In marketing terms, “making an impression” is all about gaining awareness in the minds of your customers.  Every time they see the name of your company, or hear a message repeated, it makes an impression.  The more impressions you make, the more likely it is that they’ll remember you. 

Memory leads to the formation of perception.
Perception leads to a greater likelihood of action. 

That’s a lot of lingo, there, but this is one area where first impressions count a lot less.  For marketing success, you’re looking for seven or more impressions before you can expect some kind of action.  (And that’s not just my opinion.  That’s an industry standard.) 

What happens is this:  With every repetition of a message, the audience recovers their memory of the last impression . . . adds to it the current impression . . . and stores it away until the “mental mass” of the memory is such that they feel comfortable and compelled to take action at a time that’s right for them. 

For example, the best-performing sales letters will always contain redundancies.  (They’ll also repeat what they say.)  That’s because we know from experience that people seldom read every word we write, much as it pains me as a writer to say so.  Instead, they scan the letter and tend only to absorb what’s written in certain hot spots – the first or last paragraph, the P.S. or a call-out text box in the margin or at the top of the letter.  Formatting also directs the reader’s attention to key message points with bold or underlined type. 

Every one of these tactics is designed to capture as much of the attention of your reader as possible, so that recovery of those impressions is more likely to lead to action.

People will say that they don’t want to hear or see the same information over and over again, but – behaviorally speaking – they seldom pick up the phone or make a decision after a single impression.  Since we’re in marketing, we build our strategy based on what people actually do, not what they say they’ll do. 

It’s an economy of scarcity, and the currency is attention.  To succeed, we try to make the best impression possible . . . again and again and again.