The audience memory curve summarizes research on what an ordinary presentation audience is most likely to remember from the presenter's messages. In communication strategy, it is important to use direct approach in the beginning of a presentation. This is where the audience remembers most of the ideas presented. Use and deliver ideas in descending importance order. Leave the second most important message to last.
If indirect approach is used then the ending of the presentation should conclude the main idea as a solution.
The audience memory curve is important when planning effective corporate communication.
Famous quotes containing the words audience, memory and/or curve:
“Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)
“A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.”
—Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981)
“I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty.... Here was every sensuous curve of the “human figure divine” but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.”
—Edward Weston (1886–1958)