Brand awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of the two key components of brand knowledge, as defined by the associative network memory model. It plays a vital role in consumer behavior, advertising management, and brand management. The consumer's ability to recognize or recall a brand is central to the purchasing process because buying decisions cannot begin unless a consumer is first aware of a product category and a brand within that category. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but they must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for a purchase to happen.
Brand awareness consists of two components: brand recall and brand recognition. Several studies have shown that these two components operate in fundamentally different ways as brand recall is associated with memory retrieval, and brand recognition involves object recognition. Both brand recall and brand recognition play an important role in consumers' purchase decision process and in marketing communications. Brand awareness is closely related to concepts such as the evoked set and consideration set which include the specific brands a consumer considers in purchasing decision. Consumers are believed to hold between three and seven brands in their consideration set across a broad range of product categories. Consumers typically purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set as consumers have shown to buy only familiar, well-established brands.
As brands are competing in a highly globalized market, brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand's competitive market performance. Given the importance of brand awareness in consumer purchasing decisions, marketers have developed a number of metrics designed to measure brand awareness and other measures of brand health. These metrics are collectively known as Awareness, Attitudes and Usage metrics.
To ensure a product or brand's market success, awareness levels must be managed across the entire product life cycle – from product launch to market decline. Many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels, and if they fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level.
Importance of brand awareness
Brand awareness is related to the functions of brand identities in consumers' memory and can be measured by how well the consumers can identify the brand under various conditions. Brand awareness plays an important role in the consumer's purchasing decision-making process that tends to sustainable business growth and loyalty. Strong brand awareness can be a predictor of brand success. Brand awareness is strengthened by its brand-related associations such as the consumers' evaluation of the brand and their perceived quality of the brand. A brand has a strong position when first consumers have a frame of reference or goal they can expect to achieve when using the brand, and second a point of difference or an indication that their selected brand is superior in achieving the goal. Consequently, brands focus on improving customer satisfaction and invest in advertising to increase consumers' brand awareness.Brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand's market performance. Brands competing in a highly globalized market invest in global advertising and distribution to compete for consumers' attention and awareness. As the capitalism and global transport contribute to consumer behavior, many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels. If these levels fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level. In marketing planning and brand management, it is important to set objectives to promote brand awareness to motivate consumers to purchase a given brand's products.
People are attracted to brands that reflect their emotions, preferences, attitudes and beliefs. That's why the process of creating a brand leverages both heart and science. It requires organizations to dig deep into its reason for existence; explore and define the features and benefits of its products and services, identify its values and mission, and create a persona that makes the brand appealing and relatable to its target audience.
Brand awareness is one of the major brand assets that adds value to the product, service or company. Investing in building brand awareness can lead to sustainable competitive advantages, thus, leading to long-term value.
Brand equity
Brand equity is the sum of assets and liabilities relating to a brand, its name and logo, and the sum or difference is the value that is offered by the product or service or a company or the company's customers. For the assets and liabilities to have effect on brand equity, they have to be related to the name or logo of the brand. If the brand's name or logo changes, then, it can either have a positive or a negative impact on the assets and liabilities of the brand, with some of them getting transferred to the new name and logo. The brand equity stands on the assets and liabilities and it can differ from factor to factor such as, brand loyalty, brand name awareness, how a customer perceives the quality of a brand, and other proprietary assets such as patent and trademark. Research indicates that brand equity is a resource for a company to pull from strategically to connect with its consumer-base.Types of brand awareness
Brand awareness is divided into two components: brand recall and brand recognition. These types of awareness operate in entirely different ways with important implications for marketing strategy and advertising.Brand recall
Brand recall is also known as unaided recall or spontaneous recall and refers to the ability of the consumer to correctly generate a brand from memory when prompted by a product category. So, for example, a person is thinking about laundry and writes down Tide on their shopping list. Brand recall is a retrieval component based on the strength of association between a brand and other relevant information stored in long-term memory. When prompted by a product category, most consumers can only recall a relatively small set of brands, typically around 3–5 brand names. In consumer tests, few consumers can recall more than seven brand names within a given category and for low-interest product categories, most consumers can only recall one or two brand names. Competitive brand advertising can suppress awareness of other brands, as exposure to advertising positively influences brand recall.Research suggests that the number of brands that consumers can recall is affected by both individual and product factors including; brand loyalty, brand knowledge, situational and usage factors, and education level. For instance, consumers who are highly experienced with a given product category or brand may be able to recall a slightly larger set of brand names than those who are less experienced with a given product category or brand.
Brand recognition
Brand recognition is during the point of purchase when a person recognizes a brand and associates it with a product category or category need. So an example would be a customer seeing a Gatorade, associating it with a sports drink and putting it in their cart because their son has a soccer game. Brand recognition is also known as aided recall and refers to the ability of the consumers to confirm that they have seen or heard of a given brand before. This does not necessarily require that the consumers have to identify the brand name. Instead, it means that consumers can recognize the brand upon presentation, either at the point-of-sale or after viewing its visual packaging. In general people are more likely to recognize a brand than to recall one. It is 8 to 10 times more difficult to recall a brand than recognize one. For example, when you identify a brand you may associate that brand with a product category, but when given the same product category your memory may not trigger the same brand identifier.Top-of-mind awareness
Consumers will normally purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set. This is known astop-of-mind awareness. Focusing on brand awareness and gaining brand equity, companies work to achieve an increased probability that consumers will include the brand in their consideration sets.
By definition, top-of-mind awareness is "the first brand that comes to mind when a customer is asked an unprompted question about a category." When discussing top-of-mind awareness among larger groups of consumers, it is more often defined as the "most remembered" or "most recalled" brand name.
A brand that enjoys top-of-mind awareness will generally be considered as a genuine purchase option, provided that the consumer is favorably disposed to the brand name. Top-of-mind awareness is relevant when consumers make a quick choice between competing brands in low-involvement categories or for impulse type purchases.
Marketing implications of brand awareness
Brand awareness is closely related to the concepts of the evoked set and the consideration set. One of the central roles of advertising is to create both brand awareness and brand image, in order to increase the likelihood that a brand is included in the consumer's evoked set, or consideration set, and regarded favorably. Brand image is how consumers perceive a brand based on the various things they associate the brand with.Consumers do not learn about products and brands from advertising alone. When making purchase decisions, consumers acquire information from a wide variety of sources in order to inform their decisions. After searching for information about a category, consumers may become aware of a larger number of brands which collectively are known as the awareness set. Thus, the awareness set is likely to change as consumers acquire new information about brands or products. A review of empirical studies in this area suggests that the consideration set is likely to be at least three times larger than the evoked set. Repetition of a brand name upon a consumer's consciousness, for example through advertising, will make them more comfortable with a brand. By increasing awareness, presumably consumers keep a brand in their evoked set, increasing the probability of a brand's purchase. However, awareness alone is not sufficient to trigger a purchase, consumers also need to be favorably disposed to a brand before it will be considered as a realistic purchase option.
The process of moving consumers from brand awareness and a positive brand attitude through to the actual sale is known as conversion. Brand attitude takes into consideration a consumer's experience, knowledge, beliefs and feelings about a brand and affects their loyalties and identity. Identity relates to any category label that a consumer associates with that has an impact on consumer behavior. While advertising is an excellent tool for creating awareness and brand attitude, it usually requires support from other elements in the marketing program to convert attitudes into actual sales. Other promotional activities, such as telemarketing, are vastly superior to advertising in terms of generating sales. Accordingly, the advertising message might attempt to drive consumers to direct sales call centers as part of an integrated communications strategy. Many different marketing tactics can be used to convert brand purchase intention into accelerated short term sales such as offering coupons, refunds and rebates, sampling, sweepstakes, contests and premiums. For common, repeat-purchase decisions consumers choose a brand first based on brand awareness, pricing, and packaging, but then evaluate the product after purchase. Without this pervious exposure, buyers must resort to other criteria when making a purchase decision, so sampling, for example, can be used to create conversion. When consumers cannot rely on brand awareness to make a purchase decision they will take advantage of the opportunity to sample, and even if the consumer has a previous bias or distortion of a brand from advertising or word-of-mouth, their perception of quality will be unaffected when given the opportunity to sample.
Percy and Rossiter argue that the two types of awareness, namely brand recall and brand recognition, operate in fundamentally different ways in the purchase decision. For routine purchases such as fast moving consumer goods, few shoppers carry shopping lists. For them, the presentation of brands at the point-of-sale acts as a visual reminder and triggers category need. In this case, brand recognition is the dominant mode of awareness. For other purchases, where the brand is not present, the consumer first experiences category need then searches memory for brands within that category. Many services, such as home help, gardening services, pizza delivery fall into this category. In this case, the category need precedes brand awareness. Such purchases are recall dominant, and the consumer is more likely to select one of the brands elicited from memory. When brand recall is dominant, it is not necessary for consumers to like the advertisement, but they must like the brand. In contrast, consumers should like the ad when brand recognition is the communications objective.
The distinction between brand recall and brand recognition has important implications for advertising strategy. When the communications objectives depend on brand recognition, the creative execution must show the brand packaging or a recognizable brand name. However, when the communications objectives rely on brand recall, the creative execution should encourage strong associations between the category and the brand. Advertisers also use jingles, mnemonics and other devices to encourage brand recall.
Brand dominance occurs when, during brand recall tests, most consumers can name only one brand from a given category. Brand dominance is defined as an individual's selection of only certain brand names in a related category during a brand recall procedure. While brand dominance might appear to be a desirable goal, overall dominance can be a double-edged sword.
A brand name that is well known to the majority of people or households is called a household name and may be an indicator of brand success. Occasionally a brand can become so successful that the brand becomes synonymous with the category. For example, British people often talk about "Hoovering the house" when they actually mean "vacuuming the house".. When this happens, the brand name is said to have "gone generic". Examples of brands becoming generic abound; Kleenex, Sellotape, Nescafé, Aspirin and Panadol. When a brand goes generic, it can present a marketing problem because when the consumer requests a named brand at the retail outlet, they may be supplied with a competing brand. For example, if a person enters a bar and requests "a rum and Coke", the bartender may interpret that to mean a "rum and cola-flavoured beverage", paving the way for the outlet to supply a cheaper alternative mixer. In such a scenario, The Coca-Cola Company is the ultimate loser because it does not get the sale.