‘Pictorial superiority’ and the unforgettable brand
“We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.”
So says John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist in his best selling book Brain Rules.[1] The immediate takeaway for your website and social media: use visuals, liberally, don’t settle just for text.
This post will explain why that is. And how the science shows that visuals are a key to more visitors, to more engagement, and to more leads and sales.
Yes, unique and effective graphics, video and other visuals are yet another layer of effort in the journey to create powerful and beautiful content. But it’s an effort that pays off in a major way.
Visuals create a post that is far more memorable. Hungry Monster design team works as an integral part of all content creation.
Citing both contemporary science and evolutionary history, Medina is blunt:
“Put simply, the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized—and recalled.”
A team of perceptual biologists at MIT agrees and shows that visuals can be recalled not just after a few minutes, but as much as months later:
”People have a remarkable ability to remember particular images in long-term memory ...We do not just remember the gist of a picture, but we are able to recognize which precise image we saw and some of its details [2].”
This feature of the human brain, called pictorial superiority, is profoundly driven by the brain’s physiological makeup. Over half the neural circuitry in the human brain is devoted to processing visual information, says Medina.
A picture only is nearly as memorable as text with an image. Though it lacks the nuance and detail of text, it is well to keep this in mind.
Why is that? The answer is simple historically: survival.
“Our evolutionary history was never dominated by books or email or text messages. It was dominated by trees and saber-toothed tigers. Vision means so much to us because major threats to our lives in the savannah were apprehended visually.”
Our primal revolutionary experience also explains why animations and video are so effective in digital content:
“...things that threatened us in the Serengeti moved, and the brain has evolved unbelievably sophisticated trip wires to detect motion.”
The result: in our era, brainwork is like this:
We pay lots of attention to color. We pay lots of attention to orientation. We pay lots of attention to size. And we pay special attention if the object is in motion.
The studies by Medina, at MIT, and elsewhere show much that is useful for content creators.
On its face, there is a clear message that all our materials, blog posts, social media posts, case studies, should be coupled with vivid and unique visuals.
And we don’t mean stock photos, or images scraped from a Google page. Your users won’t have the patience for these generic images, which fairly shout about their origins, nor will you get much credit on Google or other search engines. If it isn’t obvious already, the shadow knows.
We can use visuals to make our brand memorable, and not just speaking of your logo (important as that is.)
The blog BloggingWizard.com, for example, uses a logo-like image as the feature image in all its posts. This feature image is carried over to every place the post appears, or is shared or is linked to: it becomes a kind of branding for the post. And this branding can expand even beyond the (very useful) “social media images” that are widely available in CMS platforms, such as the Social Warfare plug-in, and many others, for WordPress.
Given its attention by the brain, are we using color well? Is every call to action button the same color, a hint to the viewer as to its use? Are colors consistent across an entire website, carrying over to social media posts, printed matter and all our materials?
Your users will remember certain images more.
The MIT team also explores how that certain images are more memorable than others. They found that certain “global features“ contribute to the memorability of an image.
These include the prominence of a human face, image orientation, especially nearness, indoor scenes, and activity.
The MIT researchers include this image, which should, we think, give content creators a pretty good idea of memorability in images:
Visuals of any sort—graphics and drawings, info graphics, photography, data visualizations, video and other animations— take time and they take thought. They take a talented designer that is aligned with your brand messaging.
And that’s in addition to what we need today just to get seen on search, to get shared, to create a brand: audience and market research, keyword savvy, clear structure and other content strategy.
It’s well worth the effort. Devote internal resources to rich, well-designed, visually vivid content. Allow the time and mental space to get the work done right.
Or team with an agency like ours, Hungry Monster, or others who deliver unique world class content and design, like the all important visuals which our brain craves.
From the brain’s point of view: images rule!
Footnotes:
[1]. Medina, John, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press, 2008, audio 2013, Scribe publications, e-book, 2011.
All data drawn from primary references, and documented here:
http://www.brainrules.net/pdf/references_all.pdf
[2] Isola, P., Xiao, J., Torralba, A., Oliva, A. What makes an image memorable? IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2011. Pages 145-152.