You build a brand people remember in two moves. First, get seen. Then give people something specific to picture every time they see you: a colour, a face, a phrase only you would say, a scene that keeps coming back. Pick one to three of those, keep them for years, and put them on your website, where most people decide. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute weighs fame against uniqueness in brand assets, and her verdict is short: “uniqueness is most important.”
That’s the idea under everything I do at The Growth Grove, my brand and web design studio near Moncton, New Brunswick. Said plainly: you have to be seen before you can be remembered, and what people remember is something they can picture.
What does “seen to be remembered” mean?
It means memory has a prerequisite. A customer can’t remember a business they never noticed, and they can’t hold on to one that gave them nothing to picture.
My friend (and client) Evan White has the best name I know for the end goal. He calls it market memory: “the cumulative recall a market develops about a company over time through repeated exposure to trusted stories, evidence, expertise, experiences, and third-party validation” (Evan White, “What Is Market Memory?”, 2026). In a July 2026 piece for The AI Journal, he lays out the path a company takes to get there:
Visibility → Credibility → Memory → Recommendation → Advocacy
I work the first two stages. I get a business seen at all, then make what people see credible and specific enough to hold on to. Evan builds what the market remembers. I build what it sees first.
He tells a story about soccer tryouts that I love, because it’s this whole idea in one scene. He wrote that “it wasn’t enough to play well. I needed the people making decisions to remember my number.” So he drifted toward the part of the field where the coaches were standing.
Plenty of small businesses play well. Far fewer play where the coaches can see them, wearing a number anyone could read from the sidelines.
What makes a brand memorable?
Difference. Psychologists have known this since Hedwig von Restorff described it in 1933: in a group of similar things, “the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered” (Laws of UX). And pictures beat words. Nielsen Norman Group puts it simply: “people tend to remember pictures better than words.” Its advice is to make visuals “distinct from one another and from competitors’ designs” (NN/g, 2024).
Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent years on how this works for brands. She calls the pieces that do the remembering distinctive assets: “non-brand name elements, such as colours, logos or characters that uniquely signal the brand” (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “Brands of Distinction”). She scores each asset on two things. Fame asks whether people link it to you. Uniqueness asks whether it points only to you. “Of these two, uniqueness is most important.”
Her Grid puts every asset in one of four boxes:
| Unique to you | Shared with others | |
|---|---|---|
| Famous | Use or lose: it already works, so keep using it | Avoid: it “will trigger competitors to copy” |
| Not famous yet | Invest: it needs repetition to build fame | Test or ignore: every new asset starts here |
Look at where a template lands. The stock blue and the photo of two people shaking hands are familiar, and they belong to everyone who bought the same theme. Even when they become famous, they point to nobody. That’s the Avoid box, by definition.
A small business starts with every asset at zero fame. So the smart bet is a unique one, because only a unique asset can grow into something people connect to you.
Should my website look familiar or different?
Both, and in different places. This is the twist most “stand out” advice skips.
Google’s researchers found that people form a first “gut feeling” about a website in under 50 milliseconds, with judgments forming “between 17 and 50 milliseconds,” and that they prefer sites that are visually simple and look the way they expect a site of that kind to look. Their advice: “Go for simple and familiar if you want to appeal to your users’ sense of beauty” (Google Research, 2012).
So people trust what’s familiar and remember what’s different. Both are true at once. The way through is to give each one its own job. My version: familiar where it helps people use it, unmistakable where it helps people remember it.
| Keep it familiar, so people can use it | Make it unmistakable, so people remember it |
|---|---|
| Menu at the top, named plainly (About, Services, Contact) | Your colour, the one nobody else in your field uses |
| Phone number, hours and address where people look for them | Photos of you, your people and your place |
| One clear next step on the first screen | Your voice: the sentence only you would write |
| Fast pages and readable text on a phone | A motif that keeps coming back: the shop door, the dog, a character |
Old templates get this backwards. They look like everyone else, which wastes the memory half, and many of them are slow and hard to use, which wastes the trust half. If that sounds like your site, read is my WordPress site outdated? next. For what happens in those first milliseconds, read how fast do people judge a website?
Why can’t I see what’s memorable about my own business?
Because you’re standing inside it. I had this exact problem for three years.
For my first three years working for myself, my homepage said “Bold Strategies for Businesses Who Give a Damn.” It sounded punchy, and it felt like me. It could also have belonged to any consultant with a social conscience.
I got away with it because my work came from referrals. People who’d worked with me would send others my way and say, “you should talk to Kate, she’s great.” Great at what? They couldn’t say. They knew the one project we’d done together, and my website gave them nothing bigger to picture.
Here’s the same problem in an example I use on my homepage. A pottery studio describes itself like this:
Quality pottery classes for all ages and skill levels.
After some digging, it says this:
We teach hand-thrown pottery to people who need one hour a week away from a screen.
Both sentences are true. Only one of them gets remembered. The second one hands you a picture: a person at a wheel with clay on their hands, their phone left in a bag by the door.
As a buyer, you skip the first kind of sentence in seconds. As a seller, it feels safe, because nobody could object to it. Nobody remembers it either. Safe is invisible.
Finding the second sentence is the work of brand strategy for New Brunswick businesses, and it usually takes someone outside the business to hear it. If you’re wondering whether your words or your website are the real problem, start with do I need a rebrand or just a new website?
How do I know if my brand is memorable?
Run the browser history test. It takes about five minutes, and you already do it every time you shop.
Open your homepage in one tab and three competitors’ homepages in three more. Give each one thirty seconds. Read them the way you read websites when you’re the buyer: impatient and already halfway to the back button. For each tab, write one sentence: who is this for, what do they do, and what makes them different?
Then go back to your own page and check it:
- Cover your logo. Could a competitor’s name sit on this page without anyone noticing the swap?
- Finish the sentence “the one with the…” If a customer described you to a friend, what would they say? If nothing on the page gives them an answer, you don’t have a distinctive asset yet.
- Find the sentence that could belong to anyone. There’s usually one in the first screen. Someone on your team already knows which it is.
- Look at the photos. If they’re stock, they’re in the Avoid box.
- Check the bones. Can a stranger find your phone number or your next step without hunting? That’s the familiar half, and it needs to work too.
If you can’t answer for your own page, your buyers can’t either.
What I’d do to make a business memorable
Pick one to three assets you can own. Look for things that are true and specific to you: a colour nobody in your category uses, your face, the way you actually talk, the place where the work happens. Test each one with a simple question: could a competitor down the road use this tomorrow without anyone noticing? If yes, it’s shared, and it won’t carry your name. If your budget only stretches to one thing, make it one unmistakable thing.
Repeat them for years. Romaniuk’s research is blunt about the starting point: “All new assets start with low uniqueness and fame.” Fame comes from repetition. You’ll be tired of your colour long before your customers have seen it enough times to connect it to you, so resist the urge to redo it every spring.
Put them on your website, where the memory gets made. Reviews and referrals get people to your door, and lately so do AI answers. Then people go look. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US adults, 54% said they visit a business’s website after reading positive reviews, up from 32% in 2019 (BrightLocal, 2026). The same survey found that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45%. If you want to be one of the names those tools suggest, read how do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT? Whatever sends people your way, the website is where they decide whether you’re worth remembering.
Foreword Films shows how this plays out. Connor and Andrew Buss have spent ten years making films for Red Bull, Anheuser-Busch and NFL Network, and for their tenth year they wanted a site that looked like the work. When we planned it, Andrew was clear about the job: “We want people to get a chuckle and remember it.” So we kept the copy short, because people watch before they read, and made the testimonials a joke: one is from Mom, and one is from “the future version of you.” You can see the whole project in the Foreword Films case study.
One more opinion, since this page is mine: I’d fix the words before the logo. A new logo in a common style lands right back in the Avoid box. A true, specific sentence on your homepage starts building memory the day it goes live.
Where to go next
These are the guides on being seen, and each answers one question in depth:
- How fast do people judge a website? The research on first impressions, with the sources people usually misquote.
- Do I need a rebrand or just a new website? How to tell whether the problem lives in the brand or shows up on the site.
- Is my WordPress site outdated? A fair look at WordPress and why so many sites end up looking alike.
- How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT? How to show up when people in Moncton ask ChatGPT or Google for a recommendation.
- What should a nonprofit website in New Brunswick cost and include? The same rule for donors and funders, who need something to picture too.
I write about this once a month in my letter, Unhidden in Plain Sight. If you’ve been playing it safe and you’re ready to be seen, that’s where I’d start.