Your Brand Isn’t Losing Attention
It’s Losing Memory—and It’s Costing You Growth
After spending millions on a rebrand, a B2B SaaS company commissioned a brand recall study as part of a broader brand audit in early 2024.
They contacted 50 people who had visited the company’s website within the previous two weeks and asked a straightforward question: what does this company actually do?
Only six could answer clearly.
This was not a media failure. The company had strong traffic, active campaigns, and consistent exposure. What it lacked was retention.
This pattern is not isolated.
Research published by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute in partnership with MediaScience, based on testing more than 100 B2B video ads with nearly 800 participants, found that only 36% of viewers could correctly identify the brand after seeing an ad. More strikingly, just 19% both noticed the ad and attributed it to the correct company.
In other words, attention frequently occurs without memory.
Visibility is no longer the primary constraint on growth.
Recall is.
Why visibility stopped being the growth constraint
Most organisations today are built to generate exposure. Content calendars, campaign plans, media spend, social distribution. Activity is measurable. Reach is reportable.
What is rarely measured is retention.
Ask a leadership team a deceptively simple question:
If a prospective customer encountered your brand last Tuesday, could they accurately explain what you do on Friday?
Not the positioning statement.
Not the tagline.
What you actually do.
When the answer is uncertain, growth slows in ways that are hard to diagnose, not from lack of effort, but from lack of retention.
Growth does not happen inside campaigns.
It happens between people who are not in the room with you.
The hidden cost of being impressive but unclear
Over the past decade, branding has leaned heavily on originality, expression, and differentiation. These qualities can attract attention, but they do not guarantee understanding.
Many impressive brands are still hard to explain.
When a brand requires context to be understood, it collapses under real-world conditions. The thirty-second conversation at a conference. The Slack message to a colleague. The distracted scroll between meetings.
In these moments, only simple ideas survive.
If your message cannot travel intact through a short conversation, attention decays before it compounds.
A functional definition of remarkable
Remarkable is often treated as a creative judgement. In practice, it is a functional outcome.
A brand is remarkable when people can repeat it clearly, confidently, and correctly, without assistance.
Remarkable means remark-able.
Making people able to make a remark about you later.
This reframes the objective of branding away from impression and toward transmission.
The test is not whether the work looks distinctive.
The test is whether the message survives repetition.
If someone cannot describe your brand in one coherent sentence the day after exposure, attention has already expired.
Why repeatability drives scale
Consider IKEA.
People do not describe IKEA using marketing language. They say something simple: you buy it flat, you assemble it yourself, it looks good enough, and it is affordable.
That description is not elegant. It is effective.
It travels easily across markets, cultures, and conversations. It does not require explanation. It does not mutate as it moves.
That is repeatability. And repeatability is what enables scale.
The same pattern appears in reverse. While IKEA demonstrates repeatability at scale, countless brands struggle because they have optimised for the opposite: complexity that signals sophistication but prevents transmission.
Their problem is not ambition.
It is message instability.
Where growth breaks
Most stalled growth is not caused by poor execution. It is caused by breakdown during translation.
From founder to leadership team.
From leadership team to sales and marketing.
From the organisation to the market.
Each hand-off introduces variation. Over time, the message fragments. What began as a clear idea becomes a collection of interpretations.
The result is familiar. Activity increases. Output multiplies. But momentum stalls.
This creates motion, not growth.
The hidden tax on growth
Message instability creates a silent but compounding cost.
When prospects cannot retain or repeat what you do:
Sales cycles lengthen because context must be rebuilt repeatedly
Customer acquisition costs rise because awareness does not compound
Referrals decline because customers cannot clearly recommend you
New hires take longer to ramp without a stable narrative to internalise
This is the cost of a message that does not hold once it leaves the room.
What fixing this looks like
One enterprise software company with a 40-person sales team discovered, during a quarterly sales enablement audit, that its reps were using 17 different descriptions of the same product.
After consolidating to a single repeatable narrative, average deal velocity improved by 19% within one quarter.
The product did not change.
The message finally held.
The question that matters
As organisations plan for growth, there is a more useful question than “How do we get more attention?”
What do we want people to be able to say about us, in one clear sentence, when we are not there?
If that sentence is stable, volume amplifies it.
If it is not, no amount of activity will compensate.
Growth does not reward louder brands.
It rewards brands people can explain.
Author bio
Arnt Eriksen is a brand strategist and founder of Conquer OS, a brand operating system for conviction-led organisations. He works with leadership teams to build brands that do not just get noticed, but get repeated.
