What the research actually shows

The memory advantage of bizarre over conventional material is well-established across decades of experimental psychology. What the research does not support is a specific multiplier — the article’s title originally promised “5x better,” and that figure is not found in the peer-reviewed literature. The effect size varies considerably depending on experimental conditions, and the most important boundary condition — which the article will address directly — is that the effect only emerges reliably when bizarre and ordinary items appear alongside each other. The advantage is real and substantial, but its magnitude depends entirely on how it is deployed.

Why bizarre information sticks: distinctiveness as the real mechanism

McDaniel and Einstein’s 1986 foundational experiments demonstrated that bizarre information improved both recognition and free recall — but their more important theoretical contribution was establishing what actually produces the effect. Bizarreness itself does not intrinsically enhance memory. Distinctiveness does. Bizarreness produces distinctiveness by deviating from typical expectations, and it is the deviation that makes encoding deeper and retrieval cleaner.

The practical consequence of this distinction is significant. A bizarre advertisement is better remembered than a conventional one not because weirdness is inherently memorable, but because the violation of expectation creates a distinctive, separable memory trace that conventional advertising fails to produce. In a media environment saturated with structurally similar conventional advertisements, every conventional ad fits the established pattern and receives correspondingly shallow encoding. A bizarre advertisement violates the pattern and receives the additional encoding resources that the brain’s novelty detection system allocates to unexpected events.

Craik and Lockhart’s levels-of-processing framework provides the second mechanism: processing bizarre information requires greater cognitive effort and more extensive mental elaboration. When encountering an unusual image or scenario, the brain’s schema-violation detection system flags the incongruity and initiates a resolution attempt — the viewer generates connections, explanations, and associations between the bizarre element and the brand that they would never have generated for a conventional advertisement. That resolution attempt is the elaboration, and elaborative encoding produces stronger and more resilient memory representations than shallow processing does.

The boundary condition that determines everything

The bizarreness effect is most consistently observed in mixed-list designs, where bizarre and common items are studied together. Some research suggests the effect does not emerge at all in pure-list conditions — where every item is equally bizarre — or that uniformly bizarre material can actually worsen recollection by removing the contrasting ordinary context that makes bizarre items distinctive.

This is the most commercially important finding in the entire literature, and it is the one most frequently ignored in practice. A uniformly bizarre brand identity neutralises the very contrast that makes bizarreness work. The effect is a precision instrument, not a brand identity. Skittles’ advertising is the most widely cited case of this failure mode: consistently bizarre to the point of becoming the expected pattern for that brand, it produces high engagement and cultural visibility but lower brand-to-purchase conversion than its memorability metrics would predict. The bizarre element is no longer distinctive against a conventional background — it has become the conventional background for that brand. The novelty-detection system habituates to it, and the memory advantage disappears.

What works: interacting-item bizarreness

The research distinguishes between types of bizarreness with meaningfully different memory effects. Interacting-item bizarreness — where two incongruent elements are linked through a bizarre causal or functional relationship rather than simply placed next to each other — consistently produces stronger recall than attribute bizarreness or isolated strange images. A bizarre scenario that weaves the brand into the incongruence through an interactive relationship produces a more elaborated and more retrievable memory trace than bizarreness that is merely unusual in isolation.

Old Spice’s 2010 “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign is the clearest real-world illustration of this. The bizarre scenario — a shirtless man who transitions instantaneously from a bathroom to a boat to a horse — is not merely visually unexpected. It creates an elaborate interactive narrative that links Old Spice to the bizarreness through associative interaction, so that recalling the bizarre scenario automatically retrieves the brand. The campaign produced a 107% increase in Old Spice body wash sales within a month of launch. The sales outcome demonstrates the retrieval advantage: consumers who had never planned to buy Old Spice spontaneously recalled the brand in purchase situations because the bizarre narrative had no competitor in memory.

The incidental learning condition

One of the most commercially relevant boundary conditions in the entire literature: the bizarreness effect produces its strongest memory advantage precisely when the person is not deliberately trying to remember. Under intentional learning conditions, deliberate encoding strategies equalise processing depth across all material, reducing the distinctiveness advantage of bizarre items. Under incidental learning conditions — where the person is processing material without deliberately attempting to memorise it — bizarre elements generate automatic novelty-detection responses that ordinary elements do not.

In a marketing context, the audience is almost never trying to memorise the advertisement. Bizarre marketing exploits the incidental processing condition that characterises almost all real advertising exposure, while conventional marketing fails to exploit it.

The inverse case: Dove’s Real Beauty campaign

The distinctiveness mechanism does not require that the isolating item be the bizarre one — it requires that the isolating item deviate from the established pattern. In the beauty advertising category, where fantasy, aspiration, and hypersexualised imagery constitute the conventional pattern, Dove’s realistic, unretouched presentation of ordinary women was the bizarre item. The campaign’s memorability is explained by the same distinctiveness mechanism that explains bizarre marketing: deviation from the category pattern produces novelty detection and elaborative encoding in the audience, regardless of the direction of the deviation.

If the pressure to create conventional, safe marketing — to blend in rather than stand out — is affecting your creative confidence or your sense of what is possible for your brand, that is worth examining. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.

A book worth reading alongside this

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy is the foundational practitioner text on advertising memorability, written by someone who spent decades studying what actually makes advertisements remembered and acted upon. Ogilvy’s research predates the formal bizarreness effect literature by years but independently documents many of the same principles — the memory advantage of unexpected creative approaches, the retrieval advantage of distinctive brand imagery, and the commercial cost of advertising that blends into its environment rather than standing out from it. His account of why the most creative advertisements are rarely the safest ones, and why the safest advertisements are rarely the most effective ones, provides both the practitioner evidence and the creative philosophy for applying the distinctiveness principle in practice. For any entrepreneur making decisions about creative strategy, it is the most practically grounded available account of what the psychology of memory means for the work of advertising.

Have questions about this article?

If any part of this article raised questions you want to explore further, courbot.co is built for exactly that. It is courben.co’s AI assistant, designed around the psychology of entrepreneurship. Ask it anything from this article.

If the creative and commercial pressures described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing or confidence, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP therapist finder: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. International: iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: McDaniel, M.A. & Einstein, G.O. (1986), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 12, 54–65. Craik, F.I.M. & Lockhart, R.S. (1972), Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Geraci, L., McDaniel, M.A. et al. (2013), Memory & Cognition, 41(8), 1228–1237. Von Restorff, H. (1933), Psychologische Forschung.