Neuroscience Knows Best: Vanity Numbers Work Wonders!

We write a lot on the subject of memorable marketing because that's what drives us: making your business easier to remember for potential customers when the time to buy comes.

Marketing is undeniably part art form, but there's also plenty of science underlying the artistry. Memorable marketing plays well with the brain, which is where neuroscience comes into play as a useful addition to your brand's tool kit.

And while we have a pretty good handle on how your customer's mind works, we've enlisted the assistance of the team at Software Advice, a company that reviews telecommunications technology, to explain how neuroscience can help you pick the perfect vanity number.

Neuroscience and Vanity 800 Numbers

Though some of this can be gleaned by simply putting yourself in the place of your customer, framing the process with what we know of neuroscience helps you come to a quicker decision. As Craig Borowski at Hello Operator explains it:

"Whenever a person sees or hears a new telephone number and wants to remember it, they rely on something psychologists call “working memory.” It’s where that “voice” inside our heads resides.

That voice has a specific tactic it uses when trying to remember a sequence of digits, such as a phone number. This tactic is known technically as a “phonological loop.” Most of us know it as, “Repeating a number over and over again in our heads hoping we’ll remember it.

As we all know, this is not a reliable tactic."

Knowing that this phonological loop isn't enough for customers, it's our job as marketers to help them out. We need to make that quickly lost collection of digits more memorable, which is where vanity numbers come in.

Help Your Customers to Remember

So what do we know about the brain and how it commits things to memory for the long haul? Again back to Borowski, who quotes memory expert Harvard University Professor of Psychology Daniel Schacter, PhD:

"For long-term memory to take hold, he explains, “you have to generate associations, link [the number] up with things you know, turn it into something meaningful—and then it can be retained over the long term.”

That gives you a lot of scope to start brainstorming words associated with your brand, industry, and even more abstract ideas like mascots, local landmarks, or the general problem that your customer wants to solve (1-888-GET-RELIEF, for example). Words, terms and concepts are more deeply rooted in the mind, making these associations the anchor to ensure that your marketing message stays right where you want it. And although they do tend to be the easiest route to high recall, it's not just words that are memorable.

Sequential numbers with a known area code - or local easy dial numbers, as we call them - also help customers to remember you when the time comes to buy. The important thing is to translate that random number jumble that you start with into something catchy and connected to deeper memory.

Memorable Marketing? Get Creative!

The last word on how to use neuroscience to create memorable marketing goes to Craig Borowski, summing up the research he worked on for Software Advice:

"The fact that we remember new information by associating it with information which we already know, that wasn't really surprising.What was surprising to us, is that the association doesn't really even need to make sense, it doesn't necessarily have to be logical.That fact suggests that companies can be a lot more creative when searching for numbers people will remember."