In every category, there are brands people recognise and brands people reach for. Framed differently: brands that register and brands that get chosen. Brands that made it into the consideration set and brands that are already in the trolley before anyone has stopped to think.
The difference isn't always quality. It isn't always price. And increasingly, it isn't even preference.
It's memory.
At The Edison Agency, we work with a proprietary framework called Edison BrandOrbit™ to help shape brands that stand the test of time. Born from the thinking of our founder Amber Bonney, a systems thinker who has spent her career arguing that a logo can actually be the least interesting thing about a brand. That the real work happens in the space between elements. That nothing operates in isolation.
I've been lucky enough to help shape Edison BrandOrbit™ into the practical model we run with clients today. A decade working in strategy will teach you many things, but the one that keeps proving itself true is this: the brands people grab on autopilot didn't earn that instinct through a single great asset. They earned it through everything working together, over time, without flinching.
Edison BrandOrbit™ connects how people think, feel and choose. It's how brands build emotional meaning, memory structures that last and momentum that influences real-world behaviour.
And in that structure, if Meaning is what captures the mind, Memory is what keeps you there.
Fun fact: the oldest written complaint in human history is a clay tablet from about 1750BC. A merchant, furious about receiving the wrong grade of copper, took the time to engrave his grievance into stone and send it to the supplier.
Which tells us that people have always cared deeply about knowing where things came from, whether they could be trusted, and whether they would get what they expected. Brands are just the modern infrastructure for that same very human need.
Even further back, ancient potters were stamping their work to signal provenance. Not for vanity. For memory. So that the person who bought their pot last season could find them again at the market. So that reputation could travel further than word of mouth alone.
The mechanisms have changed entirely. The instinct hasn't moved an inch.
Our work draws on research from some of the sharpest minds in behavioural science and marketing (crash course in memory 101 incoming).
Jenni Romaniuk is a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of Distinctive Brand Assets — arguably the most practically useful book written on the subject of brand memory in the last decade. Her central argument is incredibly simple: strong brands win by being easy to notice, easy to recognise, easy to remember.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, tells us why this matters so much. He identified two modes of thinking: System 1, fast, subconscious and emotionally driven; and System 2, slow, deliberate and effortful. Most purchase decisions are governed by System 1. People don't choose logically. They choose by instinct and familiarity, then rationalise it afterwards.
Dr. Rachel Lawes is one of the world's leading brand semioticians and author of Using Semiotics in Marketing, and she's the person who helps explain what brands are actually made of. Where Kahneman maps the decision-making mechanism and Romaniuk identifies what makes a brand findable, Lawes goes deeper into the raw material itself: the symbols, visual codes and cultural cues that communicate meaning faster than words ever can. Her work makes a case that many brand teams quietly overlook, that what people feel and see encodes far more durably than what they're told. The most powerful brand signals aren't always the loudest ones. They're the ones that tap into pre-existing meaning: cultural codes that already live in the brain, waiting to be activated. That's why the smartest brand building isn't just about repetition. It's about choosing the right signals in the first place. (And yes, Dr. Lawes is joining us on the Bite Big Podcast in Season 4. That conversation is going to be something.)
Strip it back and memory in branding runs on two engines: association and ownership.
Association is the link between your brand and an idea that already lives in people's heads. You don't invent the idea, you claim it. Repeatedly, consistently, across every touchpoint, until the link becomes automatic. Until your brand and that feeling are essentially the same thing.
Ownership is what happens when those associations become exclusively yours. Your Distinctive Brand Assets, the codes you protect and repeat, become the shorthand consumers use to locate you without thinking. A colour. A shape. A character. A sound. Something so unmistakably yours that it does the recognition work before the logo has even arrived.
The brands that get both working together stop feeling like choices and start feeling like instinct.
It's worth making a distinction here that often gets collapsed in practice: the difference between brand codes and cultural codes.
Brand codes are the assets a brand owns and repeats. The red sole of a Louboutin. The Burberry check. The particular shade of teal that belongs to Tiffany and nobody else. These are cues that have been staked, built and defended over time until they trigger instant recognition without any supporting context.
Cultural codes are something different. They're the shared symbols of society that arrive pre-loaded with meaning. A white flag. A red cross. The sound of a birthday song. Nobody had to teach you what these mean. They were already wired in before any brand touched them.
The most powerful brands do both. They use their owned codes to tap into cultural ones, so that recognition is instant and meaning arrives essentially for free. The work is knowing which codes you genuinely own, which ones you're borrowing from culture, and whether the combination is doing the job you think it is.
Most brand memory isn't lost dramatically. It erodes quietly, through well-intentioned decisions made in the name of freshness.
A colour softened. A character retired. A visual language overhauled to feel more contemporary. Each decision reasonable in isolation. Collectively, the codes that consumers were using to find the brand, the shortcuts stored in their subconscious, are gone. The product is identical. The memory structure has vanished.
This is the discipline that Memory demands: protecting what works, evolving execution without dismantling recognition. Consistency isn't a creative limitation. It's a commercial strategy.
Working within Edison BrandOrbit™ means building brands from the inside out. Not around what they look like, but what they leave behind in the mind. Our approach combines behavioural science principles, semiotic analysis and creative strategy to identify the codes that make brands findable, and build the structures that make them stick.
Because the best creative in the world can earn attention in the moment.
It's memory that earns the purchase after that, and the one after that.
Written by Calin Barker; Strategist at The Edison Agency
