Now you see it, now you don't

Could you draw the Apple logo from memory? Could you even identify it if you saw it? A new study suggests the answer to those questions probably is “no.”

Eight-five UCLA undergraduates – most of whom were Apple users -- were asked to draw the Apple logo. Most people were very confident they could do it. But 84 of them got it wrong. Most of them even identified the logo incorrectly when they were asked to pick it out from a group of similar logos (as depicted above.)

The man who led this research also authored a 2012 study that showed most people couldn’t describe the location of a fire extinguisher in their office building, even though they passed the extinguishers every day for, in many cases, years. (Interestingly, these people could find a fire extinguisher very easily when asked to do so – but most of them couldn’t describe its location).

So in market research, it can very tricky to ask people to recall details– especially when it comes to things like product attributes. Our memory is limited; it screens out things that seem to be irrelevant.

(By the way…none of the logos above is correct. The actual logo looks like one at the bottom-center, but with the leaf facing the other way)