How are brands being stored in a consumer's memory?

Today I'm gonna talk about a topic which involves 2 Bs: how a Brand is being stored into a consumer's Brain, or in a laymen term, memory. Interesting isn't it? YES thats right! Finally something a topic that excites you in my blog? Aww come on I'm not that boring am I?

Anyway, before I begin the topic, I'm gonna use a good example of a brand to describe how everything works. Here's the example I'm gonna use:

Prada, one of women's favourite brand of leather goods and designer wears

So there are basically 3 processes for a brand to be stored into memory: Encoding, Maintenance, and Retrieval.

Encoding

Firstly, when we encode information of the brand into our memory, we tend to form links with information already in our memory or we reinforce existing knowledge. For example, in our memory, we know that  the brand Prada produces leather goods and designer wears. However, one day there is an advertisement on Prada which shows the brand introducing their new product line: hand phones. So this is reinforcing that existing memory or information that a consumer has in his/her memory and now the consumer would be aware that Prada sells hand phones too. When encoding such information into memory, we tend to filter out many information which we came across, and only to take in things which are of interest to us as consumers.

Maintenance

The second process is maintenance, the way we store information into our memory and this is usually done by rehearsal or by repeating the information over and over in our brain. For example, now that we know Prada sells hand phones, we tend to share this information with buyers of Prada and usually they would be our friends and family. So by sharing this information we are repeating this over and over again, thus this information will be kept in our memory.

Retrieval

The third process is retrieval which is cue based, so we tend to use particular set of associations and cues which can be anything like colours, our five senses etc and this linked information can be retrieved and used as a retrieval cue for further information. Going back to the Prada example, when we think about wallets, we will think about Prada as their wallets are both trendy and durable and such information are linked and retrieved automatically from our memory. This process is crucial for brand managers who want to achieve greater brand salience. However, retrieval can be affected by mood.

The thing about consumers is that we tend to only store information which are useful, important, or relevant to our brains. We usually narrow down information which are extraordinary, and which we frequently use.