To understand the power and nature of name recognition -- and learn how to boost name ID for clients or organizations -- you have to understand how it works.
Our brains aren't computers that store facts in neat little rows and columns, like a spreadsheet.
We are bombarded with information, with more than we could ever remember, and our brains are constantly pruning what's important and what needs to get tossed out with the trash.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the brains of primates. Dunbar learned to predict the typical size of a monkey troop by measuring the size of the neocortex for that species.
The brain only has so much space devoted to recognizing faces and keeping track of social relationships.
Who's trustworthy?
Who's your friend and who's your enemy?
Who are the leaders of the group, and important to track?
Monkeys with a small neocortex had small troops of maybe five or six, because that's all their brains could handle.
The bigger the neocortex, the more faces and troop members they could remember and trust -- or not trust -- and therefore the bigger the group size.
Dunbar says humans have space in their brain to truly keep track of about 150 people. Do you know more people than this? Sure. You know their names and recognize their faces.
But what Dunbar is talking about is deeper knowledge -- about more than just remembering their name when you pass them on the street.
It's about knowing and remembering the relationships between those 150 people, which takes a heck of a lot of brain power. 150 times 150 is 22,500 possible connections. You need a powerful brain to keep track of all those possibilities.
Dunbar's Number is also, and not by coincidence, the same number as the basic unit of professional armies, dating back to Roman times.
It's also the typical size of Neolithic farming villages. When a Hutterite settlement hit 300 people, it split into two villages of 150 each.
So it's not a new sickness in our culture that people seem to obsess over whether Brad Pitt will ever marry Angelina Jolie, if Lindsey Lohan got arrested again and what the president and first lady wore to the state dinner with the British prime minister.
Our brains are hard-wired to keep track of the rich and powerful, because it's important to know what the leaders of your group are doing.
This means getting a name in the paper, on the radio or on TV isn't enough.
That name has to break through the natural filter of the human brain, a filter designed not to remember things, but to forget whatever it can to save space for what's essential for survival.
The name of your organization or client has to be relevant to their lives, and important enough that their brain decides to create space to remember it by wiping out some other name that they used to think was important.