What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is a customer’s ability to recognize your brand in different contexts.
If you have strong brand awareness, consumers will be able to recall your brand name. They know you as the go-to brand in your category and can talk about your distinguishing features.
There are two parts to brand awareness – brand recognition and brand recall.
Brand recognition refers to someone’s ability to recognize your product. Brand recall is someone’s ability to remember your brand name.
Why is brand awareness important?
Creating brand awareness is the first step in bringing a new product to market or making a relaunch.
Awareness is the first stage in the well-known AIDA sales funnel. Once potential customers become aware of your brand, they start the buyer journey to the next step of your funnel.
Brand awareness is a crucial driver for purchase decision-making. Consumers can usually only recall between 3-5 brand names per category. People tend to only purchase from one of these top-of-mind brands.
If you want your target audience to consider purchasing your product, you must find ways to get your name in those top 3-5 brands they can recall. Awareness alone isn’t enough to drive someone to buy, but it’s an essential foundation for building a solid brand.
Some brand names are so ubiquitous their name now always replaces the main term for the product in everyday life. For example, Coke or Band-Aid.
How do you create brand awareness?
If you want to create brand awareness, your target audience needs to know you exist.
You can do this with advertising but should also use organic methods. Potential customers will research when looking for a brand to solve their problem.
To create this awareness, put your brand in the places they are looking. It could be through helpful blog articles they find via SEO, your social media presence, podcasts, referrals, reviews, or partnerships with other brands or influencers.
How is brand awareness measured?
To measure brand awareness, researchers conduct surveys and questionnaires.
They ask questions to determine how aware consumers are of specific brands. Two types of tests can measure someone’s brand awareness:
Unaided recall is when someone is asked to name brands in a particular category.
A typical question for aided recall would be, “How many brands do you know that solve X problem.”
If you have strong brand awareness, your customer knows you as a leader in your space and mentions your brand name.
Aided recall is asking how familiar someone is with a specific brand name.
This includes questions about the logo and packaging or what differentiates that brand.
A typical question for aided recall: “Are you familiar with (brand name)? What can you tell me about it?”
Measuring brand awareness by asking these questions helps you understand what affiliations consumers have with your brand and what it means to them.
As brand awareness starts a customer’s journey with the brand, awareness alone isn’t a metric to measure performance. Someone may be able to recall the brand, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they trust it and would want to purchase form it.
