With a well designed and executed advertising strategy, a business will benefit from increased awareness of their product. Many people can remember products advertised over twenty years ago. “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” or “Plop, Plop, Fizz Fizz, oh what a relief it is” 

Schollnick Advertising has named this effect “residual recognition profile”. However, residual recognition is not an automatic outcome of every advertising strategy.

For example, a furniture store sends out bi-weekly mailers featuring sale items in big splashy exciting artwork. After a few months, the furniture store has trained consumers to watch for the mailer with all the specials and they can often be seen walking through the store using the mailer as a reference. Any business owner would be pleased with these results from this form of advertising.

But when the economy begins to decline, the furniture store owner is no longer able to send out these mailers. The consumers, however, keep waiting for the mailer and their announced specials to arrive. They do not go to the furniture store because they have become trained to only think about shopping at the store when they get the mailer. 

However, if the furniture store had instead advertised on TV with the consistent and general message of: “Everyday Low Prices,” consumers would begin to automatically associate the store with low prices and would think to shop there whenever they needed furniture, not just when they received the furniture. The difference between the two approaches is their residual recognition profile. Even if the store owner can’t afford to run the TV commercials for a few weeks, the results will not be too disastrous because he has built up this general, top of mind, or residual recognition, among his clients.

Schollnick Advertising understands how important a strong residual recognition profile can be for a small business in an unpredictable economy, and so we strive to make sure that every media strategy is built around creating and supporting a healthy residual recognition profile.