Designing ads, you want messages about your products not only to get into your customers' minds but also to stay in their memory and in their thinking process. Without it, the advertising, for the most part, would be only a waste of money.
To do that the advertisers need to know well the psychology of their customers in order to find better and more efficient ways to their minds.
The advertising can affect the psychological cognition function of the customers. In its turn, this function, in great measure, can determine the customers' ability to perceive, remember and recall ads, define their decision making process.
An important part of the cognition process is attention. Attention is a concentration and direction of the human ability to perceive and understand things in order to act upon them. The main design solutions for attracting the customers' attention are motion, change, contrast, brightness, figure, background, color and, of course, size and place of ads' location. Due to the amount of the advertising information in the Media, drawing the customers' attention becomes a hard task. Receiving such a great number of ads every day, people can remember only a small part of them. Only about ten percent of this information is able to have some impact on their buying behavior.
The customers are very selective in their approach to attending and memorizing the information they hear and see. Only the ads, related in their minds to pleasure, or on the contrary, to things, which scare or worry them, are able to draw their attention and to be memorized.
Memory is a psychological process of memorizing, storing and reproducing information.
Psychologists discovered that people tended to remember things closely related to them or those, which had some matter of interest for them. They do not care to remember the neutral information and, consciously, try to forget and cast out of their minds unpleasant, scarring or negative facts. Thus, designing ads, include information, emotion and ideas, which would not leave your customers indifferent and make them easier to remember.
However, you may not leave out of your attention the natural tendency of the human mind to forget. Usually, people have to make some efforts to remember and recall things, although, they do not need to try hard to forget something.
Compelling the customers to remember your ads, you must use the design tools and the frequency of ads to contact them.
Thinking is another vital mind function in perceiving things by the customers. There are many ways of thinking, such as comparing, analyses, abstracting, defining, analogy, associations, etc. All these ways of the human thinking are commonly used in the ad design. They all are the forms of communication ideas and messages.
The advertising is all about communication. The associative thinking has become a very strong advertising tool. If you can create positive associations about your products, you will be able to make them much more attractive for people.
Taking into consideration all these three cognitive aspects of the human mind: attention, memory and thinking, there is one important rule to go by: keep it simple. A simple, expressive ad can draw customers' attention, be memorized and get into their thoughts much better, than the very complicated ones.
Let your ad ask people a question, capture their interest and, then, offer them a solution in the form of your product and its qualities.