Strategy for submission of articles to highly ranked journals I am working on a research project that all total will probably end up lasting about two years.  As the research progresses, I am writing articles about each new discovery/study, with each article becoming more relevant to current interesting trends (for lack of a better description).

What I mean by this is that in the plan for publications my group has, the first article discusses just the structure, dynamics, etc. of some new interesting carbon/silicon/etc. system.  The second article will elaborate on this for an even more novel, more developed structure than the first.  Then the last article will (hopefully) provide a deep new insight into how this structure can be used for energy storage/transport/etc.

As I'm sure you can tell, each article gets more interesting, and thus I think each article has a better chance than the previous one of making it into a more highly ranked journal.  Our current strategy is to submit the article to a succession of less prestigious journals (each getting rejected) until it eventually gets into one.  This way, it ends up getting into the journal it probably deserves to be in, and not something lower,  and there's always the chance it is accepted into a highly ranked journal as well.

However, I am curious if this is a bad idea in the long run.  Will editors remember "Oh, they already submitted articles to us twice and got rejected; what are they doing it for again?"  Will they be quicker to dismiss the next article they receive even though it is higher-quality/deeper research than the previous one?

Or do the editors give each new submission a fair chance for acceptance, with no memory of previous submissions?

I know some of you all are journal editors, so any insight you can reveal to me about your thought process would be quite appreciated.
I am not an editor so I don't think I can definitely say how editors treat this, but I suspect that if you keep sending manuscripts that are not appropriate to the journal, it won't be helpful in promoting your next submission and won't gain you respect. Consider the fact that you have to convince the editor why your manuscript is important in the cover letter - you don't want to keep sending a paper every week saying it is the most important paper of the decade. Even as a reviewer I can tell you it is annoying to review a paper that is clearly not suited for the journal (although maybe it is the editor's fault that it passed to review in the first place).

If you think your manuscript fits a high-impact journal, it is fine to try a few journals to increase your chances. But try to be sincere with yourself - many papers belong to specialized journals, and that is fine.

Another fact you might want to consider is that high-impact journals tend to get recognized experts in the field as reviewers. You probably don't want to gain a bad reputation in those circles. Second, the pool of experts can be pretty small which could mean that when you resubmit to a different high-impact journal, you will get the same reviewer or someone who already heard about the paper and is biased (yes, sometimes reviewers mention papers they review to colleagues).

So the bottom line is: it is ok to resubmit a few times, but be careful not to overdo it.