We're more likely to remember someone is a baker, than if their surname is Baker

Brand & Marketing

This is known as the Baker-baker paradox. If we are introduced to someone named Mr Baker, we are less likely to remember the name than we are to remember the profession if we are introduced to a baker. If someone is a baker, we can create an image of that person pouring flour, kneading the bread, wearing a tall white hat.

We have already formed a lot of associations with ‘a baker’ - perhaps even multisensory experiences. We have smelled a bakery and eaten freshly baked bread. We can visualize what the baker does. The name Baker is just a bunch of letters. Names are essentially random syllables, a meaningless soup of sounds.

Perhaps, therefore, it is also easier to remember that Mikkel is a doctor and that Nikolaj owns a fruit plantation than the fact that Ib works in IT and Ida in public relations. It is easier to imagine Mikkel performing an operation or to visualize Nikolaj’s apple trees than to form an image of what it looks like when Ida ‘does public relations’.

Cicero, the Roman statesman, philosopher and orator, once wrote, ‘The keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and consequently perceptions received by the ears or from other sources can most easily be remembered if they are conveyed to our minds by the mediation of vision.’

Baker has flour on his hands. Baker offers only a capital letter. The profession activates a network of associations: ovens, dough, early mornings, warm bread, a white apron. The surname is a sound asking memory to please behave. No wonder one sticks better.

Business language creates thousands of surnames. “Integrated solutions partner.” “Operations enablement.” “Digital transformation capability.” Technically meaningful, perhaps, and visually equivalent to fog. Give the claim an action and memory has somewhere to grip. A technician finds the leak before production stops. One invoice travels from arrival to payment without being retyped. The person with the baffling job title removes the recurring fault that ruins Monday. Meaning now has hands.

Stock photography rarely solves abstraction. A stranger smiling beside a laptop adds an image while explaining fuck all. The useful visual belongs to the specific object, sequence or consequence the audience needs to retrieve. This is especially important for unfamiliar products. Experts hear the category name and unpack years of context. Customers hear random syllables. Show what changes in their day, which object moves, who acts and what disappears as a result.

Test the claim twenty-four hours later without showing the copy again. Ask what the person pictured, what happened and which detail belonged to this product rather than the category. If “integrated solutions partner” returns as a smiling stranger and nothing else, the language never became memorable.

Excerpt from

The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments

by Meik Wiking

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We're more likely to remember someone is a baker, than if their surname is Baker

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