You Are Not Entitled To An Opinion. You Are Entitled To An Informed Opinion.

Most people remember Darth Vader saying, "Luke, I am your father." He never said it. The actual line is "No, I am your father." But millions of people who have seen the film dozens of times swear otherwise. This isn't a trick or a glitch in the Matrix. It's how human memory works, and if you're in the business of doing the art and science of marketing, this shouldn't stop you from being interested enough to keep reading.

This phenomenon has a name that you've maybe heard before: the Mandela Effect. This is when entire groups of people share the same false memory, with the same unshakable confidence.

• The Monopoly man doesn't have a monocle.
• Curious George doesn't have a tail.
• The Berenstain Bears were never spelled the way most of us remember.
• The Fruit of the Loom logo never had a cornucopia behind the fruit.
• Many believed Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. He died in 2013.
• A non-existent movie featuring Sinbad as a genie is remembered by many.

And yet we'd bet money on it, which suggests that confidence and accuracy have almost nothing to do with each other. Need some science to convince you? Ok, the science tells us memory isn't a recording, it's a reconstruction, meaning every time your audience recalls your brand, campaign, or message, their brain rebuilds it from fragments. And those fragments are shaped not just by what you said, but by everything they've heard since. Think of every competitor, cultural reference, and conversation contributing to your carefully crafted message as being quietly rewritten, every single day, by forces you never see. Yikes.

So what? Well, this means that what your audience believes about your brand matters far more than what you've actually told them. It means the stories circulating about your brand are just as powerful as the ones you produce. And it means the most dangerous assumption we can make is that our audience remembers us the way we intended. Ergo, the marketers doing great marketing don't just create messages. They work hard to create the conditions for the right memories to form, and keep showing up, consistently and clearly, to make sure those memories don't drift.

Shape the story people tell about you, or be certain that someone or something else already is.