Costa: Real coffee.
“Ask me my three main priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education.” The words of Tony Blair in 1996, ahead of the 1997 landslide election victory. There are many famous soundbites from Tony Blair’s time as Labour Party leader, but this one is particularly memorable. Why? Because it repeats the main message.
If you’ve purchased a Costa Coffee from a machine recently, it’s likely that a repeated message has again influenced you. On display at prominent locations where Costa machines serve Barista-style hot drinks, you may have seen posters reminding you that the coffee provided is very much real. The message? “Real beans, real milk, real quick”.
Again, the gist of the message is easy to remember because the important word is repeated. Even though this coffee has not been served to you by a person, it is very much a ‘real’ Costa coffee – presumably the same taste and experience that a customer would receive from a hand-made takeaway coffee in a Costa coffee shop. A pedant might point out that ‘real quick’ isn’t perfect English and doesn’t carry the same literal meaning as ‘real milk’ and ‘real coffee beans’, but the message is clear – especially to people glancing at the advert in a rush.
Hintzman and Stern (1978) demonstrated this principle many years ago with repetition of celebrity names. The basic principle is that the more a customer hears or sees the same words, the higher the likelihood of it being remembered. Sometimes communicators repeat key messages in quick succession, sometimes over a longer timeframe. For example, apparently many filmmakers use this principle, or the ‘power of three’ in particular, to ensure key plotlines are communicated to the audience three times.
So, two approaches to repetition that marketers can apply based on this principle: either repeat the message within an advert to hammer home the point (as Costa has done), or find moments to repeat a similar message across a slight wider timeframe (as Hollywood has done for many years).
