Using early-life memories as metaphors in qualitative research

One of my favourite movies of all times is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film tells a story of a young woman, disillusioned with her love story who decides to erase all memories of her lover and their relationship from her brain. She attends a special clinic where a memory-erasing procedure is performed scanning brain activity patterns in relation to certain objects.  And later, he undergoes the same procedure.

The idea of a technique that can precisely identify and erase memories from our brain reflects how we view human memory as if it were a computer memory saving and opening files. And, therefore, much of the scientific narrative is about the deficits and errors of storage and retrieval, making human memory a sort of researcher’s Achilles’ heel. Everywhere we turn it’s about faulty recalls and memory biases.

There is so much more to human memory than how it stores and retrieves information.

This goes back to Freud and Adler. The pioneers of psychoanalysis attached much significance to early life memories. Psychotherapy looks at early life memories as metaphors for the present.  Psychotherapists do not necessarily bend over backwards to make sure that memories shared with them by clients are accurate. They accept that these could form a spectrum ranging from true and factual experiences to complete fantasy. However, these memories are all treated as opportunities to reveal insight about the client and how they can be used for change.

The relevance for marketing and research

One of the most fascinating theories about the relevance of early-life memories for marketing comes from cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille. He suggests we make imprints in the brain, as children, whenever we experience and understand something for the first time. The stronger the emotions, the deeper our experiences will be rooted in our brains. These will create neural pathways and mental connections that we unconsciously rely on for decision-making throughout our entire lives including purchase decisions, from cars to coffee. He calls these imprints culture codes because they are largely culturally dependent.

Clotaire Rapaille’s claims about how the human mind works have been challenged. Still, I consider his model having great metaphoric value – I cannot judge the science, but I see it as a story meant to reveal something else hidden within. For example, it introduces a very interesting hypothesis via the culture. Early childhood memories are not just a window into individual psychology, but also into the culture (there is no scientific doubt that they are acquired in the context of a certain culture). It inspired me to use an inside-out approach to cultural investigation, which is typically outside-in as you look at cultural evidence to assume what’s inside people’s minds, by investigating individual consumers’ early childhood memories in order to reach to cultural insights.

But, if you prefer not to deal with a model that relies on debated scientific claims, there is another way qualitative researchers can see the value of early-life memories: as a projective technique.

Research shows that language is needed not just for sharing our experiences, but for encoding them too. Before the age of 10, young children are still developing their storytelling abilities. Their narratives are consequently neither complete, nor coherent but instead contain rich sensory details. So is their stored memory. The premise of early memory recollection as a projective technique starts from the very errors in the retrieval process: when asked for voluntary verbal memories from before the age of 10, people project parts of themselves to fill in or make sense of the stories their memories cannot finish.

Applying the concept to communication research

I find the application of early-life memories as metaphors in research for communication development highly rewarding. Advertising is metaphoric communication itself and implementing the results of such research can sometimes mean a literal translation: the central metaphor in people’s lives can become the creative metaphor in advertising.

Clotaire Rapaille uses a CODE (one word) to express the central metaphor that defines a certain category in a certain culture. For example, in his book “The Culture Code” he describes how the code for coffee is HOME in American culture. As a child, the first experience of coffee is the aroma that fills the kitchen when your Mom prepares breakfast, in the cosy domesticity of your home. He then shows how, in the resulting ad for Folgers, an American coffee brand, a young soldier returns HOME from the military and makes coffee for his sleeping mother. She smells the coffee, realizes what it means, and rushes down the stairs to hug her son. The ad has been a huge hit.

Tips and tricks for early-metaphor elicitation

1. Use a mixture of group and individual techniques. While instinct might tell you that exploring memories should be an individual deep-diving process (and you are not wrong),an initial group setting helps overcome one very important hurdle: the difficulty with which adults remember early life memories. The process can be efficiently jump started via exposure to and recognition of others’ stories.
   
2. Do not rely exclusively on verbal memories. Before the age of 10, young children are still developing their storytelling abilities, which means experiences at this age are not stored in strong narratives. Instead, these early experiences are rich with sensory details, and would be more readily accessed through smells, tastes, sounds, images and touch. So, use any opportunity to involve the senses.
   
   In one research we understood that the smell of a certain Chinese ointment was part of many early childhood memories on the topic. As that same ointment was still available in some pharmacies, in the following groups, we took out the ointment mid-way through the session and asked people to tell us what smelling those triggered. Of course, scenting the air in the waiting room before participants arrive can be a better vehicle to enable involuntary, time-dependent memories. There is even more that can be done in the follow-up individual sessions – for example sending people sensorial stimulus to immerse themselves with prior to their one-on-one session.    
   
3. Give people time. “Hypermnesia” is a scientifically proven fact; when people are given a task “to remember”, consolidation processes in the brain determine the respective person to be able to remember more and more over time. This is another benefit of the two steps research process – the initial groups prime people to start remembering and enable hypermnesia, and the results will show in the individual sessions.