This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Frequency
People don’t remember what they read, what they hear, or even what they
see. If they’re lucky, people remember what they do, but they’re not very
good at that either.
We remember what we rehearse.
We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over
and over. We remember our Uncle Fred, who came to Christmas twenty
years in a row, but we don’t remember his date Ethyl, who came just that
one time.
There are obvious evolutionary reasons we’re optimized for this. We
have to prune memories relentlessly, and the easiest memories to prune are
the ones that are random noise.
We remember the events we have photos for in our family scrapbook, but
don’t remember the events that weren’t photographed. It has nothing to do
with the act of taking a picture and everything to do with rehearsing our
story, the one we tell every time we see that picture.
Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and
stories that happen again and again. The familiar is normal and the normal
is trusted.
Marketers forget this daily.

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Because we get bored with our stuff. Our story, our change. We’ve heard
it before. We remember it. But we’re bored.
And so we change it.
Jay Levinson famously said, “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired
of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t
even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when
your accountant is tired of them.”
We can expand this well beyond ads.
All the storytelling you do requires frequency. You’ll try something new,
issue a statement, explore a new market . . . and when it doesn’t work right
away, the instinct is to walk away and try something else.
But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between
when we get bored and when people get the message.
Lots of people start a project. They give a talk a few times, maybe even
on the TED stage, and then they go off to do the next thing. They launch a
new freelance business, get a few clients, then it sputters and they quit. Or
they open a company, raise money and spend it fast, hitting the wall just
before the good stuff happens.
The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I
just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency,
it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust.