When you first hear a song, you miss a lot of detail. You can’t decipher certain words, you don’t realize an interesting figure in the bass. Upon repeated listening, your mind can wander into the song, being more familiar with it and probing deeper into it. Marketing works the same way. The more one is struck by a marketing tactic, the deeper it digs.

Walk into a bakery. The smell will take you to wonderful memories. But if you work in a bakery, by the end of the day, you don’t smell the bakery smell anymore. Upon repeated exposure, your mind shuts off any reaction to the stimuli. Marketing works the same way. The more one is struck by a marketing tactic, the less it is noticed.

Somewhere on the bell curve of reaction is a perfect balance – seen enough to be noticed, not enough to be ignored. Red sky sunsets are beautiful. But if our sky were always red and some sunsets grey, grey sunsets would be the standout. How can you be the standout sunset?

Always repeat your message in marketing, be it on posters, giveaways, mailing, or whatever. You never know who simply wasn’t looking or paying attention the first time and caught it the next. Repetition ensures notice. Repetition ensures notice.

However, sooner or later, repetition becomes something unwanted. In an email campaign, it is soon spam. A quick run to the references online tells us the word “spam” originally did not mean repeated postings or such. It meant Self Promoting Automated Mailing. However, early pioneers in the illustrious field of internet marketing overused this simple mass mailing device, and “self-promotion” rapidly became synonymous with “over-promotion”.

Self-promotion is fairly expected in this world and not really looked down upon, until one becomes the nuisance who posts to the same bbs the same messages, and then wonders why no one responds, even though that post has been forced to the top of the bbs more times than Ozzy curses in a half hour.

Luckily for you, a lot of people have spent a lot of time and money researching just this kind of thing, so you don’t have to figure it out yourself. And due to the fact that I have been forced to learn this stuff for my job, I feel compelled to force it onto you.

There are a lot of facts and research to take into consideration: