Brand awareness can be described as the extent to which consumers are familiar with a brand. It is the ability of consumers to recall a brand or its products hence gauging how memorable a brand is for its target audience.
A powerful marketing tool to establish market dominance is brand awareness. Businesses essentially want consumers to recall their brand when a certain industry or type of product is mentioned. This leads to the consumers developing a natural preference for that brand’s product instead of others’. This formation of trust between customer and business then leads to lasting brand loyalty, which gives businesses a competitive edge over their competitors. Therefore, culminating in increased sales coming from a dependable target audience.
Brand Recall
While on the subject of brand awareness, we can touch upon one of its components, brand recall. This term refers to the consumer’s likelihood of recalling a certain brand when prompted with a product relating to it or any other association to it. Well-established brands with effective marketing strategies have a strong effect on the customers and have a strong brand recall. Brand recall is a qualitative measure of this recollection and is calculated as follows
Brand Recall Percentage (%) = (Survey Respondents who correctly identified or recalled your brand/ Total number of respondents) X 100.
The Importance of Brand Awareness
I’m sure you can already see why brand awareness would be so beneficial for the growth of your brand. Here are some detailed reasons why it is so important.
The First Pick
Brand awareness is a great marketing strategy to instill the presence of a brand into its correlated industry. The more people see a brand, the more inclined they are to purchase its products. This popularity bias drives customers to buy your brand’s products over the competitor’s when faced with a choice. The end goal would be to be the main brand that consumers think of when looking to buy a product.
Increased Reach
Using brand awareness, you can market your brand and its products to newer places and wider markets. By utilizing a range of newer advertising channels, your company’s outward reach flourishes, and before you know it, you will be getting more impressions and higher click-through rates. Different social media websites provide sponsored posts that crop up on users’ feeds and spark interest in consumers. Facebook and Google ads have a huge reach and can help get the word out about your brand to the wider public. Your brand can employ newer strategies such as collaborative projects with influencers and internet celebrities or sponsorships.
Consumer Data
Brand awareness campaigns cover a lot of bases and garner a lot of impressions over the internet. One of the most valuable information a brand can accumulate from this campaign is the purchasing behavior of potential customers and the target audience. With this information, brands can create customer segments and adjust the marketing mix accordingly to promote certain products and services to customer segments most inclined to purchase them. This optimization has proven to show results, with the majority of consumers making purchases from brands that show them personalized suggestions. Big companies, such as Amazon and Facebook, already make use of this.
Types of Brand Awareness
These are a few components of stages of brand awareness that can be classified to understand better how the marketing strategy works
Brand Dominance
The best of the best. Brand dominance is the stage of brand awareness where the consumer cannot seem to recall any brand but yours instantly. This exhibits the highest level of brand awareness where your brand has fully dominated the industry.
Brand Recognition
This is a type of brand awareness where if a consumer is shown a brand name, they can immediately recall what that brand sells.
Top of Mind (First Pick)
The first brand consumers tend to think of when asked about a product category. For example, when inquired about smartphones, most people would think about either Apple or Samsung.
Brand Recall
The ability to recollect brands when an industry is mentioned. An example would be the mention of the automobile industry sparking the recall of Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, etc
Visual Branding
Visual branding refers to the level of brand awareness where consumers can recognize a brand from visual symbols, colors, packaging, etc. Any brand that can be recognized without direct mention of its name has strong brand awareness. Some suitable examples would be McDonald’s famous golden arches or Pepsi’s signature red, white, and black color scheme. Symbols like these can be almost instantly recognized and related to their brands by consumers worldwide.
Brand awareness is a very powerful marketing tool that, if used correctly, can solidify a brand’s image in its industry.