What makes us remember?

As a student of marketing, one of the things I struggle with everyday is "how do we make people remember our message?"

I'm a big believer in the power of the story as outlined in Seth Godin's book,All Marketers Are Liars and this morning, I was reading Good Housekeeping (yes, you read that correctly) which had a little blurb on attention affecting retention.

I was reading GH as part of my right brain development efforts encouraged by the book A Whole New Mind I've also started recording and watching programs such as "Designed to Sell," "Design on a Dime," and other things on Home and Garden Television.

It seemed that the story is part of it and telling a good one leads to retention, but I figured there had to be more.

There's only one guy I know in my network who studies this stuff, Jon Oler, who got his PhD in '04 and is currently doing a post-doc in affective neuroscience. (I've discussed Emotional Intelligence with him in the past), so I called him up, interrupted his brunch with his siblings and asked the question quickly:

What makes us remember?

He said he'd call back w/more info, but in brief, he said, "Emotion. I remember where I was when the Challenger blew up, on September 11th. It's things like that that cause additional adrenaline to kick in in our brains and help stimulate memory."

So, the question for me, as a marketer, is what I can do to tell a good story that grabs people's attention and evokes emotion....all to make them want to buy stuff from me :-)