Most brands are not forgotten. They were never encoded.
Being remembered is not a function of how often you advertise. It is a function of how many buying situations your brand is attached to.
Written by
The Trivals
Ask a marketing team why sales are flat and you will usually hear a media answer. Not enough reach, not enough frequency, not enough budget. The diagnosis is almost always about volume, because volume is the lever that is easiest to pull.
The more useful question is different. When a customer finds themselves in the situation your product solves, does your brand come to mind at all? If it does not, more impressions will not fix it. You are not being forgotten. You were never encoded against that moment in the first place.
Category entry points are the cues that trigger a purchase. Running out of something. A friend asking for a recommendation. A deadline moving. A season changing. Each one is a doorway into your category, and most brands have claimed one or two of them by accident rather than design.
The work is unglamorous. List the situations in which someone realises they need what you sell. Rank them by how often they occur and how much they are worth. Then check, honestly, which ones your marketing actually speaks to. Most brands discover they have been shouting into a single doorway while five others stand open.
This is why we start every engagement with positioning rather than production. A campaign attached to the right entry point outperforms a better-looking campaign attached to nothing at all.