Intelligent Branding — How to become unforgettable.

After gaining attention, the next thing is to retain it. As you know, branding is the art of influencing the mind of your audience to align their thoughts with your brand identity.

Basically, you’re influencing your brand image to align with your brand identity.

On the path of retaining attention, you need an element that triggers cognitive reasoning within your audience.

This is done by using something that forces them to think.
It’s like solving a puzzle that almost always ends with “ahhh, I get it now.” In this story, I show you how to become unforgettable using tropes. This is part of the Intelligent Branding Series.

Let’s start by understanding what tropes are.

A trope is a figure of speech that say one thing while artfully and imaginatively implying another. We see this in copy all the time. Even the famous “He’s (cough)(cough) just a friend.”

It is saying one thing while imaginatively implying another thing. The reason this sticks so well is because it requires cognitive reasoning.

It requires you to reason and think from all past experiences whether you can uncover what others seem to be understanding.

It forces you to engage in reasoning. Because you feel like you don’t belong if you don’t get the joke.

It ties with the fact that people are more likely to do something if many other people have done that same thing.

Your audience lives in conformity.
Meaning they like similar things. At least a large part of your audience has something similar.

The point I’m making is humans do what others are doing just to fit in, whether consciously or subconsciously. It’s in our DNA.

At the point where you are forced to use your brain is where retention happens.

Tropes are used to create fresh memorable, and persuasive writing and some poets even spend hours just trying to find the right metaphor to capture the mood or sensation.

Tropes are mostly expressed with writing and spoken language.

To articulate it more clearly, retention has to do with causing or triggering cognitive reasoning leading to an “aha” moment.

This makes your content feel good to read, has a more sharing capability because many understand it with some cognitive reasoning.

There are three types of tropes: Irony, Metaphor, Euphemism

Irony

It refers to a contrast between expectation and reality. There are three main types of irony:

• Verbal Irony: when someone says the opposite of what they mean, often in a sarcastic or humorous way. An example could be “Oh, I’m sure the algorithm holds weekly seminars on its inner workings for all to attend.”
• Situational irony: when the outcome of a situation is the opposite of what was expected. An example could be “a fire station burns down.”
• Dramatic Irony: when the audience knows something that the characters in a story don’t. An example could be in a horror movie, we see the killer approaching the unsuspecting character.

Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two things that are not alike in a way that reveals a hidden similarity. It doesn’t use “like” or “as” but directly compares them. An example and, pun very much intended, could be “she is my sunshine.”

Euphemism

A euphemism is a mild or indirect expression used in place of one considered too harsh or blunt. An example is using “let someone go” instead of “fired.”

You see euphemism in ads all the time. Majority of ads never use direct language. Applying this to your brand would be wild.

Designers are probably asking; how do I use this in design? I talk about that here.

In design, you create a trope by creating curiosity, like an actual visual puzzle. This causes the viewer to engage in some cognitive reasoning keeping that visual and your name in mind. Which is the purpose of reading this story.

By the time you’ll be done reading this, you might go away with some tropes and attribute it to me (Tifu Kelison) or one random medium writer.

Now that all of that is out of the way, let's get into some examples.

Using self-deprecating humor to promote a product:

A company known for complicated software could release a user-friendly version with the tagline: “Finally, software even we can understand!”

This is humorous and if you’ve used a bad software before, this would get your attention and actually retain it since you have to get the new software.

Playing on product flaws in a humorous way:

Consider an Ad for a stain removal product: “We can’t promise you’ll avoid spills, but we can promise they’ll disappear!”

This acknowledges the inevitable mess while highlighting the product’s benefit. Telling the truth in a playful way (kind of turns it into a strength, your ability to tell the truth)

Downplaying (extension of what’s above):

You could downplay a product’s incredible features for humorous effect, creating intrigue and inviting exploration. For example, “this new phone takes ‘decent pictures’ to a whole new level.” This is actually implying that the pictures are actually fantastic.

A visual example.

Source

I talk more about the ad above here.

I would love to continue showing you examples, but it’s important that you start using this immediately. So, I implore you creator! Go and cause people to think about stuff they wouldn’t think of.