexpected about your facts, perhaps it’s not really a new fact?