At the time, my daughter Evie was about three weeks away from turning five.

Turning five is a big deal, especially when you’re four.

The assignments from Pre-K were to write the letters of the alphabet in lower case.

As we were driving to school one morning, she would say her ABCs aloud in order to get to the next letter and write it down.

This repetition was particularly important after the first five or six letters.

For each subsequent letter, she had repeated aloud the preceding letters.

By the time she had finished, everybody in the car had been verbally exposed to the alphabet over thirty times (she repeated a few as she lost track of what letter she needed).

This repeated exposure rings in my ears as I hear her voice traveling in her specific cadence of letters.

My three-year-old son also followed suit whenever the opportunity arose. He had succumbed to the earworm my daughter had started.

Let me note that had she done this on a tablet, she wouldn’t have needed to say her ABCs aloud as the next letter would have already been shown for her to trace. This is where analog learning is reinforced, by seeing the letter visually, then manifesting it from her brain to her fingers and onto the page through a pencil. Now, back to repetition.

Our brains need repetition to commit an idea from short-term memory to long-term echoic memory.

You and I learned repetition from an early age if bedtime stories were read to us. Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood… you get the point.

Without repeated exposure, sleep will erase the short-term memory.

Erasing short-term memory is particularly true with the abundant amount of ads that hit your senses each day.

Even with a strong message, a lack of consistent repeated exposure will fall into short-term memory and get forgotten.

When constructing your strategy, the cost to reach fewer people repeatedly should receive higher priority than the cost to reach more people inconsistently.

As Wizzo puts it, ‘It’s better to convince 10% of the population 100% of the way than it is to convince 100% of the people only 10% of the way.’

Repetition allows for Familiarity.

Familiarity breeds Confidence.

Confidence transfers Trust.

Trust wins you Customers who are willing to pay your price.

Give that last line another go – Trust wins you Customers who are willing to pay your price.

Trust comes from Confidence.

Confidence from Familiarity.

Familiarity from Repetition.

But then again, I repeat myself.

Just like the ABCs.

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