Brand lift is a metric used to measure the direct impact of marketing efforts on consumer perceptions and behaviors related to a brand. Said most simply, if content can increase brand lift, then consumer behavior will usually follow. And among all the components that comprise brand lift, memory is at the core of how brand lift is measured—if your content doesn’t make it into memory, it can’t influence behavior.

This means that memory is huge for content creators, and is important for several reasons:

• Ad recall relies directly on memory—if consumers can’t remember the ad, it likely had little effect.
• Brand awareness depends on long-term memory of seeing or hearing about the brand.
• Associative memory links the brand to values, emotions, or needs—key for building brand equity.

But here’s the kicker: brand lift doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not simply a matter of making sure your logo appears in your content or hiring a celebrity spokesperson. It has everything to do with emotion and attention. Emotion enhances memory, because events tied to emotions are remembered more vividly and accurately. Attention is necessary for memory encoding, while emotion makes that encoding more durable. And content that engages emotion is more likely to capture attention, which then increases the likelihood it will get coded into memory.

Like memory, attention and emotion also don’t happen by chance. There’s a science to capturing attention and emotion. That science can be based on the experience of your content creation team, but it should also be based on message testing research. In fact, the more testing you can do before you finalize and disseminate your content, the better chance your content will attract attention, engage emotion, make it into memory, and trigger consumer behavior. In this way, your brand can be lifted above the flood of content available to your audience, and ultimately make a meaningful difference to your bottom line.

That’s a KPI worth remembering.