What exactly is brand awareness?
Awareness is a cognitive process, and brand awareness is the first step in the process of a customer becoming aware of your brand, meaning it is of paramount importance.
In simple terms, it is the extent to which customers can recall or recognise a brand, whether aided or unaided.
Using big brands such as Coca Cola or McDonalds is an easy way to illustrate this; no matter if somebody has never tried a can of Coke or a Big Mac, they are still likely to know about these large brands. Companies such as these have a huge brand awareness, and are most likely a rather large part of consumer’s lives.
Brand awareness can enable you to cater your product to your audience, embedding it into their everyday lives and habits. It creates trust and association.
How is brand awareness measured?
There are a number of metrics which are used to measure brand awareness. You are likely to have used them yourself if you’re aiming to measure brand health. These are known collectively as Awareness, Attitudes and Usage (AAU) metrics.
These are some examples of AAU metric testing:
- Spontaneous (or unaided) awareness: A measure of how many respondents – expressed in percentage – can quote a brand name without any assistance.
- Prompted (or aided) awareness: The percentage of respondents who claim to have seen a brand or advertisement after being shown stimulus.
Surveys are typically used to measure brand awareness, and are carried out on a sample of consumers, asking about their knowledge of a brand or category.
Customers are not likely to proceed with purchasing a product unless they are aware of a product category and a brand within said category. Brand awareness does not necessarily mean that a consumer will be able to recall a specific name, but they must be able to recall it through distinguishing features.
A consumer’s ability to recall a brand can be a predictor of a brand’s success. Brand awareness is strengthened by associations such as a customer’s evaluation of a brand and their perceived quality of it.
To properly ensure a brand or product’s success, awareness levels must be measured across the entire life-cycle.
Although brand awareness is not a metric that can be specifically measured on a day-to-day basis, this doesn’t mean it isn’t something you’re thinking about regularly.
How can you increase brand awareness?
To ensure brand awareness, a content strategy which focuses on improving customer satisfaction and advertising should be a focus.
Establishing and maintaining a positive relationship with your customers is absolutely key. Ease of use in terms of your products, as well as excellent customer service are obvious ways of doing this.
Storytelling is a less obvious way of doing so. If you have an interesting background or a story behind the setup of your business/product that you think will inspire people – tell them.
Consumers are more likely to engage with and remember brands who are personable and approachable – they want something they can latch onto.
It may be a vague way of determining brand success, but brand awareness is definitely not one to sweep under the rug. It really is quite simple when you think about it, and hopefully the techniques you are already hopeful about implementing will aid you in increasing your brand awareness anyway.
