Ad message recall is high, but brand linkage is low

Has the COVID-19 pandemic caused health care advertising to lose its potency? The 2022 National Consumer Insights Study (NCIS) may reveal just that. More than a quarter Americans report having issues with memory and information recall with even more inflated rates among millennials and parents. 

People’s brains are like a CPU. As they begin to overheat, they cause cognitive challenges. Not only are consumers losing their memory, but they are reporting losing their tempers as well. One in three noted lower patience levels when comparing their recent emotions to their pre-COVID composure levels. As tempers heat up, attention spans are cooling way down with three in ten Americans - or nearly half of millennials - noticing that they are holding onto their trains of thought for shorter amounts of time than they did before the pandemic. Similarly to the findings surrounding memory retention, rates of difficulty when it comes to concentration or paying attention soar among parents and millennials. 

Several years of often COVID-centric health care dialogue in the media has led not only to more advertising being seen from health care organizations, but also more focus on the messaging itself. Just over one-third of Americans agreed that even if they remember an advertisement, they find it difficult to remember which health care organization the ad came from.

As cognitive processing skills and advertisement recall continue to sink, marketing professionals are left wondering what there is to be done about the declining effectiveness of their brand dialogue and Rob Klein delivers insight on what consumers are looking for. People are able to remember the ad and even its script, but they struggle to remember whose words they are. Health care has become a low-attention category. People don’t take as much time to be choosy with their health care as they used to; they want to know if a brand can give them the care they need, when, where, how and with whom they want it. 

The button for a hard reset on advertising needs to be hit with a focus on advertising that is simple, repetitive, catchy, and where the brand is the star – think Geico.

Find more about COVID brain, access, and market disruptors in the 2022 National Consumer Insights Study (NCIS).