Brand Awareness – The secret to gain a hold of the market!
What is brand awareness?
It is simply the extent to which an audience is aware of a brand, its products, and its functioning. People can remember a brand based on their positive or negative experiences but when we talk about brand awareness for a business we refer to the awareness of a brand between people based on their positive experience and the value of the product or service that the brand is making available to people.
In the consumer’s conscious mind, brand awareness can take the image when they come across a brand present among all other brands, while talking to others about a product or service, coming across a brand’s advertisement, or buying a product or service.
Brand awareness is looked at in the form of metrics by some businesses. However, there is no particular way as to how one can calculate brand awareness. Also, it is not necessarily the case that if people are aware of your brand then they will prefer buying your brand’s product or service.
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Importance of brand awareness
Brand awareness holds huge importance for any business, big or small. The very first step in the customer journey for any product or service begins with the awareness of a particular brand, its products, and its services. But brand awareness does not end here! There are many other reasons why brand awareness is so important to businesses that they spend a huge sum of money on it.
- Brand awareness builds trust among people and encourages others to buy products or services from their brand. This is so because as more and more people are aware of a brand and more and more people they see interacting with that brand gives a positive impression about that brand.
- It results in networking. This is so because people talk and if everything goes as planned by the marketing team of the company, then the awareness about a brand is spread through word of mouth.
- If everything goes as planned by the marketing team of the company, it results in creating a positive perception of the brand. One might not interact with a brand when they come to know about it but if they have a positive perception of it, it is very likely that they might refer to someone looking for a product or service with which that brand deals with.
- When this goes right, it creates two different associations. One where people interact with a product or service and recall the brand or when they recall the brand while interacting with a product or service. Achieving the second kind of association for a brand is a difficult task and not many brands have been successful in attaining it. However, there are brands like Google and Xerox that have been successful in achieving that level of association.
- A successful brand awareness results in the creation of brand equity. Brand equity acts as a separate asset for a brand as more and more people become aware of a brand, the more valuable it becomes.
Types of Brand awareness
There are three types of brand awareness which can also be understood as the stages of brand awareness. Let’s look at the three stages or types of brand awareness.
Brand Recognition
Brand recognition is when a customer can differentiate one brand among different brands. In this type of brand awareness, a customer need not necessarily recall the brand name but he/she should be able to recognize the brand while interacting with it. The recognition can be based on product packaging or any other aspect relating to the product of that brand.
Brand recall
Brand recall comes under the association of brand awareness where customers can recall a brand when interacting with the product or service associated with that brand. On average, a customer cannot recall more than 3-5 brands at a time but it is subjective, based on the education level of the customer, marketing strategies, and many other things used by the company as a part of marketing strategies.
Top-of-mind Awareness
This type of brand awareness can be associated with customer loyalty. Top-of-mind awareness is usually the top three brands with which customers always interact to buy a particular product or service. This stage or type of brand awareness is the ultimate goal of the marketing team of any company.
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Strategies to build, maintain and increase brand awareness
There are many strategies used by different businesses to build, maintain and increase brand awareness. But all strategies are circled around the fact that the brand should be promoted in a way where the product or service fulfills the needs of the customers without much effort from the customer’s end. Let’s look at some of the strategies used by businesses to build, maintain and increase their brand awareness.
A quality and value-generating product
Creativity and ways of marketing are limitless but it will leave a dent or negative impression about your brand if you have strong ways of generating brand awareness but the product for which you are generating brand awareness is not as strong and valuable to the customers as you promoted it to be.
Put a greater emphasis on brand positioning
There is so much competition among businesses in so many terms and so you need to find a way to promote your brand for such a position that will make your product stand out from the rest. Apple is a very good example of brand positioning where the company promoted products as premium among all other options available in the market. Positioning need not be premium, rather you can also position and promote your products as economy in presence of other premium products.
Launch limited-time offers for customers
People love to try anything if companies provide things for free. These offers combined with the limited time period create a sense of urgency in the minds of people and give an impression that the offer is of value rather than the offers that run in abundance.
Highly active on social media
In today’s time, almost everyone is on one or the other social media. Therefore, it becomes very important for a brand to be highly active among its audience. Social media also acts as the cheapest means of marketing with a wider audience reach and easy interaction with the audience.
Use a mix of inbound and outbound strategies
Advertising is a push technique that tends to not always create a positive image of a brand in people’s minds. This is where the pull or inbound technique comes into the picture where brands focus on targeting the audience, reaching out to them on a certain personal level, and converting leads into customers.
FAQs
What are the types of brand awareness?
There are three types – brand recognition, brand recall, and top-of-mind brand awareness.
What are the ways to measure brand awareness?
There are many ways in which one can analyze brand awareness but none of the ways gives an exact number or percentage for the level of brand awareness. The ways are – conducting surveys, tracking website traffic, social listing analysis, and many more.
