brand awareness research

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The essential guide to brand awareness research.

Brand awareness is the level of familiarity and recognition a consumer has with a particular brand or product. It is typically measured by asking consumers if they are familiar with a brand and if they can recognize it when presented with it. Brand awareness is also known as brand recognition or brand recall. The responsibility for brand awareness within an organization typically falls to the marketing and advertising departments.

There is no maximum amount of brand awareness that a brand can expect, as it can vary greatly depending on the industry and competition. A well-known brand has a high level of brand awareness among consumers. Brand awareness can be good or bad, depending on the reputation and perception of the brand.

Brand awareness metrics are vital for brands because they can understand how well their marketing efforts resonate with consumers and make strategic decisions accordingly. An organization should start measuring brand awareness as early as possible, ideally during the development and launching of a new product or brand. 

As of 2021, the most valuable brand in the world is technology giant Apple. According to Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands” report, Apple’s brand value is estimated at around $234 billion. Apple has consistently been ranked as the most valuable brand globally for several years, thanks to its strong reputation for innovation, design, and customer loyalty. The company also has a diverse product portfolio that includes iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, AirPods, and services like the App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud.

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Other top brands worldwide include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Samsung, which also have strong brand values and reputations. These brands have a strong presence in their respective industries and consistently show strong financial performance.

It’s important to note that brand value is subjective and can fluctuate depending on factors such as market conditions and brand performance. Factors that cause brands to lose awareness include changes in consumer preferences, increased competition, and negative publicity.

The history of brand awareness research

The first examples of brand awareness research can be traced back to the early 20th century with the advent of advertising and the growth of consumer culture. 

One of the earliest examples of brand awareness research is the “Top of Mind” study, which was first conducted in the 1930s by George Gallup, the founder of the Gallup Poll. The study aimed to identify which brands were most frequently mentioned by consumers when asked to name a brand in a particular product category without any prompts or cues.

The “Top of Mind” study was a pioneering research method in brand awareness. Advertisers and marketers widely use “Top of Mind” research studies to understand consumer preferences and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Additionally, in the 1940s, Louis Cheskin, an American psychologist and design consultant, developed the “Association Test,” which measured brand awareness and brand association by asking consumers to list the first word or phrase that comes to mind when thinking about a brand.

These early examples of brand awareness research laid the foundation for modern brand research and have been adapted and developed over the years to include more advanced methods and technologies such as online surveys, focus groups, and social media analytics.

Measuring brand awareness has changed over the years with the advent of new technology, such as online metrics and social media analytics. Modern technology has made researching brand awareness more efficient and cost-effective.

What is the best formula or method for measuring brand awareness?

There is no specific formula for measuring brand awareness, as the methods used can vary depending on the research objectives. 

There are different ways to measure brand awareness, and some methods include the following:

• Unaided recall: This method measures the percentage of people who can spontaneously recall a brand without any prompts or cues. It’s a measure of top-of-mind awareness.
• Aided recall: This method measures the percentage of people who can recall a brand after being prompted or given a list of options. It’s a measure of brand recognition.
• Brand association: This method measures the strength and relevance of consumers’ associations with a brand. It can be done by asking consumers to list the first word or phrase that comes to mind when thinking about a brand.
• Brand loyalty: This method measures the degree to which consumers are loyal to a brand. It can be done by asking consumers how likely they are to repurchase a brand or recommend it to others.
• Brand consideration: This method measures the degree to which a brand is considered by consumers when they are making a purchasing decision. It can be done by asking consumers if they would consider purchasing a brand in the future.
• Brand tracking: Brand tracking measures changes in brand awareness over time by conducting regular surveys and comparing the results.

Different methods may be more appropriate for different types of research and various industries. Additionally, the sample size, the formulated questions, and the study’s context should be considered when measuring brand awareness.

How do you calculate the value of a brand?

There are different ways to evaluate a brand or trademark, including: 

Brand Value: This is the most common method which measures the financial value a brand name or trademark contributes to the company. It is calculated using a combination of factors such as revenue, market share, customer loyalty, and brand awareness.

Brand Equity: This method refers to the added value that a brand name gives to a product or service beyond its functional attributes. Brand equity is built over time by creating positive associations in customers’ minds and can be measured by how consumers perceive the brand in terms of quality, reputation, and loyalty.

Brand Strength Index (BSI) : This method calculates brand value by measuring the power of a brand in the marketplace. BSI takes into account factors such as brand loyalty, brand awareness, and brand perceptions.

Royalty Relief: This method calculates brand value by estimating the amount of money a company would have to pay to license the brand if it did not already own it. This method considers factors such as the brand’s strength, market conditions, and the company’s projected revenues.

Cost of Replication: This method calculates brand value by estimating the cost of creating an equivalent brand from scratch. This method considers factors such as the cost of developing the brand name, logo, and other intellectual property, as well as the cost of advertising and building brand awareness.

Brand Contribution: This method calculates brand value by estimating the revenue or profit a brand contributes to a company. This method takes into account factors such as market share, customer loyalty, and brand awareness.

Regardless of the method chosen, brand awareness is a critical aspect of a brand’s value. High levels of brand awareness can contribute to a strong reputation and customer loyalty and ultimately increase the financial value of the brand.

Can brands with higher awareness charge more?

While brand awareness is a key factor in a brand’s value, brands with a strong reputation for quality, for example, may be able to charge higher prices than others. Brands that have a loyal customer base and have built a strong emotional connection with them may also be able to charge a premium.

A brand with a strong level of awareness is often easier to license and can command a higher value for licensing agreements.

Consumers may be willing to pay a premium for a product or service from a brand they are familiar with and trust, as they perceive it to be of higher quality or offer more value than similar products from lesser-known brands.

Luxury brands may charge higher prices based on the exclusivity and prestige associated with the brand.

However, charging higher prices is only sometimes possible or appropriate for all brands. Brand awareness can be a factor in charging higher prices, but it is not the only one. It’s important to consider the competition, target market, brand reputation, positioning, and emotional connection with its customers. 

Additionally, it’s essential to ensure that the higher prices are justified by the brand’s value and that the prices are not too high to discourage potential customers.

How can brands grow their brand awareness?

Brands can help grow brand awareness by implementing various marketing strategies, such as:

• Building a strong visual identity and consistent brand messaging
• Investing in advertising and promotions
• Building relationships with influencers and media outlets
• Creating engaging and shareable content
• Leveraging social media and digital marketing
• Hosting events and sponsorships
• Creating a strong customer service experience
• Building a solid reputation and positive brand image

It’s important to note that while these strategies can help increase brand awareness, it’s crucial to tailor them to the specific audience and objectives of the brand and to measure the strategy’s effectiveness to ensure they are working.

What happens to brands that fail to measure brand awareness?

If a brand fails to build brand awareness, it can have many negative consequences. Some of the most significant ones include:

• Reduced sales: Without brand awareness, consumers may not be able to find or recognize a brand’s products or services, leading to reduced sales and revenue.
• Difficulty standing out in a crowded market: A lack of brand awareness can make it difficult for a brand to differentiate itself from competitors and stand out in a crowded market.
• Difficulty building customer loyalty: Without brand awareness, it can be difficult for a brand to build customer loyalty, as consumers may not have a strong emotional connection to the brand.
• Difficulty attracting new customers: Without brand awareness, it can be difficult for a brand to attract new customers, as they may not know that the brand exists or what it offers.
• Difficulty creating a strong reputation: Without brand awareness, it can be difficult for a brand to create a strong reputation and be perceived positively by consumers.
• Difficulty in launching new products or services: Without brand awareness, it can be difficult to launch new products or services, as consumers may not be familiar with the brand or its offering.
• Difficulty in expanding to new markets: Without brand awareness, a brand may find it difficult to expand to new markets, as consumers in those markets may not be familiar with the brand.
• Difficulty in negotiating with suppliers and partners: Without brand awareness, a brand may find it difficult to negotiate favorable terms with suppliers and partners, as they may not see the brand as a valuable partner.

Overall, building brand awareness is an important part of building a successful business. It helps to create a strong emotional connection with consumers, increase sales and revenue, and create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Can brands reverse a trend of declining awareness?

Reversing a trend of declining brand awareness can be a challenging task. Still, there are several strategies that brands can use to improve their brand awareness and regain consumer recognition and trust. Some of these strategies include:

• Re-evaluating brand positioning and messaging: Brands should review their current positioning and messaging to ensure they are relevant and resonate with consumers. They should re-position and re-brand themselves if necessary.
• Investing in advertising and promotions: Brands should invest in advertising and promotions to increase consumer exposure to the brand. This can include traditional advertising, such as TV and print ads, digital marketing, and social media advertising.
• Building relationships with influencers and media outlets: Brands should build relationships with influencers and media outlets to increase exposure and credibility.
• Creating engaging and shareable content: Brands should create engaging and shareable content such as videos, infographics, and blog posts to increase brand visibility and build an emotional connection with consumers.
• Leveraging social media: Brands should leverage social media to engage with consumers and build a community around the brand.
• Building a solid reputation and positive brand image: Brands should focus on building a strong reputation and positive brand image through positive customer experiences and word-of-mouth marketing.
• Reviewing and adjusting the customer service experience: Brands should review and adapt their customer service experience to ensure that it aligns with the brand’s values and goals and helps build a positive brand image.
• Investing in market research: Brands should invest in market research to understand the brand’s current awareness and perception and identify the areas that need improvement.

Reversing a trend of declining brand awareness takes time and effort, and it’s not a one-time task. Brands should continuously monitor and measure the effectiveness of their strategies and make adjustments as necessary.

What insight can be gained through a brand awareness research study?

When gathering information about brand awareness, areas that should be researched include consumer recognition and familiarity with the brand, brand loyalty, and brand perception. 

You can use metrics such as market share or brand recall to compare a brand’s brand awareness over its competitors. 

Gathering brand awareness metrics can be different in international or foreign markets, as cultural and language differences may affect consumer recognition and perception of the brand.

It is essential to use a variety of research methods and to consider factors such as sample size and representation so that the information gathered in brand awareness research is correct and trustworthy. 

Different types of brand awareness research include surveys, focus groups, and online metrics. 

Gathering information about the awareness of brands is important because it allows companies to understand how well their marketing efforts resonate with consumers and make strategic decisions accordingly.

What factors and steps should you consider when conducting a brand awareness study?

When researching brand awareness, important considerations include sample size, representation, and research methods. 

The steps for calculating brand awareness can vary depending on the specific research methods and objectives, but generally, the process includes the following steps:

• Define the research objectives: Identify the specific information you wish to gather about brand awareness, such as consumer recognition and familiarity with the brand, brand loyalty, and brand perception.
• Develop a research plan: Determine the research methods that will be used to gather information about brand awareness. This may include surveys, focus groups, or online metrics.
• Conduct the research: Use the research methods identified in the research plan to gather information about brand awareness.
• Analyze the data: Organize and analyze the data collected during the research phase to identify patterns and trends in brand awareness.
• Make strategic decisions: Use the insights gained from the research to make strategic decisions about how to improve brand awareness, such as adjusting marketing strategies or targeting specific groups of consumers.

Brand awareness should be measured regularly, depending on the brand’s specific needs and the industry. Some brands may measure brand awareness quarterly, while others may measure it annually. The frequency of measuring brand awareness also depends on the level of competition, the product or service, and the market conditions.

What types of questions are typically asked during brand awareness research?

When collecting information about brand awareness, it is important to include metrics such as consumer recognition and familiarity with the brand, brand loyalty, and brand perception. 

It’s important to remember that the research questions used, whether qualitative or quantitative, will depend on the survey’s specific research objectives and goals.

Several types of research questions should be asked to gather valuable information about consumer recognition and familiarity with the brand.

Some examples of these types of research questions include:

• Recognition: “Are you familiar with [brand name]?”
• Recall: “Can you name a brand in [product category]?”
• Top of mind: “What is the first brand that comes to mind when you think of [product category]?”
• Spontaneous: “What brand did you last purchase in [product category]?”
• Aided: “Can you name a brand of [product category] that you have seen advertised recently?”
• Unaided: “Can you name a brand of [product category] without any prompts or cues?”
• Brand loyalty: “Would you consider purchasing from [brand name] again in the future?”
• Brand preference: “Which brand of [product category] is your personal favorite?”
• Brand association: “What words or phrases come to mind when you think of [brand name]?”
• Brand perception: “How would you rate [brand name] in terms of quality, value, and customer service?”

After the data is collected, it is generally recommended to segment the responses to the brand awareness survey based on demographic factors such as race, age, income, and education. 

Segmenting the data in this way can help identify patterns or differences in brand awareness and perception among different groups of consumers. For example, segmenting responses by age can reveal discrepancies in brand recognition and loyalty among different age groups. Segmenting by income helps to understand how brand awareness and perception differ among consumers with different financial means. Segmenting by education can reveal how brand awareness and perception may vary among consumers with different levels of education.

It is important to note that demographic segmentation may not be suitable or appropriate in all cases, and it is essential to consider the ethical and legal implications of collecting and using demographic data in research. Additionally, it’s crucial to ensure that any data collected is handled and reported in a way that respects the privacy and confidentiality of survey participants.

It’s also important to remember that demographic segmentation is one of many ways to segment the data. Other ways to segment the data include:

• Behavioral segmentation (e.g., purchase history, brand loyalty, frequency of purchase)
• Psychographic segmentation (e.g., personality, values, lifestyle, interests)
• Geographic segmentation (e.g., region, urban or rural)

Why consider a research partner like Kadence International to conduct your brand awareness research?

There are several reasons to use a research agency when conducting brand awareness studies.

• Expertise: Research agencies have the knowledge and experience in conducting research studies, including brand awareness studies. They can design a study tailored to the brand’s specific needs and provide actionable insights.
• Objectivity: Research agencies are independent of the brand, which can provide a more objective perspective on the brand’s awareness and perception.
• Resources: Research agencies typically have a wide range of resources, including staff, technology, and data collection tools, which can help conduct a brand awareness study.
• Time-saving: Outsourcing the research to a research agency can free up time for the brand to focus on other important tasks, such as building the brand or developing new products.

Using a research agency like Kadence International when conducting brand awareness studies can provide valuable expertise and objectivity.

Kadence International partners with the world’s largest and fast-growing, emerging brands to help them make game-changing decisions. If you would like to discuss your brand’s awareness and how research can help, please reach out. 

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The Influences of Brand Awareness on Consumers’ Cognitive Process: An Event-Related Potentials Study

Associated data.

All datasets generated for this study are included in the article/supplementary material.

Brand awareness plays an important role in most aspects of marketing. However, consumers’ cognitive process of brand awareness, which plays an important role in purchase decision or product usage experiences, is still unclear in the brain. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the influences of two different brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process was investigated. Phone pictures with high or low brand awareness and girl pictures were used to carry out this experiment research. An amended oddball task was designed in which girl photos were taken as target stimuli, and phone pictures were taken as non-target stimuli. Subjects were asked to identify the girl pictures. Smaller ERPs components N2 and P3 along with high brand awareness phone pictures were found compared to the low brand awareness ones. The amplitude variation in N2 and P3 indicated that the cognitive process of identification and attention distribution were changed along with the magnitude of brand awareness, which meant consumers could allocate different attention resources to distinguish high or low brand awareness product unconsciously. This may indicate the identification and attention distribution caused by brand awareness can be detected by N2 and P3, and event-related potentials methodology may be a sensitive measurement technique for brand awareness.

Introduction

As is known to all, brand awareness plays an important role in consumer decision-making, market performance, marketing mix, and brand equity. Keller (2008) have pointed out that brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or simply whether consumers know about a brand. Just as people buy mobile phones, people are more inclined to buy iPhone or Samsung than a less well-known brand, such as Smartsan or UooGou. Obviously, when consumers face a vast commodity brand, the higher the brand awareness, the easier it is to attract consumers. Scholars have conducted extensive research on the two important aspects of brand awareness, brand recognition and recall. Most scholars have reached a consensus that brands recognition and recall are important while consumers are making purchase decisions ( Emma and Sharp, 2000 ; Thoma and Williams, 2013 ) and evaluating product usage experience ( Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012 ; Stach, 2019 ) or product quality ( Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012 ). Brand recognition and recall also affect consumer attitudes and emotion ( Rossiter, 2014 ; Wilson et al., 2015 ; Xu et al., 2015 ), even the firm performance ( Grundey and Bakowska, 2008 ; Homburg et al., 2010 ).

However, most of the research mentioned above mainly adopted questionnaire ( Emma and Sharp, 2000 ; Koenigstorfer and Groeppel-Klein, 2012 ; Topolinski et al., 2014 ), interview ( MacInnis et al., 1999 ; Turner et al., 2015 ), or market survey ( Naik et al., 2008 ; Homburg et al., 2010 ) as research methods. Despite growing concerns about cognitive research on brand recognition and recall from the perspective of psychology, such as studies on purchase intention ( Ashby et al., 2015 ; Topolinski et al., 2015 ), memory ( Valkenburg and Buijzen, 2005 ; Hubert et al., 2013 ), or categorization ( Esch et al., 2009 ; Dew and Kwon, 2010 ), etc., research into the cognitive process of brand awareness in the brain has not aroused sufficient attention. Even though the approaches above are easy and cheap to implement, the data gathered may include biases. As a consequence, the results of those studies usually do not match the actual behavior of consumers when they buy ( Scheier, 2007 ). The reason for the deviation lies in the unavoidable shortcomings of the above-mentioned methods itself. Whether it is for the collective, the individual, and whether it is conducted in a confidential manner, researchers still rely on consumers’ self-reports to investigate their response to brand awareness. But these methods have limitations. First, the researchers assumed that the respondents were able to describe their own cognitive processes, but in fact, many of the subconscious parts of the process were not known to the respondents. Second, there are many other factors, including incentives, time constraints, or peer pressures, that induce respondents to distort their feelings, so that the results of the survey do not fully reflect the true thinking of the respondents. It is important to note that some earlier studies have already involved the cognitive process and brand awareness in the brain, such as linguistic encoding and retrieval processes of brand experiences ( Esch et al., 2012 ), the basis of the relationship between brand personality associations and brain activity ( Chen et al., 2015 ), the consumer-psychology model specification synthesized psychological constructs and empirical finding using consumer-neuroscience methods ( Schmitt, 2012 ). However, studies on the neural response to brand awareness straightforward have not yet started, which can provide marketers with a theoretical foundation. Therefore, marketers and researchers need to re-examine research methods in order to better understand consumer behavior ( Pozharliev et al., 2017 ).

By using neuroimaging tools, consumer neuroscience might be cheaper and faster than current marketing tools and better understand the decision-making and related processes than usual ( Ariely and Berns, 2010 ; Plassmann et al., 2015 ). With these advantages, consumer neuroscience has attracted scholars’ interest and attention since the “Coke and Pepsi” experiment ( Hoegg et al., 2010 ). People realize that by observing the processing of stimuli in the brain, we can study how consumers respond to external stimuli and to observe and study consumer behavior from the neuroscience level ( Scheier, 2007 ). Based on the theory of consumer neuroscience and earlier event-related brain potential (ERPs) studies ( Sutton et al., 1965 ; Roth, 1973 ), we expect brand awareness to be intrinsically related to brain neural response. In this study, we take phones with different brand awareness, the ordinary wireless communication devices, as research objects to carry out the cognitive research by ERPs. We hypothesize that the process of consumers’ brand recognition and recall will be activated and reflected spontaneously by ERPs components alone with different brand awareness, which might be sensitively associate with the cognitive process such as categorization and memory retrieval according to the literature ( Polich, 2007 ; Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ). The study could provide a novel way to estimate brand awareness from another perspective, especially when traditional evaluation methods are controversial, the evoked components may serve as a sensitive indicator.

Materials and Methods

Sixteen right-handed college students (eight male and eight female; mean age 25.6 ± 2.8 years) were recruited. All subjects reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision. All of them were free of neurological or psychiatric illness, head trauma, or drug abuse. Written informed consent was obtained from each subject according to the local medical ethics committee. Subjects received a small gift as compensation after the experiment.

Stimulation

The critical stimuli were beautiful girl photos, two categories of colorful phone photos. According to the Chinese mobile phone brand reputation report 2018, two phone brands with different brand awareness were chosen in this study. The high brand awareness index was 5.46, and the low one was 2.71. Subjects reported that they had heard of the phone brands before the experiment.

Experimental Design

An illustration of the basic classes of stimuli and the timing of the experiment is shown in Figure 1 . Subjects viewed a sequence of colorful beautiful girl photos ( n = 3) and two categories of colorful phone photos ( n = 4) for each brand. The reason we chose beautiful girl photos is that we want to attract subjects’ attention so that when subjects see these two categories of colorful phone photos unconsciously, we can explore their brain activity. An amended oddball task had been used: the girl photos were taken as target stimulus and phone pictures were taken as non-target stimulus. The target proportion of series was 27.3%.

The sequence of stimuli with beautiful girl photos and colorful phone photos in an amended oddball paradigm.

An electrically shielded and sound-attenuated experimental chamber was used. The Subjects seated in a comfortable chair during the experiment. Each trial began with a screen-centered fixation cross presented in light gray against a black LCD computer screen. The task was programmed and presented by E-prime professional (vision2.0, Psychology Software Tools). Each experimental block contained 11 photos, 3 target stimuli, and 8 non-target stimuli. Each trial presented more than 10 times. One trial consisted of the presentation of the stimulus (duration of 800 ms) followed by a fixation cross (random inter-trial interval with a duration between 800 and 1200 ms) to avoid repeated presentations of the stimuli. Those stimuli were viewed from a distance of 100 cm at the center, visual angle 10.3°, horizontal vertical angle 6.8°. The subject’s task was to identify and verbally report to the researcher the number of target stimuli. If the accuracy was less than 95%, the data would be discarded. Before the experimental blocks, subjects performed one training block to familiarize with the task. Subjects were offered a rest break half-way through the presentation of the stimuli.

Electroencephalogram Recording and Analysis

Subjects wore a 32 channel electroencephalogram (EEG) cap (Quickcap) during their session, with electrodes placed using the International 10/20 system to record and then estimate the ERPs. The electrodes were referenced to the left mastoid. All electrodes’ impedance was kept below 5 kΩ. Vertical eye movements were monitored with electrodes placed directly below the left eye, and horizontal eye movements were monitored with electrodes placed on the outer canthi of the right eye. Electrode recordings were collected by Nuamps amplifiers (Neurosoft Labs Inc.) with a band-pass of 0.01–100 Hz, a sample rate of 1000 Hz. Offline data was processed using Curry7.0 SBA (Neurosoft Labs Inc.). The dataset with more than 6% of the trials rejected was excluded from further analysis. ERPs were segmented into time locked epoches using the picture onset as a reference. The length of the time window was 1000 ms from 200 ms before picture onset to 800 ms after it (baseline = 200 ms). The averages per channel were low-pass filtered through 50 Hz (24 dB/octave) and were computed on the basis of the EEG elicited in response to brand with different awareness index using within-subject repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA).

The time windows of the ERPs components of interest in the frontal, central, and parietal electrodes were presented in Figure 2 . Based on a visual examination of the potential distributions, the scalp topographical mapping of potentials (see Figure 3 ) and the literature ( Potts et al., 1996 ; Polich and Criado, 2006 ; Legrain et al., 2009 ), nine electrodes F3, Fz, F4, C3, Cz, C4, P3, Pz, P4 were chosen for statistical analysis. The average amplitude of N2 in 200–260 ms time window, P3 in 300–400 ms were analyzed. Within each time window, a within-subjects repeated measure ANOVA was used to compare the ERPs (average amplitude of N2 and P3), with brand awareness (high vs. low) and distribution (frontal, central, and parietal) as two within-subject factors. When appropriate, Greenhouse-Geisser correction of degrees of freedom and contrast analysis were used. The significance level was set at P < 0.05.

Raw ERPs waveforms at 9 electrode sites. Grand averaged ERPS elicited by stimuli with low brand awareness (solid line) vs. high brand awareness (dotted line) at 9 electrodes in the frontal, central, and parietal areas.

Topographic maps of the voltage field topography. Topographic maps of the voltage field topography at the peak of the N2 and P3 evoked by stimuli with low and high brand awareness. Red and yellow are positive, blue and black are negative, scaled from −4 to 4 mV (N2) or −2 to 2 mV (P3).

The results showed that, for the N2, there was a significant main effect for distribution [ F (2, 30) = 29.137, p < 0.001], brand variance [ F (1, 15) = 14.629, p = 0.002], and interaction between brand awareness and distribution [ F (2, 30) = 4.493, p = 0.020]. Combining raw waveforms with variance analysis, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher N2 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of N2 appeared on the Fz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared. Besides, the closer to the front of the scalp, a greater amplitude of the N2 waveform could be seen, whether the stimuli were presented with a low or high degree of brand awareness. For the P3, we obtained significant main effects for brand awareness [ F (1, 15) = 11.731, p = 0.004], but distribution [ F (2, 30) = 1.592, p = 0.220] and interaction between brand awareness and distribution [ F (2, 30) = 2.778, p = 0.078]. Similar to the N2 component, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher P3 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of P3 appeared in the middle of Fz-Cz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared. Besides, the closer to the front-central of the scalp, the greater amplitude of the P3 waveform could be seen, whether the stimuli were presented with a low or high degree of brand awareness.

The present study aimed at contributing to explore consumers’ cognitive process of different brand awareness through two phone brands. In order to better simulate the impact of brand awareness on consumer cognitive process, we did not try to fabricate a non-existent brand to conduct research. The two phone brands which had different brand awareness on market were chosen to carry out ERPs experiments through a pseudo oddball paradigm. The ERPs results showed significant differences between the two categories of colorful phone photos with different brand awareness. Low brand awareness stimulus elicited higher amplitudes of the N2 and P3 than high ones.

As the result showed, the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher N2 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region. It was generally believed that N2 distributed over the front-central of scalp reflected the process of cognitive control ( Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ; Liu et al., 2013 ). We believe that the N2 component could reflect consumers’ identification of brand which corresponded to the recognition process of brand awareness on the basis of previous studies ( Schweinberger et al., 2002 ; Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ; Wiese et al., 2014 ). Stimulation with brands in this experiment had been divided into two categories, one for high brand awareness and another for low brand awareness. According to raw waveforms and statistical analysis, these two categories of phone photos could lead to significant difference in N2 component, we believed that subjects could accurately distinguish the phones’ brand even the phone pictures with a brand awareness difference is taken as a non-target stimulus. As brand awareness was different, subjects allocated more cognitive resources for the stimulus with low brand awareness. Conversely, when stimuli with high brand awareness presented, subject only needed to put less effort into the identification process, therefore the average amplitude of N2 appeared smaller compared to low brand awareness ones. Combining the raw waveforms with topographic maps, we found that the component N2 was mainly distributed over most brain areas from frontal to central area, and its amplitude was lager in Fz than Cz. The result was coincident with previous study ( Ernst et al., 2013 ; Hu et al., 2013 ).

Similar to the N2 component, the result showed that the low brand awareness conditions elicited higher P3 amplitude than high brand awareness condition, and the P3 mainly distributed over fronto-central scalp. The evoked P3 component in this study might be a P3a-like potential due to its distribution. In general interpretation, the P3, which distributed over the central area, was thought to reflect the allocation of attention ( Polich, 2007 ). The amplitude was observed to decrease as the difficulty of the primary task increased, and thus reflected the attention resources devoted to task performance ( García-Larrea and Cézanne-Bert, 1998 ; Polich, 2007 ). As mentioned before, the girl pictures were taken as target stimulus, phone pictures were taken as non-target stimulus, and subject’s task was to identify and report to the researcher the number of target stimuli. According to this interpretation, when subjects concentrated on performing the main tasks in the experiment, the phone pictures could be seen as distractions. The higher the brand awareness, the easier it is to be excluded from the task by subjects. As mentioned earlier, the two selected phones’ brand awareness was 5.46 and 2.71, respectively, so that the decrease in brand awareness indexes between brands increased the task difficulty ( Hagen et al., 2006 ) and consequently led to a more intense P3. Another interpretation is that P3a may be subtended by neural changes in the anterior cingulate function when new stimuli replace the contents of working memory ( Polich and Comerchero, 2003 ; Polich, 2007 ). Compared to the stimuli that had high brand awareness index, subjects were more risk-avoidant considering committing errors and subsequently more likely to activate an anterior cingulate/medial prefrontal network while processing with low brand awareness ones. According to this, the stimuli that had a lower brand awareness could be regarded as a type of non-target distractor. Thus, a larger amplitude of P3 was elicited when the phone photos with low brand awareness presented.

This study had some differences with traditional studies. First of all, unlike the traditional marketing methods such as questionnaire, interview, or market survey, consumers’ cognitive process caused by brand awareness had been studied through an experimental approach. In this study, the relationship between cognitive process and brand awareness was investigated using event-related potentials, and consumers’ cognitive differences caused by high and low brand awareness were explored unconsciously. Second, through the observation of consumers’ cognitive reactions to phone pictures with brand awareness variances, in particular the process of identification and attention distribution, we found that the amplitude deviation of EPR components N2 and P3 could be developed into a cognitive index to measure the process of consumers’ brand recognition and recall, and then to measure brand awareness from another angle.

To summarize, this study explored the influences of brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process unconsciously. The result showed that stimuli with low brand awareness could elicit higher N2 and P3 than high brand awareness ones, which means that, alone with perceiving the awareness information from a brand, subjects didn’t need to allocate much attention resource to distinguish product with high brand awareness. The amplitude variation in N2 and P3 expressed the change in the identification and attention distribution processing. It can be concluded that EPR components N2 and P3 could serve as cognitive indexes to compare and measure the brand recognition and recall even as people didn’t pay special attention to the differences between brand awareness. Moreover, event-related potentials methodology may be a sensitive measurement technique for brand awareness.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the School of Management, Southwest University of Political Science and Law. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank all the subjects for carrying out the experiments.

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Brand Experience

Brand Awareness

What is brand awareness?

Why is brand awareness important, how is brand awareness different from brand recognition or brand recall, the two types of brand awareness to know, the ultimate goal of brand awareness, how to increase brand awareness, brand awareness examples: successful campaigns, the importance of measuring brand awareness, how to measure brand awareness, start building strong brand awareness with qualtrics, see how qualtrics strategic brand works, the ultimate guide to brand awareness.

31 min read If consumers aren’t aware of your brand, they’ll generally never think to buy from you. Find out how to build brand awareness and why it’s important in the guide below.

Brand awareness can be simply explained as consumers knowing the name of your brand, or recognizing your brand’s logo or imagery. It means your brand has enough of a presence in cultural or social consciousness that people have familiarity with what you do or provide.

Brands that are successful in generating brand awareness on a global scale are often so familiar that their brand names enter popular lexicon. Who hasn’t said that they will “Google” something when they actually mean they’ll use an internet search engine? Who doesn’t reach for a Band-Aid when they’re looking in the medicine cabinet for a bandage?

Brand awareness is generally thought of as the first step in the buying process and is the most important. Without brand awareness, the consumer will generally not consider your brand for purchase. There are rare cases (e.g. impulse buying, or some lower engagement categories) where a purchase can take place without prior knowledge of the brand, but by increasing brand awareness, you’ll reduce your reliance on consumers finding you by chance. Instead, you’ll develop brand awareness campaigns to draw customers to you on purpose.

Read on to find out why brand awareness is so important for your business, and the types of awareness you might cultivate.

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Here are some key reasons why brand awareness is important:

It’s a simple measurement of business success

Building (and measuring) brand awareness is an effective way of bringing together a team and organization. It is the most common measure tracked from top-level executives because it’s a singular measurement and it can be used to track your progress as a business. As a rule, if awareness goes up, this is a sign of improvement.

But what does improvement mean? Business success and reaching your goals. If you know the percentage of people aware of your brand, and roughly what your market share is, you can compare and contrast these two numbers. The goal should be to turn brand awareness into brand consideration – and ultimately get more people buying from your brand, and that market share percentage will increase.

It’s necessary to draw in customers

People need to be aware of your brand. Without awareness, the consumer will generally not consider your brand for purchase, and this is why brand awareness is often seen as the foundation to multiple brand equity models. It’s because building brand awareness keeps your brand top of mind.

Improving brand awareness increases brand loyalty

Building brand awareness isn’t a one-time thing. Consumers are busy and have evolving needs, so it requires constant work and messaging to the right people, at the right time. This will help to keep you relevant. Prove your worth to the customer, and you’ll increase loyalty too.

It’s a good measure of how your marketing campaigns are performing

Brand awareness is also a good signifier of whether your marketing initiatives are working. If you see an improvement in brand awareness, you know your campaigns are resonating. If brand awareness isn’t increasing, then you know they’re not effective and something needs to change.

Experience matters

We know that brand awareness is important to your business, but so is the experience – for customers, your product and your brand overall. Experiences may help bring attention to the brand too, hence why developing awareness of it exists, and it helps to reinforce it in the memory.

Make sure you’re not letting your marketing efforts down with a sub-par experience. Your consumers may know who you are, but you don’t want that to be for negative reasons.

You may hear the terms “brand awareness”, “ brand recognition ” and “brand recall” all used interchangeably. This is incorrect. All three terms have distinct meanings.

Brand recognition

Brand recognition is another way of saying “aided” brand awareness, as it provides the customer with a prompt such as a brand name or logo to help them remember the brand. It indicates the extent to which consumers have a minimal awareness that the brand exists in the market. Brand recognition is used to gauge total awareness of a brand in a category, and sometimes to assess how well an ad is communicating the brand.

Here is an examples of how you might structure a brand awareness survey question to test brand recognition:

‘Which of these brands do you know? Please select all that apply.’

[Logo] [Logo] [Logo]

Brand recall

Brand recall is another way of saying “unaided” brand awareness. It helps marketers assess how well a brand is associated with a category. Here are some examples of brand awareness survey questions that you might use to test brand recall:

‘What brand comes to mind when you think about carbonated drinks ?”

Answer: Coca-Cola.

This unaided method can also be applied to recall of advertising:

“Do you recall seeing any ads for carbonated drinks in the past two weeks?”

“Can you describe the ad?”

“What brand was featured in the ad?”

From the answers to these questions, we are able to gauge the extent to which a brand or an ad is within consumers’ field of awareness, and the extent to which consumers are connecting the correct brand to the ad.

These two approaches to awareness – recall and recognition – are used throughout brand and ad research and have important, nuanced differences that can help marketers evaluate how well their brands and advertising are establishing themselves in the consumers’ minds.

Brand awareness is an important metric for gauging how well your target audience knows your brand. In fact, awareness measures are often used in research to assess brand performance and marketing effectiveness. For example, does increased awareness lead to improved brand performance?

We can assess this success through two levels – unaided brand awareness and aided brand awareness . Your preferred measure will vary according to the size of your brand – for example, if you’re a smaller brand , then unaided awareness will be particularly hard to achieve and therefore not much use measuring.

Aided brand awareness (or brand recognition)

Aided brand awareness is the recognition of your brand name when prompted with a list of brand names or logos.

Unaided awareness constitutes a much more difficult task for the respondent than aided, and brand size is usually a factor that needs to be taken into account. Typically the bigger your brand is, the more likely you are to achieve unaided awareness.

You can see examples of unaided vs aided survey questions in the guide below.

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Unaided brand awareness (or brand recall)

Unaided brand awareness is unprompted recall of the brand name or product, with a cue (which generally, the category of products). You can use this approach to assess how top of mind your brand is – i.e. when your brand is the first brand to be named unprompted. “Top of mind” is a desired state because people tend to recall the products they use, so it is usually a strong indicator of performance and a predictor of choice.

You can then compare your brand’s top of mind to other brand’s top of mind scores. However, pay attention to brand size so you are making a like for like comparison.

Here’s an examples of an unaided brand awareness survey question: “What is the first brand that comes to mind when you think about refrigerators?”

“Can you think of any other brands of refrigerators?” is a typical follow-up question (and often referred to as ‘spontaneous awareness’ ).

The first question is referred to as Top of Mind Awareness. The net of the first and second questions is a brand’s Total Unaided Awareness.

This is a good metric but don’t lose sight that this is sensitive to how the cueing statement is written. For example, “What is the first brand that comes to mind when you want to get something to eat out of your home?” as compared with, “What is the first brand that comes to mind when you want to get something to eat?”

In the first case, you are likely to get brands of restaurants, in the second case, you may also get convenience stores, supermarkets, and restaurants.

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As we covered above, developing brand awareness is important. But it’s not enough on its own. The most successful brands readily come to mind when a customer is thinking of buying a product or service.

This is called brand salience , or the degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.

Brands should continue to build awareness and then increase their brand salience by creating cues that activate the brand at critical touchpoints . The best cues are those that become synonymous with the customer’s needs in that moment. The more you can differentiate yourselves in this moment, the better.

There’s also brand equity , which is the perceived value of your brand. You want consumers to think of your brand first, and to believe it to be good value, whether that’s good value for money or of high quality. This will bring customers back to you time and time again and help you to develop brand awareness in new customers.

Read on for strategies to increase brand awareness, as well as brand awareness campaign examples to help you build brand salience.

Whilst there are some exceptions (such as building brand awareness through usage as mentioned above), generally the most effective way to build brand awareness is through implementing a carefully planned marketing program in line with your brand strategy.

Marketing strategies need to balance two things – short term acquisition, and long term brand building (in which brand awareness is an important part). The best strategies find a balance of the two, rather than focusing their efforts purely on one.

So, if you’re looking to build brand awareness, don’t forget that you still want people to buy from you today. And if you’re focusing on the here and now, remember that there is a tomorrow, and a successful way of growing your brand is to reach new audiences and grow your customer base over time.

Category Kings

A strategy that some brands try to adopt is to create their own category first, and then create demand and evoke awareness around that. That way, the brand is entwined with the category, and becomes the category leader, whilst simultaneously meeting their customer’s needs and demand.

Create a strong brand awareness strategy that’s integrated

When focusing on building brand awareness, an integrated approach that is tailored to your audience will bring the best results. This is because in today’s age customer needs are nuanced, there are multiple mediums and many more brands competing for attention. This way you’ll be able to reach your audience in more places.

Mediums such as TV and radio will always be important in achieving this, but there are signs that their power may be relenting – so it’s important not to put all your eggs (or budget) in one basket.

According to the Ebiquity report Mind the Gap , total LINEAR TV (not including OTT, connected, streaming TV) advertisement impacts were down by 4.4% in 2019. Whilst this is only UK specific, it points to LINEAR TV not being as effective as before. This is because habits are changing and we should be responsive to change.

For the younger 16-24s, 25-34s, and 35-44s, advertising served on YouTube and Facebook was found broadly to be able to match the reach delivered by LINEAR TV. It should be noted though that in terms of video time per day TV (collectively) dwarfs everything else. ( Thinkbox )

What this shows is there are multiple ways to build awareness, which is why taking an integrated approach will work best because the report shows that ‘reaching large audiences to build brands in the decade ahead is going to be more difficult’.

There are multiple ways to build awareness — here are some of the most common tactics:

1. Advertising

As we have mentioned above, advertising is one of the most effective marketing strategies for reaching a large target audience all at once. This is “above the line” – because it is delivered to the masses, rather than one to one. The best advertising uses this tactic to drive awareness of a product, service in a way that people remember. Brands are constantly fighting for attention from the consumer, but only the brands that are distinctive and differentiate themselves from the rest will succeed in achieving their goals.

Mediums that you might advertise on include:

• TV (Linear, and connected etc.)
• Social media
• Web search engines
• Print (For example, Out of home (OOH), magazines and newspapers)

2. Public relations (PR)

A form of communications, PR is a “below the line” tactic, because you are talking to your target audience on a one to one basis. PR is an umbrella term, and there are different ways to increase brand awareness through this approach – which is “earned” coverage.

• Media relations – working with journalists, editors and publications to portray your message in a positive, credible and valuable way.
• Influencer relations – In the same way a journalist might try a product or service, influencers are a popular option too. With big followings on platforms such as Youtube and Instagram, they ensure your product reaches many people – quickly.

3. Sponsorships

This is where brands pay to endorse something for exposure in return. These sponsorships are typically in an environment where the brand will be exposed to a big audience. Sporting events and competitions, music festivals, TV programs are all examples where sponsorship is popular. But more importantly, these sponsorships are where the brand expects their target audience to spend their time.

4. Partnerships

Partnerships are similar to sponsorships in that they’re used to drive maximum exposure. However, partnerships are more “active” – and both parties often have something to gain. Examples of partnerships include influencer or celebrity, and media partnerships. The best partnerships are those that are authentic and feel natural to your target audience. A good way to decide if this partnership is right for you, is to go back to your brand values and see if their values align to yours.

Events are a really popular way of meeting fellow professionals and customers. This might be your own event – such as the Qualtrics X4 Experience Summit, or it might be a third party event that you attend with a booth, or speaking slot on stage. This tactic helps you meet as many people as possible, and often engage with them too – making it more likely you’ll leave a lasting impression.

Experiential events are another option. Popular because they are centred around delivering an experience that you wouldn’t normally otherwise, these moments can live long in the memory. These events are also often coupled with other tactics such as media relations so the event, and news of the event, can reach more people.

6. Brand activations / Launches

Traditionally, brand activations have been an in-person event. These are usually to launch a new product and generate buzz and excitement for it. With the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the movement of many events into the digital space, these events are likely to evolve. Social media and digital platforms will hold even more importance, and brands will find new ways to create awareness for their products that rely less heavily on in-person launches.

7. Thought leadership program

Build awareness by becoming a titan in your category and own it. A thought leadership program is built to set yourself apart from the competition and differentiate yourself. Therefore customers will feel they are buying from the best, or buying the best. Thought leadership programs might include tactics such as:

• Speaker events
• Bylined articles or opinion pieces in newspapers or industry publications
• Roundtables with other experts
• Media briefings with relevant journalists

You could also create:

• Video tutorials or demos
• Whitepapers

8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Make sure potential customers are visiting your site by ranking highly on search engines such as Google. You can do this by competing for keywords – which are closely associated with the services and products your brand offers. This should be one of your biggest priorities as a business, because there is an untapped market of customers who might not have heard of you, when you could (and should) be listed on screen right in front of them, at the exact time your customers are expressing a particular need. Secondly, if your website isn’t showing up when a consumer needs you, then it’s more likely they will click on a competitor’s site instead.

Building brand awareness through usage

Whilst generally the most common method of creating brand awareness is through marketing campaigns and tactics, sometimes there are exceptions. There are cases where brand awareness is built through usage, such as water. When there’s no alternative, the brand that provides the product or service automatically gains brand awareness.

Develop a solid brand identity in your campaigns

You want to execute your brand awareness strategy, but so do your competitors. Therefore you’re competing in a crowded market where there’s lots of “noise”, or brand awareness efforts happening at the same time.

Marketing and advertising campaigns are a tried and tested way of reaching people on mass. However, brand recall is often really low. Only 20% will remember an advert the next day, and be able to attribute that ad to your brand. (Marketing Week)

There are ways to overcome this – by creating cues and signals that make the campaigns you put out look more like your brand. Be distinctive, and make sure that people know that what they’re seeing is yours.

But what cues are the most effective?

Ipsos studied over 2000 advertisements and found that characters are the most effective way of improving brand recall. Interestingly celebrities come up second. However, there are risks associated with this option, because you’re vulnerable to guilt by association if that celebrity is in the spotlight for negative reasons.

Research by Kantar suggested that the use of celebrities was generally seen to be ineffective because ‘few celebrities are instantly associated with particular brands’. In some cases, the celebrity overwhelms the brand/ad, so the consumer remembers the celebrity but not the brand on any specifics of the ad.

Consistency is an important component to make it work as an intuitive branding device. There are other options, Kantar suggests “the building blocks of brand assets, patterns, shapes and colors can combine to act as a powerful cue to consumers” and help brands become instantly recognisable.

The great thing about fictional characters is that you can own what you create.

Activate a set of benefits, and link it to something memorable. But this will take time. Some of the best advertising campaigns have run the same message for as long as it is relevant – in some cases over decades, to keep consistency and drive the message home. It requires repetition and reach.

In fact, Kantar outlined the three C’s for achieving a strong brand imprint:

Simple, clean, uncomplicated, connected use of color, design, and phrasing. Employ a distinctive color palette to connect, amplify, and build a unique and instantly recognisable identity.

Consistency

Deploy brand assets over time, across channels and products— and draw on heritage where relevant. Expose your brand as much as possible, across all touch points and opportunities so you can embed your brand assets and reinforce recognition.

Communication

Reinforce relevant brand purpose , principles and messaging. Use your assets to invoke reminders of key messages and maximise their influence at points of decision making.

Reflect your customer experience

When thinking about what tactics are best suited to achieve your goal, keep in mind the experience you give customers. There needs to be consistency in how you portray your brand and the experiences that customers expect to receive as a result. For example, if you’re a premium brand with a premium experience, then your messaging needs to reflect this.

Coca-Cola: Share a Coke campaign

As one of the most recognizable brands in the world, Coca-Cola’s campaigns focus more on raising brand awareness of their customer experience than they do their brand itself. Their “Share a Coke” campaign zeroed in on providing a personal experience that could be shared. Customers were able to purchase a personalized glass bottle of their Coca-Cola drink of choice, adding a name or phrase to the label.  The campaign ran in 70 countries across 2013 and 2014, and picked up seven awards at the Cannes Lions festival, helping the brand gain recognition on several fronts.

Volvo Trucks: The Epic Split campaign

Volvo Trucks’ recognizable campaign involving famous action star Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits between two moving trucks won several awards for its ingenuity when it came to demonstrating the values of the brand. Not only was the stunt memorable, it also demonstrated the technical ability of the trucks, helping to cement the idea of Volvo Trucks as a reliable, precise and stable truck to purchase.

iHeartDogs: 0% off campaign

It can be easy to think that brand awareness campaigns for large businesses are successful because the brand is already known – but smaller brands can make an impact. iHeartDogs, a company selling dog products such as supplements, started a Facebook ad campaign that declared they were offering 0% off for Black Friday, turning the discounts they would have offered over the weekend into a double donation to dog shelters to help purchase meals. Rather than damaging their profits, the campaign went viral, leading to 200,000 meals provided for shelter dogs and four times their predicted sales. The company managed to reach consumers through an emotive brand awareness campaign that did good as well as generate profits.

Top of Mind and Unaided Awareness help us measure the availability, accessibility, the salience to consumers of your brand in a specific category. Typically, the leading brands in a category are also the most salient and accessible to consumers. These measures can also be very sensitive to context, how you ask the question.

Aided awareness questions help you gaug the total size of your brand presence in the consumer mind. The advantage of this approach is that there is no ambiguity about the prompt or the answer. The disadvantage is that the consumer can claim to recall many brands when asked directly, but they just may not be salient, or relevant at time of purchase.

Looking at both Unaided and Aided awareness measures can offer even deeper insights. For example brands with high aided awareness and low unaided awareness are typically in decline–many people know of the brand, but few are thinking about the brand. We see this with older brands that have pulled back on advertising and innovation.

Brand awareness surveys

You can measure brand awareness through surveys, to see if someone can recall your brand both with prompts and without (aided and unaided).

Here are some examples of brand awareness survey questions that you can use to measure your brand’s success:

Measure unaided brand awareness with questions that invite the survey respondent to name different brands in your category.

For example: Thinking about brands of toothpastes, which name first comes to mind?

(This is so you can assess what brands are top of mind).

Followed by a second question: Still thinking about brands of toothpaste, what other brands come to mind?

This involves providing a list of brands that exist in your category and asking the user what brands they recognize. You might use the brand logo to assess recall in this scenario.

There are challenges that come with adopting this traditional approach.

• You have to be very careful about the cue you use – not too broad, not too narrow. For example, if measuring awareness for a beer brand, do you choose the category “alcoholic beverages” or “beer”.
• There are nuances too. Taking this example further, most people would spontaneously name Heineken but would they recall Heineken Light? Bigger brands may make it more difficult to recall smaller ones spontaneously.
• Finally, brand awareness doesn’t inform the likelihood for the brand to come to mind in certain circumstances, i.e. day-to-day cues that people encounter. This is why measuring brand salience as a secondary metric is important.

You can try alternatives, such as turning a category into a need, and by doing this your measurements are more closely linked to an action.

For example: If you’re hungry, what brands do you think of?

Web traffic measurements

You can also deduce brand awareness by analysing web traffic. If you’re bringing new users through to your site (which can be checked in Google Analytics) then you can feel confident that you are reaching more people, and resonating with them enough that they come to your site to view your products and services.

Social engagement numbers

You can track whether you have a successful brand awareness campaign by looking at the number of followers, likes, comments and other social media measures you receive after your brand awareness campaign runs. Setting up social listening tools will help you to track your brand awareness efforts’ impact on your social media presence.

Mistakes to avoid in measuring brand awareness

Avoid measuring awareness on a level that’s not useful to you, and make sure you are measuring awareness of your brand in the context that is most relevant to your business strategy.

For example, there is a difference between ‘financial services’ and ‘student loans’. You can track poorly in one, and well in the other. Make sure you are measuring awareness based on what you most accurately offer or want to assess.

But taking this example further, you may be a business that is currently known for addressing student lending as your primary service, but your plan is to be a more full-service financial services company. If so, then you should focus on the broader category of financial services and not on the smaller category of student lending. You may learn you have close to 0% awareness in financial services, but at least you know what you are up against.

Are you a big, medium or small-sized brand? This will determine which of the awareness metrics is most relevant to you. Large brands generally display high (and stable) levels of aided awareness, so they tend to focus on unaided awareness. Smaller brands may do one thing really well, and want to focus on building awareness around that niche offering, so they focus on aided awareness.

As you think through your brand strategy and marketing campaigns, and decide how you’re going to build brand awareness, do it in the contexts that you want to improve, and evoke salience. To raise brand awareness is important, but getting the consumer to use your brand is even more so.

Qualtrics BrandXM can help. Take control of your most important asset, attract new customers and track how you’re doing every step of the way so you can take the right actions for your brand. Ready to go straight out of the box, you’ll be ready to go in no time.

Related resources

How to increase brand awareness 17 min read, how to measure brand awareness 14 min read, brand recognition 14 min read.

Market Segmentation

Market Fragmentation 9 min read

Brand Perception

Brand Sentiment 18 min read

Brand intelligence 12 min read, how to build a brand 14 min read, request demo.

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Brand awareness: What it is and strategies to improve it

Written by by Ronnie Gomez

Published on  October 25, 2022

Reading time  12 minutes

What does it take to build brand awareness?

In the old days, a steady drumbeat of messaging across a few audience-preferred channels might have done the trick. Today, we have brand mascots faking forbidden romances, sponsored dance challenges and internet beefs over—ironically enough—chicken sandwiches.

Building a memorable brand image takes some big swings, but you have to walk before you can run. To help, we’re breaking down the why and how behind driving and measuring brand awareness.

Table of contents

What is brand awareness?

How to measure brand awareness, 12 proven strategies to increase brand awareness with social media, take your brand awareness strategy to the next level.

Brand awareness is the extent to which audiences are familiar with your brand’s identity and its product or services. It is the bedrock of your sales funnel. After all, you need to be able to recognize a brand to trust and buy from it.

A high level of brand awareness is the competitive edge that keeps a business top of mind for consumers. Brands with high levels of consumer recognition can even become synonymous with their product. For example, when someone needs to fix a permanent writing mistake, they’re usually not asking for “correction fluid”; they’re asking for Wite-Out .

Of course, achieving that level of brand recognition is a lofty goal. Our advice? Start where you are. Focus on building awareness within targeted audiences and grow from there.

Why is brand awareness important?

Every customer journey begins with the same step. That step is brand awareness.

Jokes aside, your brand awareness strategy will set the tone for a person’s entire experience with your brand. Start things out on the right foot, and you could be sowing the seeds for your next crop of brand advocates.

If that’s not enough, don’t worry—it’s not even the best part.

As your brand awareness strategy matures, you’ll soon find that the most effective awareness drivers don’t come from your official brand channels: they come from your fans. Our research shows that the most effective purchase drivers on social media are recommendations from friends, comments and product reviews and familiarity with a brand.

Brand awareness creates a community that generates word of mouth buzz, ‘I love this product, and I know you will too.’ Your community knows what their friends and family like. Your audience becomes a pipeline to your most relevant customer in the exact moment their friends and family need your product. That is the power of brand awareness. Akeeme Hogg Social Media and Email Marketing Lead, ServiceMaster Brands

Combine positive brand sentiment with high brand recognition and you get fans. Fans beget more fans. Brand awareness truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Connecting brand awareness to ROI can feel like trying to explain how to get from Chicago to San Francisco by foot. Sure, it’s doable but it’s pretty complicated. We’ve simplified this process by creating a brand awareness roi calculator tool to help measure the impact that employee advocacy has on your brand’s awareness.

The classic marketing funnel looks straightforward but in reality, every customer journey is different and some can be much longer than others. Trying to track and assign value to every interaction between awareness and purchase simply isn’t the best use of anyone’s time.

Just because you can’t put an exact dollar value on your awareness efforts doesn’t mean they should go untracked. There are actually quite a few ways to track your efforts as you pilot new awareness strategies. Here are some of our favorites that you can try to help you measure brand awareness .

Brand surveys

Brand surveys are routine (often biannual) surveys that assess what an audience thinks and feels about your brand. Data from brand surveys can be used to track brand perception over time, providing businesses with the insights needed to shape their brand’s image in the right direction.

Unfortunately, these surveys take weeks (if not months) to design and distribute. If you want more timely data, you’ll want to supplement a brand survey with the following options.

Website traffic

Tracking month-over-month differences in web traffic isn’t an exact measurement of brand awareness. However, it’s much easier to connect web traffic to ROI making it a management-preferred reporting metric.

As you test out new brand awareness tactics, use Google Analytics to see how those changes impact growth in new users. That will give you a rough estimate of how your efforts translated to site traffic.

Social listening

Every day, people turn to social to rant and rave about the companies they love—and the ones they don’t. The right social listening tool can help you synthesize that chatter into timely, actionable brand insights.

If you use Sprout’s social listening tool , here are just a few of the metrics you can pull to understand how conversations are trending around your brand:

• Total message volume tracks the total amount of messages shared around your brand.
• Sentiment summary measures how people are feeling about your brand and whether or not it’s trending positively.
• Share of voice compares your brand’s market share on social to its top competitors.

Social is a go-to channel for raising brand awareness. But how do you become a familiar face within your followers’ feeds versus someone they just scroll past?

There’s no one correct answer to that question. The truth is, the options are as limitless as your creativity.  If you want to use social media for brand awareness, use these 12 ideas to jumpstart your efforts. From fine-tuning your profile to experimenting with your content, any combination of these tips will help you rise above the noise.

1. Give your social presence some personality

First things first: your social media presence shouldn’t look like everyone else’s.

One of the most persistent social media marketing myths is that only certain industries can have a “fun” social presence. Fast food, retail, sports—those brands can get experimental. Everyone else has to play it safe.

That couldn’t be more wrong.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s social strategy.

Side effects include -rough hair -dry skin -broken friendships -crop and habitat damage — Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (@OKWildlifeDept) October 13, 2022

It would be easy for them to just share some cute animal pictures every now and then. However, it’s their off-the-wall personality that’s made them so endearing to followers.

And “personal” is the keyword here. Followers want to see more than promos and links: they want personal, human-centric content. Maybe that’s why the “man on the street” style interviews are exploding on TikTok.

@triplewhale Out of all the options… these are their favorite??🤔 #publicinterview #digitalmarketing #triplewhale ♬ Blue Blood – Heinz Kiessling

The social team at Triple Whale took notice of the trend and made it work for their brand. Now, they’ve amassed over 2 million views on TikTok.

Marketers are told time and time again to create “unique” content. It might sound corny, but the person behind your social presence represents a one-of-a-kind voice.

Before you hit “post,” make a point to ask yourself: “Does this sound like something a bot would say?”

2. Fine-tune your profiles

Recognition is a key element of building brand awareness.

When followers glance at your social profiles, they should be able to understand the basics of your brand, its purpose and its personality.

From social bios to profile images, how you set up your profile determines whether or not people recognize you. For example, check out how Hinge has their Twitter profile set up.

Brands only get a few seconds to grab someone’s attention and tell a quick story. By using their cover photo as a chance to reinforce their purpose and tagline, Hinge gets their message across quickly.

If you can’t sum up your brand ethos in a few characters and 1500×500 pixels, don’t worry. A clean, well-optimized profile and photo are enough to establish your brand with new audiences.

3. Make your posts pop

Here’s a common thread between most of our brand awareness tips: a bit of creativity can score you major brownie points with followers.

For example, check out how Bloom Nutrition makes use of their signature pink and green across a variety of post formats on Instagram.

Don’t have eye-popping images featuring your products? No problem. The principle of making your posts pop rings true in content marketing, too.

Notice how Sprout’s blog posts are all coupled with these colorful illustrations instead of generic stock photos?

After almost 20 years of #pumpkinspice frenzy, is the trend finally slowing down? 👀 We used Listening to find the answer. https://t.co/Fy7pp3HkhE — Sprout Social (@SproutSocial) October 4, 2022

Or how brands like Hubspot couple important announcements with graphics instead of just using text?

For the second year in a row, HubSpot is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms for its offering, Marketing Hub. 🎉 Learn more: https://t.co/XgRKRxsaCN pic.twitter.com/TSolp5Lvnr — HubSpot (@HubSpot) September 21, 2022

Anything you can do aesthetically to make your posts stand out is a point in your favor. Even if you’re not a design master, there are plenty of social media post templates to help you whip up some eye-catching imagery.

4. Collaborate with other brands

You know what they say: Teamwork makes the dream work. When brands collaborate on new releases or campaign ideas, both parties get a chance to introduce themselves to new audiences.

Both co-marketing and co-branding campaigns bring engagement from the jump. Not only that, but collaboration is a surefire way to make positive impressions on other players in your industry.

WAKE UP & MAKEUP 🍩💄☕️ e.l.f. runs on @dunkindonuts drops 3/31/22 on our site, exclusively available to our Beauty Squad loyalty program members 🤩 Coming to @ultabeauty 4/3/22 online & in-stores. Sign up for Beauty Squad to be the first to shop: https://t.co/TPi9urZdRU pic.twitter.com/dIagOxL3Pm — e.l.f. Cosmetics (@elfcosmetics) March 30, 2022

Keep an eye out for strategic partnerships as you watch over your industry’s content landscape. You never know who could be the best fit for your dream team.

5. Harness the power of hashtags

Do hashtags work anymore? According to 72% of our LinkedIn community , the answer is yes.

Every now and then a viral hot take will try to force hashtagging into an early grave. Fret not, my fellow marketers, the hashtag is alive and well. If you’re choosing relevant, brand-applicable hashtags, they’re a surefire way to increase impressions on your posts.

When choosing which hashtags to include in your posts, consider both the network you’re posting on and the trends that are driving conversations at the moment. Take this Halloween-themed TikTok from Heinz , for example:

@heinz_us Tag yourself #heinzhalloween ♬ The Heinz Halloween Beat #3 – Ricky Desktop

This video uses two different hashtag strategies. First, they came up with a hashtag campaign (#VegetarianVampire) to introduce their new spooky season character. Then, they used a hashtag that’s almost constantly trending on TikTok (#WhatIEatInADay) to push the video to a wider audience. These hashtags work together to establish and amplify the Heinz brand.

6. Take it to the comments

As more networks experiment with algorithmically ranked comment sections, marketers are gaining new territory to make their brands known.

@emilyzugay Reply to @mcdonalds easy ♬ original sound – Emily’sTikTok.edu

Take this viral content series from creator Emily Zugay. Her hilarious redesigns of famous logos had brands rushing to her comments for their turn in the spotlight.

The top comments on her most popular post have over a hundred thousand likes each. On top of that, this video has been liked over 6 million times. That’s some seriously valuable brand exposure for every brand that’s secured a top spot in the comment section.

As you scroll through your social feed, keep an eye out for viral posts that relate to your brand or industry. When it comes to brand awareness, there’s no shame in riding on coattails.

7. Repurpose your content

If you’re like most marketers, you’re probably trying to boost brand awareness across multiple networks.

In that case, it’s important to repurpose your content to fit in with the best practices of each platform. After all, what works best on Instagram might not be prime for Facebook or Twitter.

Check out these two posts from You Need a Budget to see what we mean.

Hey Nashville, YNABers! Busy this weekend? 😉 We'd love to see you at our first ever YNAB Gathering!! 🥳We'll have special guests, games, prizes and swag! Oh, and did I mention it's free to attend? 🤩 Tickets are limited so don't wait to claim yours! https://t.co/Y4pZUkd0cZ — YNAB (@ynab) October 13, 2022

Both posts drive to the same call to action. However, the Tweet is much shorter and to the point. The Facebook post, on the other hand, relies on an eye-catching visual and emojis to stand out in newsfeeds.

It just goes to show that one-size-fits-all content and captions aren’t going to win your brand much attention.

Photos. Videos. Blogs. Your stuff. Other people’s stuff.

To keep your feed from growing stale, you should always have new social media ideas on the back burner to keep your feed fresh.

8. Share a distinct point of view

Stats. Case studies. Surveys.

If your brand is conducting any sort of original research, it can be a huge authority booster that does wonders for brand awareness, too.

How much does it pay??? 🤔 We picked a few popular job titles and looked up their base pay figures on Glassdoor (tips and bonuses aren't included in the total). What jobs would you like to see data for next? Let us know ↓ #salarytransparency #corporatelife #fairwages pic.twitter.com/eCnQp5b19M — Glassdoor (@Glassdoor) September 26, 2022

And if you’re not in a position where such research is possible, don’t panic.

Consider how you can comment on industry trends and happenings from your point of view. For example, our social team put their own spin on third-party data from AdWeek by adding a specific call to action for B2B marketers.

If you walk away with one thing, remember that working with creators will only become more important for all brands. We're talking to you too, B2B brands. via @thisiskis , @Adweek https://t.co/cgdLe8wycf — Sprout Social (@SproutSocial) August 14, 2022

The takeaway here is that you should be contributing to the ongoing conversation of your industry at large versus just sitting on the sidelines.

9. Experiment with social copy

We’ve talked a lot about visuals, but text is yet another opportunity to showcase your brand’s social persona . Use your copy to pique people’s interest and encourage engagement, giving a sort of taste to readers before they click through.

You can look to The Cut for inspiration on this one. Their Tweets always pair perfectly with article link previews, creating a post you can’t help but click.

Fashion month may have finally come to an end this week, but we’ve already got a different sort of street style to look forward to: Carrie Bradshaw and the girls are back https://t.co/NXY5uYpWXr — The Cut (@TheCut) October 16, 2022

Don’t count out the power of a well-crafted text post. Once you find your brand voice, it can be a prime opportunity for connecting with followers and letting them know exactly who you are.

10. Use social as a teaching tool

Educational and “how-to” content is widely sought after on just about every social network. We surveyed consumers for The Sprout Social Index™ 2023 and found the content they like to see the most from brands are posts that highlight a product or service and real customer demos.

@charlottetilbury Replying to @mikkelsenkaren YES YOU CAN! ✨ Let @SOFIA TILBURY & @harris_reed show you how! 💎 #CharlotteTilbury ♬ original sound – Charlotte Tilbury

Posting such content regularly positions you both as a positive resource and a thought leader. The more opportunities to show off your brand’s product or know-how, the better.

11. Partner with creators

The creator economy is thriving. A new crop of trendsetters and thought leaders rises up every other week. No matter what industry you work in, there’s probably a social media content creator making waves with your target audience.

That’s probably why marketers rank connecting with new audiences as the second most popular reason for collaborating with creators. When you think about it, it’s kind of like the online equivalent of getting introduced to someone through a mutual friend.

12. Show up consistently

Finally, consider that nobody can truly be aware of your brand if you don’t post consistently.

According to The Sprout Social Index, 74% of consumers think brands should post 1-2 times per day. To help you save time and to make the process of showing up easier, having a scheduling tool such as Sprout on deck can be a game-changer.

The more ground you and your brand can cover, the better. It all comes down to having a specific strategy which makes the most out of the time you spend on social media.

And with that, we conclude our list!

Building buzz around your brand takes an eye for both experimentation and data. Try new things, report on what works, rinse, repeat.

And when the workload gets too high, try automating some of your routine responsibilities. Sprout’s scheduling and analytics tools can remove bulky, manual processes from your day-to-day so you can focus on creating new brand awareness strategies that gain and retain loyal followers.

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What is Brand Awareness and How Do You Measure It?

Create your brand awareness survey, form, or poll now!

What is Brand Awareness Research ?

Anyone not living under a rock recognizes Nike’s swoosh and Apple’s, well, apple. But not many people have probably heard of Bob’s Bait Shop. These brand awareness examples highlight the wide spectrum of awareness that exists among brands. 

Brand awareness , then, is the number of people who are aware of a particular brand, company, or product. Understanding your brand’s position in the market helps when trying to build a presence, develop marketing initiatives, and increase sales.

Brand awareness studies conducted by Cahners Research reveal that brand awareness is the first step toward increasing brand preference, which leads to an increase in market share and sales. In addition, as greater levels of awareness are reached, conversion to preference comes more quickly (for example, as awareness increases from 25% to 35%, preference increased from 10% to 15% (a 5% difference); between 85% and 95% awareness, preference increased from 55% to 70% (a 15% difference).

These results demonstrate how important it is for companies with low brand awareness to get their message out; otherwise, sales, and the company, will suffer. Of course, many companies don’t know how often people actually think about them, which is where brand awareness research comes in. 

Two Types of Brand Awareness: Recognition vs. Recall

Consumers remember brands in different ways. Some brands have such an overwhelming cultural presence and global reach that they enjoy “top of mind” brand recognition, such as Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Disney, and the aforementioned Nike and Apple. Other brands only come to a consumer’s mind when they are reminded of them when they see their logo or hear their name. 

Brandwatch , a company dedicated to tracking what various brands customers think about, writes about how to measure levels of brand awareness in a blog post here that’s definitely worth your time. Now, let’s take a look at two types of brand awareness research .

Brand Recognition (Aided Research)

When measuring brand awareness using aided research, people are provided with brand visuals or names to determine the percentage who recognize your brand among the other brands. Having a high recognition level in aided recall questions is important when customers are at a store and are presented with the same product offered from several different brands.

For example, brake fluid is not something you buy every day. When you do need to buy it, you may have forgotten the name of the brand you used last time. But, when you’re in the auto parts store, you may suddenly recognize that brand when you see the familiar silver oil container or the logo.

Brand Recall (Unaided Research)

U naided brand recall asks the customers to remember the name of a brand without having it appear in a list or picture gallery like shown in the example survey above. This makes recall the highest level of brand awareness . To conduct unaided research through a brand recall survey , questions must be open-ended as presented in the example below. Research shows that a higher correlation is found between customer preference of a brand and the brands they mentioned in the unaided research.

Measuring Brand Awareness Using Brand Awareness Tools

How do you measure brand awareness? When it comes to traditional advertising such as television and radio campaigns, marketers look at reach and frequency to determine if their message is reaching the masses. For other forms of marketing, different metrics can be used—and it’s probably easier than you think! Here are some useful tips regarding brand awareness metrics you can use to determine whether you’re good to go, or need to up your marketing game!

1. Conduct Brand Awareness Surveys

Brand awareness survey questions can help you gauge how familiar people are with your company. Whether your survey is done online, sent by mail, or conducted over the phone, you should consider a two-prong approach:

• Asking existing customers how they heard of you to understand what means of marketing, from television ads to basic word of mouth, has been most successful.
• Asking random people if they have heard of your brand to gain insight into how many people can recall your brand.

Pro Tip: Always conduct both unaided and aided brand awareness surveys to give yourself the best foundation for decision-making regarding your company’s brand and its market awareness.

2. Check Website Traffic and Online Search Volume

Web traffic is a lot like road traffic; the more congested it is, the more popular the route! Analyzing your website traffic with Google Analytics over time can provide a number of insights into levels of brand awareness . 

Direct traffic is a good indicator, showing the number of people who typed your URL into their address bar, used a browser bookmark, or clicked a link.  Of course, this isn’t an infallible measure of brand awareness; for example, someone purchasing Ziploc bags is probably going to buy them through a supermarket or on Amazon, not through Ziploc’s website.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner and Google Trends are other brand awareness tools you could use. These allow you to view how many people are searching for your brand name, and to track it over time to see if search volumes are increasing. Of course, data can be skewed if your brand name is also a common word, such as Tide (boaters, for example, may be looking for high tide and low tide times, not the detergent). 

3. Use Social Listening Tools

Sure, you can look at the number of followers your brand has on social media versus competitors, but it doesn’t paint the full picture. Social listening, on the other hand, is an effective tactic as it lets you see what people are talking about organically. “Listening” to unsolicited opinions across the web gives you insight into consumer’s natural thoughts about your brand. 

A social listening tool (such as the aforementioned Brandwatch ) helps you write refined searches that can eliminate irrelevant mentions, such as in the “tide” scenario.

Finally, you may also want to check your social media share count. Shared Count is one free tool that allows you to quickly see how many times a piece of content has been shared socially across platforms like Facebook and Linkedin. Just pop the URL you want to check out into the Share Count box and click “analyze.” Social media management tools such as Hootsuite can also track your performance on social channels.

How to Increase Brand Awareness

This could be a blog all on its own! As a survey creation company, we feel one of the best ways to increase brand awareness is to ask existing customers how they heard about your brand; if it becomes clear that one method of your marketing mix is doing most of the heavy lifting, you may choose to invest more in that initiative and less in those that are yielding little results.

Of course, there are many other ways to increase your brand awareness, and often it will have to do with your budget. Here are 15 ways to increase brand awareness to get your wheels spinning. 

• Offer referral rewards
• Invest in traditional media
• Become active on social media
• Pay influencers to promote your product
• Offer free samples
• Develop more unique branding
• Perform search engine optimization
• Hold contests
• Try guerrilla marketing
•   Sponsor events
•   Get involved with the community/donate to causes
•   Co-brand with more established brands
•   Offer valuable content
•   Improve customer service to increase word of mouth
•   Do email marketing

Brand Awareness Survey Questions

While no two brands are alike, brand awareness survey questions are often quite similar! Here are some common brand survey question examples you’ll want to consider asking of your participants:

• When was the last time you used our product category?
• When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind?
• Which of the following brands have you heard of?
• When did you first hear about our brand?
• In the past three months, where have you seen or heard about our brand?
• How familiar with our brand are you?
• In the past three months, how often did you hear people talking about our brand?
• How would you describe your overall opinion of our brand?
• Has your perception of our brand changed in the past three months?
• Would you be likely to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague?

Want to see this particular survey in action, with the responses included? Check out our Brand Awareness Survey Template .

Build Brand Awareness By Building Surveys!

Are you ready to put the power of surveys to work for you? SurveyLegend is leading the way in easy online survey creation, and we’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest brands ! Our surveys can help you gauge your brand awareness and recognition among customers and non-customers, giving you the data you need to put a stronger marketing plan into place. Sign up today for free!

Jasko Mahmutovic

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How to measure brand awareness: 9 key metrics to track

From a consumer perspective, brand awareness is something you just sort of have or you don't. There are those brands you never knew existed until you traveled to a different part of the country, and then there are those brands whose jingles you'd heard before you even knew what they were selling. (I, for one, knew that sometimes one feels like a nut and sometimes one doesn't long before I ever laid eyes on a Mounds or an Almond Joy.)

There are a number of ways, and smart marketers will measure at least a few.

Table of contents:

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness refers to people's simple knowledge of your business's existence. But you need to go beyond measuring how well-known your business itself is among the general public; you also want to measure awareness of your products and services specifically—both what they are and what they do . After all, being known on Twitter for your clapbacks isn't helpful if no one knows what you offer.

9 ways to measure brand awareness

Not tracking brand awareness can be a little like yelling your company's name into the void hoping someone out there hears you. The good news: there are plenty of ways to measure brand presence around the web. Here are the most important ones to think about.

1. Social listening

How to measure:

2. Branded search volume

A good method of evaluating the general public's awareness of a particular brand is to evaluate branded search volume, or how many people search for your company name and associated keywords. 

For example, using Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer, we can see that the monthly estimated average search volume for "Zapier" is 83,000 and that the majority of searches are coming from users based in the United States. 

3. Change in direct traffic

You can also evaluate awareness by tracking direct traffic: traffic from people who arrive on the site without following another link. In most cases, it comes from people who were aware of your brand and typed your website into their address bar to visit your site.

These numbers will usually be lower than other traffic measurements, which is fine—what matters most is the change in direct traffic over time. An increase in direct traffic indicates that your brand presence is growing.

How to Measure:

4. Backlink profiles

Using a backlink checker (Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush—among others—all offer them), track your backlink growth month over month. Keep an eye out not only for the number of backlinks, but also the backlink quality. For example, is the link a dofollow or nofollow? Is the site linking out to your own relevant to your industry?

5. Brand awareness surveys

Brand awareness surveys are questionnaires that help determine how aware your target audience is of your brand. These questions dig into four key categories: 

Brand recognition: How familiar are consumers with your brand?

Brand recall: How quickly does your brand come to mind when thinking about your industry or product?

Brand image: What do people think of when they hear your brand name?

Brand identity: How do consumers perceive your brand based on their interactions?

It's also helpful to ask a mix of aided and unaided brand awareness questions to drill down into just how impressionable your brand is. 

Unaided question example: What brand comes to mind when you think of toothpaste? 

Aided question example: Which of the following toothpaste brands have you heard of (check all that apply)? Colgate, Crest, Sensodyne, Arm and Hammer

The responses gathered during brand awareness surveys offer a straight-from-the-horse's-mouth look into what customers truly know and think about your brand. 

Conducting these surveys on a regular basis allows you to glean insights into how your brand awareness has grown over time. Once you have your results in hand, you can see which of your competitors is outpacing you, which competitors are catching up to you, and which competitor is a disrupter within your industry. 

Before you craft the questions for your brand awareness survey, have a target audience in mind. This will help you craft more relevant questions and ensure that your questions reach people in your target market. 

6. Social share of voice

Share of voice, or SOV, measures your brand's visibility compared to your competitors. Over time, SOV has evolved from measuring the success of your paid advertising to showing a more holistic view of your overall online presence. 

You can use SOV to measure how well your brand is covered when it comes to marketing, advertising, and social media. Social media SOV, or social SOV, gives you insight into how your brand is perceived online and how your competitors are being discussed. 

Social SOV can be measured either manually or via a social listening tool. The free route will also require you to use a free social listening tool such as Mention.com or TweetDeck. 

Once you've decided on your tool of choice, open the tool and type in your brand name. Write down the number of times your brand name is mentioned online. Then do the same for your competitors. 

Calculate your social SOV using this formula: Number of mentions of your brand/total number of brand mentions (yours + your competitors') x 100.

7. Earned media coverage

Earned media, AKA third-party publicity, are brand mentions or references (often in a blog or social media post) that are obtained organically. Earned media is important because it offers an unbiased review from people who have used your product or service, which is often deemed more trustworthy than sponsored reviews—and doesn't cost a thing.  

Using a social listening tool or brand tracker tool, monitor how frequently you're being mentioned online unprompted. This is especially insightful when tracked during a big marketing campaign to see how that particular campaign's reach is felt across platforms. 

Keep track of the number of mentions month over month to see how that number grows. 

8. Referral traffic

Referral traffic comes to your website through another source, commonly through a link from another domain or social network. This contrasts with direct traffic, which comes from people who know your brand's name and type it into Google. 

Referring domains (external websites that link to your website) tell Google your site is an authority in the space (thus why external domains are linking to you), which can help improve your SEO rankings. This also helps you gauge which other brands recognize you and their willingness to share your content with their audience.

How to measure: 

Using Google Analytics or a similar tool, navigate to Referrals . 

Track the quality and quantity of referring domains. 

9. Content marketing performance

For example, a visitor who has no idea what your product does might still recognize your brand name because they read one of your top-of-funnel articles that was ranking on page one of Google. 

As you create blog posts, monitor key metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversions to discover how they're performing and how many new visitors are getting exposure to your site monthly or daily.

Use a tool like Ahrefs or Moz to monitor traffic and keyword rankings, and a tool like Google Analytics to monitor conversions.

8 additional KPIs for brand awareness

There are plenty of other metrics you can track, so take a look and determine if any of them feel relevant to your business.

Traffic KPIs

Unique users: Multiple pageviews from the same IP still equals one unique user. This metric is used to measure the popularity of your website. 

Time spent on page : This metric helps you understand how your audience is interacting with your site and content. 

Bounce rate: Your bounce rate, or the percentage of people who leave your site after only looking at one page, can help you understand whether your content meets the user intent, offers a good user experience, and provides value. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors didn't like what they saw or didn't find what they were looking for.

Social KPIs

Impressions: Impressions are the total number of times your ad or post is served to users on screens. Impressions are an important metric to track because if your content or ads aren't being seen by your target audience, they're much less likely to know about your brand. 

Click-through rate: Click-through rate, or CTR, is the number of people who follow the links in your posts. This metric shows how relevant users find your content or ad.

Shares: The number of times your content or your social post is shared online helps brands understand what types of content resonates best with their target audience. 

Believe it or not, the number of followers isn't usually a particularly important KPI when it comes to brand awareness. Case in point: I'm highly aware of Pepsi and H&R Block, and I even use their products, but I have zero interest in following either of them on any social platforms. What's more important than follower count is the percentage of brand interactions from the followers you do have.

Brand awareness matters

Related reading: 

This post was originally published in September 2022 and has also had contributions from Shea Stevens. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• Brand marketing

Audience analysis is...complicated. But it can be less complicated if you home in on a specific way to capture the data you need. If you're looking to find new markets for your business, social listening is a natural choice.

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The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness

Learn how to boost your brand awareness and positively impact your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue.

FREE DOWNLOAD: HOW TO BUILD A BRAND

A comprehensive guide to effective and measurable branding.

Published: 07/03/24

Whenever I think about brand awareness, I think of companies like Apple, Nike, and Trader Joe’s. Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people?

That’s what brand awareness does. It embeds itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

This guide will give you a better understanding of brand awareness so you can establish it among your audience and build campaigns that allow it to continually grow and change with your business. Let’s dive in.

What is brand awareness?

Why is brand awareness important, how to build brand awareness, brand awareness strategy, how to increase brand awareness, how to measure brand awareness, brand awareness examples.

Brand awareness is a marketing term that refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as ‘trending,’ ‘buzzworthy,’ or simply ‘popular.’ Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in the early stages of a business.

Brand awareness might seem like a vague concept, and in truth, it is. For marketers and business owners who like to gauge success with numbers, brand awareness will likely ruffle your feathers.

But just because it isn’t a metric that can be perfectly determined doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry value. Brand awareness is incredibly important for your overall marketing goals and business success. Here’s why.

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• Understanding brands today.
• Incorporating brand in marketing.
• Creating brand strategy.
• Measuring brand impact.

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Brand awareness fosters trust.

In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase, brand trust is everything. Once consumers bond with your brand, they’re likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought.

With this comes loyalty. Brand awareness establishes that this trust and trust creates loyalty.

When you put a proverbial face to your brand name, consumers can trust easier. Brand awareness efforts give your brand a personality and outlet to be sincere, receive feedback, and tell a story. These are ways that we, as humans, build trust with one another. The human/brand relationship isn’t any different.

Brand awareness creates associations.

When you’ve had a paper cut, I bet you’ve put on a Band-Aid. When you had a pressing question, I’m sure you’ve Googled it. When you needed to make a few copies, I’m guessing that you Xeroxed them. And when you’ve packed for a nice picnic, I’m willing to bet you grabbed a Coke to drink.

Am I correct? Most likely. But, do you notice how I capitalized the first letters of some words above? These are brands, not nouns or verbs.

In brand-less terms, Band-Aid is a bandage, Google is a search engine, and Xerox is a copier. But it’s more fun to refer to the brand itself, even if we aren’t using their specific product.

That’s what brand awareness does. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. And before you know it, simple paper cuts or picnics are doing the marketing for us.

Brand awareness builds brand equity.

Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.

Here are a few valuable things that come from positive brand equity:

• A higher stock price.
• Higher prices because of higher perceived value.
• Greater social impact because of brand name value.
• The ability to expand business through product or service line extensions.

How does a brand establish (and increase) brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they recognize it without help, seek it out to make a purchase, prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that spurs on other purchases and inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That is why brand awareness is so important. Brand awareness:

• Establishes trust with your customers.
• Creates positive associations.
• Builds invaluable brand equity.
• Helps your business to become a household name and consumer staple.
• Be a person, not a company.
• Tell a narrative.
• Make sharing easy.

Brand awareness among your audience and the public doesn’t happen overnight. It also doesn’t happen from a simple advertisement or marketing campaign.

Strong brand awareness results from multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.

If you expect to raise awareness of your brand by running a few product advertisements on Facebook, you won’t get very far. Not only will the consumer focus on the product (not the brand), but the ad will also lack impact beyond a simple sale.

Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact on your audience:

1. Be a person, not a company.

When you get to know a new friend, what do you like to discover about them? I like to learn about hobbies, passions, likes and dislikes, and more. I also pay attention to how they speak, what they like to talk about, and what gets them excited.

These are the traits your brand should determine and promote about itself. To leave an impact on your audience, define yourself as more than a company that sells products or services. To do this, think about the words you would you use if you had to introduce your brand to a new friend.

Pro tip: If your brand has lots of employees, your employees can help in molding how you want your audience to perceive your brand. Our 2024 State of Marketing Report shows 87% of marketers deem this practice, called social selling , effective. Dreamdata is one brand that executed this with only six employees.

2. Start socializing.

Introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, all humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It’s how we stay connected, learn new things, and become known by others. The same goes for your brand.

If you only attempt to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you won’t be known as anything beyond a business with a singular intention (and the same goes for a person).

To raise awareness of your brand, get social . Post on social media about things unrelated to your product or services.

Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.

Pro tip: If you’re a founder, take charge of socializing. I often see founders shy away from social media because they are busy. However, those who make the time to get active raise lots of awareness about their brand.

Two examples are Dharmesh Shah , with over a million followers on just LinkedIn, and Chris Walker , with 150,000+ followers.

3. Tell a narrative.

Storytelling is a powerful marketing tactic for marketing products or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives your audience something real to latch onto.

Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. Weaving this narrative into your marketing helps to market your brand alongside your products or services.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea, or the story of how your business made it in this big world.

People like hearing stories about each other. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to an enormous boost in brand awareness.

Pro tip: When telling stories, ensure they pass the rotary 4-way test. Is your story truthful? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and make better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned (your audience)?

4. Make sharing easy.

Whatever your industry, product offering, or marketing strategies, make it easy for your audience to share your content.

These could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees a product or service recommendation from friends or family, they’ll take notice of that product and brand.

Is this a brand worth exploring? Do they have other great products I can rely on? What are their social accounts like, and what do they talk about?

If you make it easy to post about your business, consumers will raise brand awareness for you by simply clicking “Share.”

Brand awareness is about impact. It’s about interacting with your audience in ways that are not pushy.

Imagine if you met a new person who wanted to be your friend. If they instantly asked for your loyalty or money, you’d probably laugh and walk away, right?

Not only is that a shallow approach to friendship, but it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

The same goes for establishing and building brand awareness among your audience.

• Guest blog on other niche websites.
• Try co-marketing.
• Advertise everywhere.
• Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.
• Choose an image or symbol that represents you.
• Create a short, catchy slogan.

You already know how to start building your brand awareness from the ground up. Now, it’s time to use simple and effective brand awareness strategies that will keep the flywheel turning.

1. Guest blog on other niche websites.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness with minimal effort. You can take advantage of another website’s traffic to get more eyes on your brand while offering helpful and relevant content.

In other words, you’re not just pushing out your product on people who aren’t ready to buy, but writing in your brand voice and presenting yourself as human first, company second. Another great alternative to guest blogging is publishing sponsored content on niche websites.

2. Try co-marketing.

Co-marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness — not only because you’d be taking advantage of another brand’s audience, but because it can highlight who you are and what you offer in the marketplace.

For instance, if your company sells dog leashes and toys, you might partner with a dog-walking app.

The campaign could work in ways like creating a shared offer (“download the app and get one free leash”) or hosting an Instagram live together. No matter what, partnering with another brand could help you increase your reach.

3. Advertise everywhere.

I know that advertising may not build brand awareness so much as it builds product awareness, but still — it’s one of the best tools for people to know about your brand in a low-touch, unobtrusive way.

Consider Grammarly. It feels like just a few years ago, no one knew about Grammarly. Now, it’s one of those brands that you automatically think of when you consider online proofreading software.

That’s because they’ve launched robust social, video, and display advertising campaigns that appear nearly everywhere.

You might consider starting with online advertising , which includes paid social media and PPC . If you’re interested in truly appearing everywhere and launching more sophisticated campaigns at a mass scale, you can launch programmatic advertising campaigns .

4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.

This may not be doable for smaller companies, but if you do have the budget, consider hiring an actor or spokesperson to represent the company.

What do you first think of when you think of Progressive? Flo, who’s even been termed “Progressive girl” for her fun and friendly personality.

This allows you to not only humanize your brand, as mentioned in the previous section, but give a sense of the friendly and knowledgeable service customers can expect to receive.

You don’t have to use a person, either. GEICO is a great example of this. The moment you see that friendly lizard, you know it’s GEICO. Creating an animated mascot may be a cost-efficient but effective way to give a face to your brand.

5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.

Nike is not even Nike anymore. It’s a checkmark. The moment you see that check mark, you know it’s Nike. Or how about McDonald’s yellow “M”? Or Apple’s bitten apple?

These are not just logos. They transcended to become identities. So, when working with your branding team or a freelance graphic designer, aim to create a symbol that you ubiquitously use in your marketing, advertising, and organic campaigns.

You might also consider taking a note from Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike and incorporating the symbol into your product packaging and design.

6. Create a short, catchy slogan.

Extending the Nike example, you think of the brand immediately you hear “Just do it.” Creating a short motto or slogan is a cornerstone of a strong brand awareness strategy and is an easy way to increase brand awareness.

It’s definitely tough — imagine condensing everything you’re about in one short sentence. It must explain how you’re different, what you offer, and why customers should choose you.

Consider HubSpot’s tagline, “Grow better with HubSpot.” In four simple words, you understand why our product should be your choice when considering marketing automation tools.

Learn how to write an effective business slogan with this free guide.

• Offer freemium.
• Create free content.
• Sponsor events.
• Give your brand a personality.
• Produce a podcast.

Your brand awareness is now effectively off the ground, and people talk about you with no need to see an ad.

What about expanding your established brand awareness and building on that strong foundation? What can you do as a brand to campaign for awareness and constantly increase it?

Here are a few campaign ideas to boost your brand awareness beyond your initial strategy.

1. Offer freemium.

Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium or enterprise-level. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies, like HubSpot and Trello .

Freemium options allow customers to get a taste of your brand and product before making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opportunity that can, technically, last forever (as opposed to a free trial period that some companies choose).

It’s common to offer a freemium option with the condition that the brand’s watermark will show on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win situation: the consumer gets the product for free, and the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it.

Typeform is another great example of this. Typeform offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must include a thank-you page that features the Typeform logo and message.

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The Definitive Guide to Brand Awareness Studies

• Brand Experience , Survey Tips

The goal of most brand awareness studies is to answer this one question:

What percentage of my target market is aware of my brand?

Other brand health studies are crucial to forming a complete marketing strategy, but measuring your brand’s market Recognition and Recall is the best first step.

Why is this metric so important? Easy. It is integral to the topmost section of the customer purchase funnel and dictates how large that section is:

You can only get out of the funnel as much as you put in, so it’s important to know how your brand awareness stacks up with the competition.

Two Types of Brand Awareness: Recognition vs. Recall

Brand awareness measures the extent to which consumers are familiar with your brand and product. As consumers we’re aware of brands in different ways — with some brands we’re reminded of our familiarity with them upon hearing it’s name, or seeing it’s logo in store aisles. Other brands enjoy “top of mind” status, which puts them immediately at the forefront when it comes time to make a purchase.

Brand Recognition (Aided Research)

These studies measure the ability for customers to recognize your brand from a list of brands shown. Brand recognition levels are crucial in scenarios where customers are presented with a selection of products from various brands, such as at the supermarket. Unless the customer has a “top of mind” selection, they will automatically recognize the brands where a level of familiarity already exists.

For example, you may purchase motor oil so infrequently that you’d be hard-pressed to recite the name of one brand off the top of your head. However, one quick scan of the selection at the local auto parts store and you just might find yourself leaning towards the familiar looking one in the bright yellow container. 

Brand recognition levels are especially important for newer companies and brands who do not yet have a solidified presence in the market.

Brand Recall (Unaided Research)

These studies measure the ability of customers to summon the name of your brand without having it appear in a list first. This means that an open-ended question must be used. Brand recall question types provide a higher “hurdle” than aided research. This means you will gather higher quality data from this method. A higher correlation is typically found between consumer preference and the results of an unaided study versus a lower correlation than with an aided one.

Where possible, data collection through unaided question types is much more preferable compared to aided questionnaires.

Four Additional Types of Brand Awareness & Health Studies

Brand awareness measures the percentage of your target market that is aware of your brand, but intelligence that you collect for changes in your marketing strategy cannot be fed by this alone. Your brand has an image, but are your brand’s attributes that you work so hard to market being reflected in the sentiments of those already aware of your brand? Let’s take a look at various brand health studies that in conjunction can be used to form your marketing strategy:

• Brand Image Study: Gather internal and external feedback to see how closely your customer’s perception matches the Brand Identity that you’re trying to cultivate.
• Brand Trust Study: In an era of data breaches, keeping tabs on your levels of brand trust is key. If your brand doesn’t appear trustworthy, you will have difficulty retaining customers.
• Brand Loyalty Study: Loyal customers can become evangelists, but you need to consistently track loyalty levels to determine how often this transformation is happening.
• Customer Profile Study: Changes in your core customer base may signal the need for a pivot, either in the product or your marketing messages (or both).

Two Ways to Conduct Your Brand Awareness Study: Online and Telephone Surveys

The example questions above are commonly found in online surveys. Increasingly, this has become a popular choice for studies of all kinds, brand studies included. Many people have web-oriented jobs and coupled with smartphones users have access to the internet for hours and hours per day. Respondents rarely plan their day to include survey-taking, but when the convenience level is so high they’re happy to share their opinion.

Advantages of Online Surveys for your Brand Awareness Study

• They offer the ultimate in convenience: participants can respond almost any time.
• Lower costs compared to telephone and in-person field studies.
• Fast field times to gather your representative sample.

Disadvantages of Online Surveys for your Brand Awareness Study

• Anonymity is more common: many online panel services do not allow for personally identifiable information to be collected.
• No live person to clarify questions.
• Technology requirements (access to a fast, web-connected laptop /smartphone) can make certain segments of the population almost impossible to reach.

Advantages of Telephone Surveys for your Brand Awareness Study

• Great ability to target a specific number of respondents within a narrow demographic or geo location.
• In certain studies it can allow for more in-depth probing of the respondent.
• Respondents can more readily decide to share their personal information.

Disadvantages of Telephone Surveys for your Brand Awareness Study

• Typically much more costly than online surveys.
• Fields times to capture your entire sample audience can be considerably longer.

Online Surveys: Best Practices for Brand Awareness Studies

Online surveys provide are an affordable option to provide high quality data for your brand health study. Unbiased results can be captured with quick field times, but only if you protect yourself from some common pitfalls and follow some best practices. Online survey creation platforms abound online, such as Alchemer, SurveyMonkey, and Qualtrics, to name a few. Whether you are using an online panel provider (recommended) or you have purchased an email list (not recommended), these best practices apply all the same.

Reach Your Target Audience, Use Disqualifying Questions

Even if the online panel company you’ve chosen to run your car brand study through claims that it can target those who are in the market to purchase a car with the next 12 months, given the margin of error that exists within panel companies you’ll still want to asked a question early in the survey confirming that this is the case. Online survey software typically provides “logic” features that automatically perform the disqualifications.

Use Audience Quotas

Basic demographics, such as age, gender, location and ethnicity should be asked as questions in your survey. If you plan to segment your some or all of these demographics it’s highly recommended that quotas are created for each of these. The only way to ensure that your quotas are accurate are to qualify the respondent through these questions on demographics. Online panel provides offer census data with regards to age, gender, location and ethnicity, which you can use to create your quotas. 

Use Unaided Question Types

As discussed previously, unaided questions provide data of a higher purity, since respondents must make top of mind recollections. Aided questions creates the opportunity for a margin of guesswork from your respondents.

Protect Yourself Against Bad Data

Most high quality online survey creation platforms feature tools that automatically quarantine low quality responses. Here are the main culprits that these data cleaning tools typically target:

• Speeders: Those whose survey completion times come in much lower than the average of all respondents of your survey.
• Straight-liners/Patterned Responses: Applies to check box questions — those who select all options within a single column, or follow a particular pattern (i.e. a zigzag pattern is known as “christmas treeing”):
• Gibberish and One-word Open Text Responses: Necessary for unaided questions is for respondents to share information in their own words. Entries that do not form words (gibberish) or consist of only ONE word can “cleaned” out of your data-set.
• Utilize Trap/Red Herring Questions: to protect against bots, as well as those who are answering your survey without actually reading your questions, can be weeded-out uses questions that have obvious answers:

Most online panel providers will provide replacement completes for these types of problematic answers, but it’s best to arrange for this ahead of time with the panel company before your study launches.

Run Your Brand Awareness Study Before a New Marketing Campaign

The results of brand awareness studies can serve as fantastic benchmarks. Placed as bookends around a major marketing effort, these studies can provide fantastic indicators on the performance of your initiative. At a minimum brand awareness surveys should be run once a year, but other opportunities arise as you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your product. SWOT analysis is perfect for this. SWOT is a structured planning method used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing business ventures.

• Strengths: What are the attributes of your brand that it an advantage over others?
• Weaknesses: What attributes put it at a disadvantage relative to others
• Opportunities: what does the organizations stand to gain from this venture
• Threats: what could cause trouble for the organization as a result of this venture.

With SWOT many of the opportunities and threats are defined based on the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. But what if your strengths and weaknesses haven’t been affirmed by an external audience? A brand awareness study is a perfect tool to ensure that your perceived strengths and perceived weaknesses are reflected by the opinions in the market.

As Brand Awareness Increases, so Does Brand Preference

As increased awareness is unarguably a good for your brand, it stands to reason that there is a direct correlation here with brand preference. In fact, there have been multiple studies performed that document this correlation. A study conducted by Cahners Research involved 23,341 businesses and found the following results. With almost a direct ratio, brand preference rose along with brand awareness:

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Want to Learn More About Brand Awareness Surveys?

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Brand Awareness Research: How to Understand and Increase Your Brand's Visibility in 2023

In today's highly competitive business landscape, brand awareness plays a crucial role in determining your company’s success. It's not enough to have a great product or service; if people are not aware of your brand, it becomes challenging to attract customers and build a loyal following. This is why brand awareness research is essential for businesses looking to increase their visibility in the market.

Understanding brand awareness is the first step towards developing effective strategies to increase it. Brand awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with and recognize a particular brand. It is about creating a strong presence in the minds of consumers, so they can easily identify and differentiate your brand from competitors.

Brand awareness is crucial for businesses for several reasons. First and foremost, it helps in establishing credibility and trust among consumers. When people are familiar with a brand, they are more likely to consider it as a reliable option when making purchasing decisions. Moreover, brand awareness also influences customer loyalty and repeat purchases, as consumers tend to stick with brands they are familiar with and trust.

Brand awareness can be measured at different levels. These include brand recognition, which is the ability of consumers to identify a brand from its logo or packaging, and brand recall, which is the ability to remember a brand when prompted with a product or service category. The higher the levels of brand awareness, the greater the chances of attracting and retaining customers.

To effectively increase brand awareness, businesses need to conduct thorough research. This involves choosing the right methodology to gather relevant data, designing brand awareness surveys to collect information from target audiences, and analyzing and interpreting the results to identify areas for improvement.

Several strategies can be employed to boost brand awareness. Leveraging social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, allows businesses to reach a wider audience and engage with potential customers. Collaborations and partnerships with other brands or influencers can also help in expanding brand reach and visibility. Additionally, content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can enhance brand visibility by creating valuable and shareable content that resonates with the target audience.

Standing Out: The Importance of Brand Awareness

In today's crowded digital marketplace, brand awareness has become a crucial method of cutting through the noise. It serves as the foundation for building a successful brand and plays a significant role in shaping consumer perceptions and preferences. In this section, we will delve into the importance of brand awareness and how it can impact the overall success of a business.

The Power of First Impressions

First impressions matter, especially in the business world. When consumers encounter a brand for the first time, their level of awareness greatly influences their initial perception. A strong brand presence and high level of brand awareness can leave a positive and lasting impression, leading to increased trust and credibility.

Differentiating from Competitors

In a saturated market, standing out from the competition is essential. Brand awareness helps businesses differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating a unique identity and positioning in the minds of consumers. When consumers are aware of a brand and its distinct qualities, they are more likely to choose it over other options.

Building Trust and Credibility

Trust and credibility are fundamental pillars of a successful brand. Brand awareness plays a crucial role in establishing trust among consumers. When people are familiar with a brand and have positive associations with it, they are more likely to trust its products or services. By consistently delivering on promises and maintaining a strong brand presence, businesses can build long-term relationships with their customers.

Driving Customer Loyalty

Brand awareness not only attracts new customers but also fosters customer loyalty. When consumers have a high level of awareness and familiarity with a brand, they are more likely to become repeat customers. Additionally, loyal customers tend to become brand advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth and further increasing brand awareness among their peers.

Expanding Market Share

Brand awareness plays a crucial role in expanding market share. When consumers are aware of a brand and have positive associations with it, they are more likely to choose it over competitors. Increased brand awareness leads to greater market visibility, attracting more customers and capturing a larger share of the market.

Influencing Purchase Decisions

Brand awareness has a direct impact on consumer purchase decisions. When consumers are aware of a brand and have positive perceptions, they are more likely to consider it when making purchasing decisions. Brand awareness influences the consideration and evaluation stages of the consumer decision-making process, making it a powerful tool for businesses to drive sales and revenue.

In summary, brand awareness is of utmost importance in today's competitive business landscape. It enables businesses to make a strong first impression, differentiate from competitors, build trust and credibility, foster customer loyalty, expand market share, and influence purchase decisions. Understanding the significance of brand awareness lays the groundwork for developing effective strategies to increase brand visibility and achieve long-term success.

Levels of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness can be measured at different levels, each representing a different degree of consumer recognition and recall:

• Brand Recognition: This level of brand awareness refers to the ability of consumers to identify a brand when exposed to its logo, packaging, or other visual elements. It is the first step towards building brand awareness, as consumers are able to recognize the brand as familiar, even if they do not recall specific details.
• Brand Recall: Brand recall refers to the ability of consumers to remember a brand when prompted with a product or service category. It goes beyond simple recognition and involves the active retrieval of brand-related information from memory. Brands with high brand recall are more likely to be considered by consumers during the evaluation and purchase process.
• Top-of-Mind Awareness: Top-of-mind awareness represents the highest level of brand awareness. It occurs when a brand is the first to come to mind when consumers think of a specific product or service category. Brands that achieve top-of-mind awareness have successfully positioned themselves as the go-to choice in the minds of consumers.

Understanding the different levels of brand awareness allows businesses to assess their current position and develop strategies to increase awareness at each level, ultimately leading to a stronger brand presence and greater market share.

In conclusion, understanding brand awareness is essential for building a successful brand strategy. It involves the recognition and recall of a brand among consumers, leading to increased credibility, customer loyalty, and market share. By comprehending the definition, importance, and levels of brand awareness, businesses can develop effective tactics to enhance their brand's visibility and achieve long-term success.

How to Conduct Brand Awareness Research

Conducting brand awareness research is a critical step in understanding the current level of awareness and perception of your brand among your target audience. In this section, we will explore the key steps involved in conducting brand awareness research, including choosing the right methodology, designing effective surveys, and analyzing and interpreting the results.

Choosing the Right Methodology

Selecting the appropriate methodology is essential to ensure accurate and reliable brand awareness research. Here are a few commonly used methodologies:

• In-depth Interviews: In-depth interviews provide an opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with individuals from the target audience. This method allows for a deeper exploration of brand awareness, as participants can provide detailed feedback and insights.
• Surveys: Surveys are a popular and effective method for collecting data on brand awareness. They can be administered online, via email, or in person. Surveys allow businesses to gather quantitative data by asking respondents specific questions about their awareness and perception of the brand.
• Focus Groups: Focus groups involve gathering a small group of individuals who represent the target audience. Through moderated discussions and guided questions, businesses can gain qualitative insights into brand awareness, including perceptions, associations, and memorable aspects of the brand.
• Social Listening: Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing online conversations and mentions of the brand on social media platforms. This method provides real-time insights into brand awareness by capturing public sentiment, opinions, and discussions related to the brand.

Choosing the right methodology depends on factors such as budget, target audience, research objectives, and available resources. It is important to select a methodology that aligns with your research goals and provides the necessary data to make informed decisions.

Using Reveal AI for Brand Awareness Research Interviews at Scale

All of these methodologies have their strengths, but they also come with their own limitations. For instance, in-depth interviews yield deep insights but are hard to scale; surveys can be deployed to many respondents, but might lack depth. This is where a tool like Reveal AI comes in:

Redefining In-depth Interviews

Reveal AI is a platform that uses AI to conduct qualitative research interviews, combining the depth of one-on-one conversations with the scalability of surveys. The tool enables you to craft open-ended questions for your 1:1 interview, just as you would in a traditional in-depth interview. Reveal AI’s conversational AI can ask follow-up questions and probe for additional detail, thereby ensuring that you get high-quality, in-depth responses.

Scale With Ease

One of the standout advantages of Reveal AI is its scalability. You can run your interview campaign with anywhere from 1 to 100,000 participants. Unlike traditional in-depth interviews that require considerable time and resources, Reveal AI allows participants to respond at any time and from any device of their choosing. This infrastructure provides convenience for respondents and increases the likelihood of obtaining a higher completion rate, which isn't always the case with traditional surveys.

Real-Time Insights

Running interviews with Reveal AI provides nearly real-time insights, akin to the benefits of social listening, but in an interview context. Through the usage of cutting-edge AI technology, Reveal AI analyzes your interview responses, automatically deriving key insights from the interview data. A big advantage is that this analysis is performed by AI, allowing massive campaigns to be conducted without the burden of manual data analysis.

Customizable and Segmented Insights

Reveal AI allows responses to be sorted by market segmentation factors like geography, role, tenure, and many others. Consequently, it provides a deep, segmented understanding of your brand awareness among various audiences in a way that generally surpasses other methodologies.

In conclusion, if you're gearing up to conduct brand awareness research, integrating a tool like Reveal AI can help you to conduct in-depth interviews at scale and derive insights faster than ever. Its unique combination of conversational AI, scalability, and real-time insights makes it a valuable asset for any brand awareness research toolbox.

Designing Brand Awareness Surveys

When conducting brand awareness research through surveys, it is crucial to design effective and well-structured questionnaires. Consider the following points:

• Objective: Clearly define the objectives of the survey and what specific information you want to gather. This will help in designing relevant questions.
• Demographics: Include demographic questions to understand the characteristics of respondents and segment the data accordingly.
• Brand Recognition and Recall: Incorporate questions that measure brand recognition and recall, such as asking respondents to identify the brand logo or recall specific advertisements.
• Competitor Awareness: Assess competitor awareness by including questions about other brands in the market and their level of recognition or preference.
• Brand Perception: Gather insights into how your brand is perceived by including questions about brand attributes, associations, and overall satisfaction.
• Open-Ended Questions: Include open-ended questions to allow respondents to provide detailed feedback and insights that may not be captured through close-ended questions.
• Scale and Response Options: Use appropriate scales and response options, such as Likert scales or multiple-choice questions, to capture accurate data and make data analysis easier.

Analyzing and Interpreting the Results

Once the data is collected, it is crucial to analyze and interpret the results to gain meaningful insights. Some key steps in this process include:

• Data Cleaning: Review and clean the data to eliminate any inconsistencies or errors.
• Quantitative Analysis: Analyze quantitative data using statistical techniques to identify patterns, trends, and correlations. This can include calculating percentages, averages, and conducting significance tests.
• Qualitative Analysis: Analyze qualitative data, such as responses from open-ended questions, by categorizing themes and identifying common patterns or sentiments.
• Comparative Analysis: Compare brand awareness metrics with competitors or previous research data to gain insights into relative brand positioning and changes over time.
• Interpretation: Interpret the findings in the context of the research objectives and draw meaningful conclusions. Identify areas for improvement and develop actionable strategies based on the insights gained.

Conducting brand awareness research is an ongoing process, as brand perceptions and market dynamics can change over time. Regularly monitoring and updating brand awareness research allows businesses to stay informed and make informed decisions to enhance brand visibility.

In the next section, we will explore effective strategies to increase brand awareness based on the insights gained from brand awareness research.

Strategies to Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing brand awareness is a key objective for businesses looking to expand their reach and attract a larger customer base. In this section, we will explore effective strategies that can be implemented to boost brand awareness and visibility.

Leveraging Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms have become powerful tools for increasing brand awareness. Here are some strategies to leverage social media effectively:

• Content Creation: Create engaging and shareable content that aligns with your brand's values and resonates with your target audience. This can include informative blog posts, visually appealing images, videos, and interactive content.
• Consistent Branding: Maintain consistent branding across all social media platforms. Use your brand logo, colors, and voice to create a cohesive and recognizable brand identity.
• Engagement and Interaction: Actively engage with your audience by responding to comments, messages, and mentions. Encourage user-generated content and foster a sense of community around your brand.
• Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers or industry experts who align with your brand values and have a significant following. Their endorsement can help increase brand visibility and reach new audiences.

Collaborations and Partnerships

Collaborating with other brands or individuals can significantly boost brand awareness. Here are some partnership strategies to consider:

• Co-Branding: Partner with complementary brands to create joint marketing campaigns or co-branded products. This allows you to tap into each other's customer base and increase brand exposure.
• Sponsorships and Events: Sponsor relevant events, conferences, or community initiatives to increase brand visibility. This can include sponsoring local sports teams, industry trade shows, or charitable events.
• Cross-Promotion: Collaborate with non-competing brands to cross-promote each other's products or services. This can be done through joint marketing campaigns, co-hosted events, or sharing promotional materials.

Content Marketing and SEO

Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can play a significant role in increasing brand visibility. Consider the following strategies:

• Blogging and Guest Posting: Create high-quality blog content that provides value to your target audience. Guest posting on relevant industry blogs can also help increase brand exposure and establish thought leadership.
• Optimize Website for SEO: Optimize your website content, meta tags, and URLs to improve search engine rankings. Conduct keyword research to identify relevant terms and incorporate them strategically into your content.
• Video Marketing: Utilize video content to engage and educate your audience. Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo can help increase brand visibility, especially when combined with SEO techniques.
• Guest Speaking and Webinars: Offer to speak at industry conferences or host webinars to share your expertise. This positions your brand as an authority in the field and increases brand exposure.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves partnering with influential individuals in your industry to promote your brand. Consider the following strategies:

• Identify Relevant Influencers: Research and identify influencers who have a significant following and align with your brand values. Look for influencers who have an engaged audience that matches your target market.
• Sponsored Content and Reviews: Collaborate with influencers to create sponsored content, product reviews, or endorsements. This allows you to leverage their reach and credibility to increase brand visibility.
• Giveaways and Contests: Partner with influencers to host giveaways, contests, or exclusive promotions. This encourages audience engagement, increases brand mentions, and attracts new followers.

Incorporating these strategies into your brand awareness efforts can help increase visibility, attract new customers, and build a stronger brand presence. It is important to continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies to make data-driven adjustments and optimize your brand awareness campaigns.

In conclusion, learning from successful brand awareness campaigns can provide valuable insights and inspiration for businesses looking to enhance their own brand visibility. By adopting creative strategies, personalization, and aligning brand messaging with consumer values, businesses can create impactful campaigns that resonate with their target audience and drive brand awareness.

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February 17, 2023 at 5:00 am ET

Brand awareness is crucial for building the reputation of your business, attracting the right audience and maintaining a loyal customer base. While companies may understand how to increase their brand awareness, many struggle to effectively measure the success of their efforts.

• What is brand awareness ?
• The importance of brand awareness

Survey research

Website traffic, branded search volume, social listening, earned media coverage, measure more than brand awareness with morning consult’s brand intelligence, survey research brand awareness metrics, public relations brand awareness metrics, website traffic brand awareness metrics, social media brand awareness metrics, schedule a conversation, what is brand awareness .

Brand awareness is the level of recognition and familiarity that a target audience has with a particular brand. It represents the extent to which consumers can recall, recognize and/or associate a brand with specific characteristics or values. Brand awareness can be influenced by various factors, such as brand interactions, exposure to brand messaging and brand identity.

The importance of brand awareness 

Building awareness keeps brands top of mind and helps differentiate them from competition. And ultimately, people are more likely to buy from a brand they know and trust. Brand awareness has the power to drive audience growth, top-of-funnel leads, product recognition, brand loyalty and purchase consideration. 

• Audience growth: Brand awareness campaigns can increase brand exposure in target markets, generate positive word-of-mouth and build engaged social media communities.
• Top-of-funnel leads: Brand awareness campaigns that leverage SEO, content marketing and social media generate a steady stream of new leads and build a pipeline for future sales.
• Product recognition: Brand awareness helps drive product familiarity in target markets. Consumers may recognize a brand name or visual identity, such as a logo, colors or typography. And when consumers recognize your product, they’re more likely to choose it over competitors.
• Brand loyalty: Brand awareness drives brand loyalty by increasing recognition, creating positive brand associations, building trust and fostering an emotional connection between the brand and its customers.
• Purchase consideration: Similar to product recognition, brand awareness helps drive purchase consideration through increased trust and familiarity, which acts as a differentiator between your brand and competitors. When consumers are already familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to consider buying from it.

How to measure brand awareness

Once you have a firm understanding of brand awareness and the benefits it can bring to your business, it’s important to explore the most effective ways to measure it.

Survey research is one of the most reliable and accurate methods to measure brand awareness. A strong and effective survey method can help inform an organization’s overall brand strategy by providing valuable insights into the minds of consumers. By conducting survey research, businesses can obtain data on how well their brand is known, how it compares to competitors and what factors may be contributing to or hindering its success. This information can help businesses make informed decisions about branding and marketing strategies, as well as identify areas for improvement in order to increase brand awareness and ultimately, drive sales. Some companies may opt to build their own questionnaire and distribute to a hand-selected survey pool, while others choose to partner with a reputable company for even further analysis.

Morning Consult , for example, gives companies a competitive advantage when measuring their brand awareness. We survey tens of thousands of people across the globe every day to provide real-time insights on what consumers think about thousands of brands and products. These insights help professionals build a strong, more effective brand strategy. Learn more .

Measuring website traffic provides insight into the number of users visiting your website and how they’re doing so. Website traffic increasing over time is a strong indication that your brand is becoming more well known. Here’s where you can find this information:

Google analytics: Explore overall site traffic, direct traffic (when a user navigates directly to your site) and referral traffic (users that visit your site through another source) to understand what sources are driving users to your site.

Google search console: Filter out branded organic traffic to understand the extent users are visiting your site via branded keywords on search engines.

Measuring branded search volume can provide insight into what branded keywords are driving traffic to your site and roughly how many times users search those keywords on a monthly basis. It is generally viewed as a trend over time, giving insight into how your brand awareness is growing. There are many keyword research tools that can provide this information, such as:

Keyword planner : A powerful keyword research tool that requires a Google Ads account to access.

Google trends : A search trends tool for comparative keyword research and uncovering spikes in topic search volume.

By definition, social listening is the practice of monitoring social media platforms for brand mentions, related keywords, social engagement and competitor activity. Through social listening, companies can track social mentions of their brand in real time, providing useful insights into consumers’ attitudes toward services and products.

Earned media is a reference to the exposure that a company has earned through word of mouth and media outreach and is a valuable tool in improving brand awareness.

Comparing this data against other brand awareness metrics provides solid insight into the success of your efforts.

While the above tactics are an effective way to boost your brand awareness efforts, partnering with Morning Consult can take your brand strategy to the next level.

Our custom brand tracking solution allows you to understand and measure the associations that customers have with your brand. This type of study suggests how likely a consumer will choose your brand over competitors and provides you with a road map for growth.

Professionals across the globe rely on Morning Consult’s state-of-the-art brand research and analysis technology to deliver real-time, intelligent data on all the most important brand metrics to drive strategic decisions.

Complete list of brand awareness metrics

Refer to this list to ensure you’re uncovering the most valuable insights from your brand awareness efforts.

• Aided brand awareness : the measure of how well a brand is recognized by consumers when prompted with its name or other identifying information, such as a logo or slogan.
• Unaided brand awareness : the measure of how well a brand is recognized by consumers without any prompting.
• Total media coverage : all blog articles, RSS feeds, video content or other types of digital content where a brand, product or service are discussed.
• Share of voice : a measure of the market a brand owns compared to its competitors. It acts as a gauge for brand visibility.
• Brand mentions : references to a company, brand or service online.
• Branded search volume : the number of searches that contain branded keywords (keywords containing a brand name or word associated with a brand) over a given time period.
• Branded organic traffic : the volume of users who are visiting a site via branded keywords (keywords containing a brand name or word associated with a brand) on a search engine over a given time period.
• Referral traffic : the segment of traffic that arrives on your website through another source (i.e. a link on another domain).
• Direct traffic : occurs when a visitor arrives directly on a website without having clicked on a link through another site.
• Total website traffic : the total volume of users visiting a website.
• Backlinks : an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website.
• Social shares : shares on a social network from users to their connections, groups or specific individuals.
• Social engagement : the amount individuals engage with brands or posts on social media platforms.
• Social mentions : social posts that include a reference to a brand.
• Total followers : the total number of users that are following your account on social media platforms.

Morning Consult is helping companies build stronger, more effective strategies with our Brand Intelligence offering. Discover how we can support your brand awareness efforts and inform business decisions with our brand research and analysis technology.

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‘Branding’ explained: Defining and measuring brand awareness and brand attitude

• Published: 29 December 2014
• Volume 21 , pages 533–540, ( 2014 )

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Writing in the very first issue of this journal, the present author proposed a comprehensive model of ‘branding’, a managerial process that requires the marketer to establish, in the consumer’s mind, two essential communication effects: brand awareness and then brand attitude. In the present article, he expands this model from two to now three types of brand awareness (brand recognition, category-cued brand-name recall and brand recall-boosted recognition) and from three to now five levels of brand attitude (reject, unaware, acceptable if on special, one of my several preferred brands and my single preferred brand). Also, he shows how to most efficiently measure these two necessary components of branding.

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Aaker, D. (2014) Aaker on Branding. New York: Morgan James.

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Rossiter, J.R. (1993) Brand awareness and acceptance: A seven-set classification for managers. Journal of Brand Management 1 (1): 33–40.

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Rossiter, J.R. and Percy, L. (1987) Advertising and Promotion Management. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Rossiter, J.R. and Percy, L. (1997) Advertising Communications & Promotion Management. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Rossiter, J.R., Percy, L. and Slowikowski, S. (forthcoming) Managing Advertising and Promotion.

Taute, H.A., Peterson, J. and Sierra, J.J. (2014) Perceived needs and emotional responses to brands: A dual-process view. Journal of Brand Management 21 (1): 23–42.

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Rossiter, J. ‘Branding’ explained: Defining and measuring brand awareness and brand attitude. J Brand Manag 21 , 533–540 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2014.33

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Received : 04 November 2014

Revised : 04 November 2014

Published : 29 December 2014

Issue Date : 01 November 2014

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2014.33

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It’s impossible to measure and fully evaluate the effectiveness of brand awareness activities without robust brand awareness research. Lead volume and revenue statistics give you the bald facts of one part of the outcome. But you need robust research to get actionable insights about your clients real interactions with your brand. This informs strategic decisions related to advertising, communication, product positioning and market expansion. 

You need to know how familiar your clients and prospects are with your brand. Do they recognize it and what associations are attached to your brand? Are these the attributes you intend to be part of your brand identity? Brand awareness research gets into the minds of your target audience, initially giving you a benchmark of how your brand is perceived. Participating in regular brand awareness studies over time helps you track the strength of your brand’s presence in the market and show you the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns. 

Your whole organization can use your brand awareness research insights, for example:

• Identify opportunities for partnerships and collaborations with other brands in your space
• Benchmark overall brand awareness campaigns 
• Help determine how new product offerings align with existing brand perception before product launch
• Create more valuable brand personas by seeing how individual personas perceive your brand differently – even if they’re in the same buying team – and tailoring your targeted marketing accordingly
• Marketing and sales assets have more consistent, refined messaging because teams are more able to understand the thoughts and feelings of their target audiences. 
• Evaluate the success and the ROI of your brand awareness campaigns with reliable data that goes beyond revenue figures
• See where your brand sits among your competitors through the eyes of your clients and prospects – spot where you can stand out from the crowd 
• Track your brand awareness over time to ensure a strong brand identity and increased brand equity

Brand tracking

Brand equity research, brand sentiment analysis, advertising effectiveness, customer satisfaction research, competitive landscape research, brand awareness research to deliver both scale and specificity.

Our technology reaches across 140+ industries to give you the scale of a panel combined with the depth of an expert network. From professionals en masse to niche, hard-to-find audiences, the NewtonX Knowledge Graph can find the exact people to deliver the business insights you need. We’re the only customer loyalty research agency that’s developed proprietary research technology to keep up with market demands. Here’s just a sampling of who we pinpoint, for everything from 5,000+ participant surveys to curated groups of in-depth interviews.

• Cryptocurrency specialists advising on hedge fund projects 
• Advertising professionals overseeing brand spend
• Reddit users that visit Reddit for NSFW content
• IT decision-makers evaluating cloud software services

NewtonX helps industry innovators turn inquiry into impact.

How we helped a $25 billion American life science giant measure brand reputation and develop insights to support strategy

How NewtonX User Research Uncovered Growth Insights for a Digital Advertising Agency

How Tableau utilized a NewtonX brand tracker to sustain innovation

Want to see how newtonx can help you, what is brand awareness research.

Target Audience

Brand awareness research is the cornerstone of understanding how well your brand is recognized and remembered by your target audience. It delves into the extent to which your brand name, logo, or other brand elements resonate with consumers and how readily they associate them with your products or services. This research goes beyond surface-level recognition; it aims to uncover the depth of brand recall and the impressions associated with your brand.

At its core, brand awareness research answers questions such as:

• How familiar are consumers with your brand? Can they spontaneously recall your brand when prompted? What emotions, qualities, or attributes do consumers associate with your brand? How does your brand’s visibility compare to that of competitors in your industry?

By gathering this valuable data, businesses gain insights into their brand’s position in the market and can tailor their marketing strategies accordingly. Brand awareness research is the foundation upon which businesses build strong brand identities and, ultimately, lasting customer relationships. It is an essential component of any brand’s journey toward recognition, credibility, and success in the competitive landscape.

Benefits of brand awareness research

Brand awareness research gives you the custom findings you need to build a successful brand awareness strategy. People buy from people and companies they trust. But you can’t trust something you don’t know. Your brand is your business identity. Brand awareness research isn’t just ‘Do they recognize our logo?’ The insights reveal the perceptions people hold about your brand.

Enhanced Brand Visibility

One of the primary benefits of brand awareness research is improved visibility. By understanding how well your brand is recognized and recalled by consumers, you can fine-tune your strategies to ensure your brand is consistently in the spotlight. Increased visibility translates to more opportunities for engagement and conversion.

Competitive Edge

In a crowded marketplace, standing out is crucial. Brand awareness research helps you assess how your brand compares to competitors. It allows you to identify gaps in awareness and positioning, enabling you to differentiate your brand effectively and gain a competitive edge.

Targeted Marketing

Armed with insights from brand awareness research, businesses can tailor their marketing efforts more precisely. You’ll know which demographics are most aware of your brand and which require more attention. This leads to more efficient resource allocation and better results.

Brand Consistency

Consistency is key to building a strong brand identity. Brand awareness research ensures that consumers consistently recognize and associate your brand with specific values, qualities, or emotions. This uniformity across touchpoints fosters trust and loyalty.

Improved Decision-Making

Making informed decisions is the bedrock of successful marketing strategies. Brand awareness research provides data-driven insights that empower businesses to make decisions based on real consumer perceptions rather than assumptions.

Refinement of Messaging

Through brand awareness research, you gain clarity on the aspects of your brand that resonate most with consumers. This knowledge helps refine your messaging, ensuring it aligns with what your target audience values most about your brand.

Long-Term Brand Equity

Building brand equity is a long-term endeavor. Consistent brand awareness research allows you to monitor your brand’s progress over time, helping you shape a brand that not only survives but thrives in the ever-evolving market.

Risk Mitigation

Identifying weaknesses or negative associations with your brand early on is essential for risk mitigation. Brand awareness research can help detect potential issues before they escalate, allowing you to address them proactively.

Efficient Resource Allocation

Knowing where your brand stands in terms of awareness and perception enables you to allocate resources wisely. You can focus efforts on areas that need improvement while reducing spending on well-established brand elements.

Brand recognition vs brand recall

Audience Connection

Brand recognition and brand recall are both under the umbrella of brand awareness, with recall being a deeper stage of audience connection than recognition.

Strong brand recognition is important – your prospects need to be able to pick your brand out from the others in your industry. But the unaided recall of the latter is what all companies strive for – to be the first brand that pops into someone’s head when they think of your industry is a very powerful position. Brand awareness research encompasses questions designed to ascertain levels of recognition and recall. You can use these insights to build both into your overarching brand strategy.

Brand Recognition:

• Definition : Brand recognition is the consumer’s ability to identify or acknowledge a brand when exposed to it. This recognition typically occurs when a consumer encounters a brand logo, symbol, or other visual cues associated with the brand.
• Example: Think of a scenario where you see the iconic swoosh symbol, and you immediately recognize it as Nike, even if the brand name isn’t explicitly mentioned. This is brand recognition in action.
• Importance : Brand recognition is essential for building initial awareness and familiarity with a brand. It’s the first step in the customer journey, helping consumers connect visual elements with the brand’s identity.
• Marketing Strategies : To enhance brand recognition, marketers often focus on creating memorable logos, packaging, and visual branding elements. Consistency in design and messaging across various touchpoints is crucial.

Brand Recall:

• Definition : Brand recall, on the other hand, goes beyond recognition. It represents a consumer’s ability to remember a brand when prompted without visual cues. It measures how well a brand name or product spontaneously comes to mind.
• Example : If someone asks you to name a popular brand of soft drinks, and you immediately think of “Coca-Cola” without any visual aids, you’re demonstrating brand recall.
• Importance : Brand recall is a deeper level of brand awareness and engagement. It reflects how well a brand has etched itself into consumers’ memories and daily lives.
• Marketing Strategies : To boost brand recall, marketers focus on creating memorable slogans, jingles, and advertising campaigns that stick in consumers’ minds. Consistent messaging and emotional connections play a significant role.

The Synergy:

It’s important to note that brand recognition and brand recall are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they work together to create a robust brand presence:

• Recognition Leads to Recall : Initial brand recognition often paves the way for brand recall. Once consumers are familiar with a brand’s visual identity, they are more likely to remember the brand name and associated attributes.
• Recall Reinforces Recognition : When consumers can recall a brand spontaneously, it reinforces their recognition of that brand when they encounter it visually or otherwise. This synergy enhances brand memorability.

When to perform brand awareness research

Understanding The Issue

The question of timing your brand awareness research study depends on what you want to know. Every NewtonX brand awareness study is customized to each client’s needs and timing the research is part of the planning stage. 

There are some common situations where brand awareness research is always valuable, like:

• Bookending a specific brand awareness campaign with studies to measure its effectiveness
• As part of a refresh of brand personas – adding a layer of real perceptions to deepen those relationships
• During the development of new messaging to see where there are opportunities for refinement
• To get a snapshot of where your brand sits in the market, in comparison to your competitors, from your prospects’ perspective. 
• At regular intervals throughout the year to monitor brand health to grow brand loyalty and equity over time

If brand awareness research is the best way to answer your questions, then NewtonX will make it part of your overall research strategy.

Factors for performing brand awareness research

When you’re performing brand awareness research, the first step is to set specific objectives. This means thinking through how you’re going to use what you find out, before you even start the research process. You need to include everyone that the results can benefit and set clear expectations for every stage of the process. This even means thinking through what you’re going to do with the possible results. There’s no point investing in brand awareness research if you’re not open to what might be uncovered. What if insights reveal that your brand has some negative associations? Preparing your team for any eventuality from the start optimizes the value of your brand awareness research. 

How to measure brand awareness

Brand Recall

Measuring brand awareness is a multifaceted process that involves assessing various aspects of how consumers perceive and recognize your brand. Surveys and questionnaires are commonly used to gauge aided and unaided brand recall. These surveys ask participants open-ended questions about brands in your industry, measuring spontaneous awareness (unaided) and prompted awareness (aided).

Analyzing website traffic and analytics is another vital component. You can track the number of visitors, bounce rates, and user engagement on your website. Pay particular attention to organic search traffic, as it can reflect brand visibility and recognition.

Social media monitoring is crucial in the digital age. By keeping an eye on social media platforms, you can measure brand mentions, shares, and engagement levels. Social listening tools can help track sentiment and conversations related to your brand.

Utilizing tools like Google Trends is valuable for assessing search volume for your brand name and related keywords. An increase in search queries can indicate growing brand awareness.

Brand equity surveys can provide valuable insights into consumer perceptions and associations with your brand. Metrics such as brand favorability, loyalty, and trustworthiness can be evaluated to gauge brand awareness.

Market research data, including market share, customer satisfaction scores, and customer feedback, can provide further insights into shifts in brand awareness. Comparing your brand awareness metrics to those of competitors through competitor benchmarking can reveal your brand’s position in the market.

Recognition testing, both in focus groups or online studies, can assess consumers’ ability to recognize your brand logo, tagline, or visual elements.

By combining these various measurement methods, you can develop a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s awareness levels and make informed decisions to enhance brand recognition and recall among your target audience.

Brand awareness survey question examples

Your NewtonX brand awareness survey questions will be tailored to answer your overarching business question. A small example includes: 

When you think of industry/product/service, what brands come to mind?

How familiar are you with our products or services, what aspects of the brands you purchase drive your decision, what factors matter to you in the consideration of the brands you might buy, if you were to tell someone about our brand, what would you say, has your opinion of our brand changed over the last few months, how likely are you to recommend our brand to someone else.

20 B2B Brand Awareness Survey Questions That Improve Strategic Planning

Asking the key brand awareness survey questions will help you assess where you stand on this crucial marketing metric.

The Value of Building B2B Brand Awareness

How do you build, increase, and measure brand awareness in B2B industries? Read more about the value and insights you can gather by measuring awareness.

The right brand perception survey questions boost your marketing ROI

In B2B branding, brand perceptions are what your target audience, customers, and prospects—and to some extent, your employees—think about your brand.

Take it from the world’s leading companies.

Newtonx’s platform gives us continued confidence that we’re sourcing the highest quality data to drive critical business decisions., i was really excited when we found newtonx. their custom recruiting has genuinely been a game changer for us in terms of data quality. not only do i have much greater trust in the data, but the variation in the data means i can more easily provide actionable direction for our product and marketing teams without finding myself rationalizing away bad data., got your next question in mind.

NewtonX is the only B2B research company that connects researchers with the exact professionals required to solve any problem.

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Home Blog How To Perform A Brand Awareness Study

How To Perform A Brand Awareness Study

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We perform brand awareness studies because a brand is such an important thing.

Studies show the stronger a brand’s awareness, the more likely people are to buy it. In fact, brand awareness has positive impacts on customer lifetime values (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Why? Because trust matters. And a brand, if anything, is a way for companies to tell you what you can trust them to do. It’s the product of years of deliberate work on very tangible things (e.g. quality, consistency, availability) marketed in a particular way (e.g. positioning, messaging).

This is why we do brand awareness studies . They objectively measure how many people know about you. And, they hopefully tell you how much people trust you to deliver.

Why Perform A Brand Awareness Study

Let’s dig into the key reasons you’ll want to perform a brand awareness study.

Benchmark Where You Stand Today In The Market

Remember the old Peter Drucker saying, “What gets measured gets managed?” This is what brand awareness metrics are all about. You can’t take stock of your position in the market without measuring it! The same is true of your competitors too. Measuring competitor awareness tells you exactly where everyone stands.

Measure The Impact of Marketing Efforts

Marketing activities should increase awareness for a brand. Increases in purchases or information requests follow thereafter. This is why you’ll want to take a brand awareness benchmark before you start marketing campaigns and then again after. This lets you see how things are trending. And, if they aren’t trending well, it gives you a chance to re-jigger things.

Proactively Identify Upstarts In The Market

New brands pop up all the time. It’s hard to keep track of it all. However, by measuring customers’ awareness of category brands, you have a proactive way to see if anyone is taking hold. Or, if you’re the upstart brand, you can assess if your brand awareness is getting traction.

We want to be explicit that brand awareness studies are not just about measuring your own awareness. Measure competitor awareness too. This gives you a complete, holistic picture of the ecosystem you do business in.

The Key Brand Awareness Metrics

When performing brand awareness research studies, you should always measure two types of awareness: aided and unaided awareness.

Measuring Unaided Brand Awareness

We like to say that unaided brand awareness is the holy grail of branding. This is because unaided awareness is a way to measure top-of-mind awareness. Here’s how it works. You ask participants to name all the brands that come to mind for a given category. You then give them an open space to list out as many brands as they can think of.

Let’s use the athletic shoe category as an example. We would pose the following statement, “Please list all of the athletic shoe brands that come to mind.” Respondents then see an open box where they can type as many, or as few, brands that come to mind.

When reviewing the raw data, we’d see something like the table to the left. For each respondent, we see at least one entry. That entry may be a single brand, it could be many brands, or it could be some variation of “I don’t know.”

Once you collect the raw responses, you then tally up the number of times each brand was mentioned, and then divide it by the total number of people in your study. Let’s say 20 people out of 200 mention Saucony. This means that Saucony enjoys 10% unaided brand awareness.

Measuring Aided Brand Awareness

The next metric to measure in a brand awareness study is aided brand awareness. This is essentially a measure of recall. Research participants look at a list of brands and select all of the brands they recognize.

Let’s keep using our athletic shoe brand to see how we measure aided awareness. We show respondents a large list of brands. They then select the brand names they recognize.

Once we collect the raw data, we determine how many times a brand is selected compared to the number of people taking the survey. For instance, let’s say Saucony is selected 50 times out of a survey with 200 respondents. This lets us say that Saucony has 25% aided brand awareness.

How To Perform Your Brand Awareness Study

Let’s go through a quick rundown of how to actually execute your brand awareness study and look at its results.

1. Draft & Revise Your Study Questions

Start by writing out the questions you want in your study. Of course, this includes your unaided and aided brand awareness questions. But, it can include other questions too. For instance, you may want to learn more about how people perceive your category, your brand, or competitor brands.

Ideally, you have other people review your survey. This lets you bring in new perspectives and further refine your questions.

2. Program Your Brand Awareness Study

We haven’t said it explicitly. But, brand awareness studies are generally quantitative studies . That means we use (usually) digital surveys to capture responses. As a result, you’ll need to take your drafted questions and program them into a survey platform. Once programmed, be sure to take it several times. You’ll see how respondents experience the survey, giving you a chance to revise anything you don’t like.

3. Collect Survey Responses

You now need people to actually take your survey.

There is no hard and fast rule about how many people you must survey. However, we like sample sizes that allow for no more than + 8% margin of error. That’s a specialized way of saying we want to survey enough people that we can feel confident in our survey results. The greater your sample size, the lower your sample error.

4. Code The Unaided Awareness Question

Questions that capture free form text need to be coded. This means someone reviews each response and attributes it to a particular tag. For instance, responses with “Socony,” “Saucany,” or “Socny” get tagged as “Saucony.” It’s a time intensive process, but necessary with open text responses.

5. Review Responses To Aided Awareness Question & Other Survey Questions

You now can aggregate responses to each of your other survey questions. This lets you see exactly where brands stack up on aided awareness as well as the other questions you asked. Using statistical methods and significance testing lets you further identify patterns and relationships within your data.

6. Review Responses By Customer Segment

It’s great to see aided and unaided awareness across all respondents. However, maybe awareness differs by gender, age, job title, or some other feature. If this is the case, you’ll want to split your data across each of these groups to see how these unique segments respond to each survey question.

Where to Source Research Participants

Let’s now circle back to the issue of finding participants for your brand awareness study. When it comes to this component, you have two things to work through.

1. Determine Your Participant Profile

First, determine who you want in your study. Usually, you want people that could potentially purchase your product. In the B2C world, this means finding people who previously bought or would consider purchasing something from your product’s category. For instance, if you’re Heinz ketchup, you want people who have or will buy ketchup. Conversely, for B2B items, this means people in a position to buy your product. For instance, if you’re Mailchimp, you want people who are responsible for email marketing in their organization.

2. Determine Where You Will Find Your Participants

Brand awareness studies usually require hundreds of research participants. This means you need to find them. We generally source participants from one of two locations.

Research Panel Companies

Panel companies specialize in building databases of people who have opted-in to participating in assorted research like surveys and interviews . By using targeted questions called screeners, panel companies help you find people who meet your participant criteria. The upside of panel companies is you have greater confidence that you’ll get enough respondents. The downside is that there is a cost per respondent.

3rd Party Databases

There are also more tangential ways to find participants through 3rd parties. For instance, one approach is leveraging sales enablement databases like Hoovers. These tools let you filter contacts by B2B demographic criteria so you can build a list of relevant contacts. This approach lets you take advantage of existing tools in your organization, minimizing research costs. However, it requires cold outreach which may have limited response rates.

People sometimes wonder if they can use their own business’s contact database. The answer to that is easy. No, you cannot! This is a very biased set of contacts because they already know your brand. After all, how else would they be in your database to begin with? Be sure to use a contact source that is objective and lets you get an accurate picture of your market landscape.

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Published October 25 th 2023

4 Ways to Measure and Track Brand Awareness

Brand awareness has always been one of the hardest things to measure. We take a look at the different ways you can monitor the buzz around your brand.

Consumers are bombarded with information and messages on a daily basis. They face endless choices in highly competitive markets. Strong brand awareness can make all the difference. 

Brand awareness is an indicator of how familiar and recognizable your brand is to consumers. It measures how well a brand is known in its target market and can greatly impact consumers' purchasing decisions. If consumers are familiar with a brand, they are more likely to buy the product instead of a competitor's product. 

Some brands have achieved such widespread recognition that their brand names have become synonymous with the generic terms for their products. Notable examples include Band-Aid, Kleenex, Coke, and Sharpie. For instance, consumers often refer to any facial tissue as a 'Kleenex,' showcasing the immense influence and branding power these companies have achieved.

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Start measuring your brand awareness properly.

With Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can track how many people are talking about your brand online and analyze the conversation.

That's why brands spend a lot of money on brand awareness campaigns to get their brand in front of a wide audience, with the goal of consumers remembering their brand when they make a purchase decision.

One way to increase brand awareness is through sponsorships. Brands spend a lot of money to have their logo appear on the kits of major sports events. The airline Emirates, for example, spends 70 million euros a year on its sponsorship deal with the football club Real Madrid. It's unlikely that viewers watching the games will immediately book a flight with Emirates, but when they think about booking their next trip, they may remember Emirates and consider booking a flight with them.

It's important to build brand awareness in order to become recognizable to consumers and to attract new customers in the long run. However, brand awareness has always been one of the most difficult things to measure. Below, we take a look at the different ways you can monitor awareness.

Why tracking your brand awareness is important

Brand awareness is how familiar consumers are with your brand. The knowledge and perception they have about your brand influence their buying decisions. Ultimately, brand awareness leads to a better brand reputation, strengthens customer loyalty, and increases sales.

Brands need to be aware of how their customers and target audiences perceive their brand, products, or services. Without tracking your brand awareness, you don’t know how your brand is positioned in the market or if your campaigns and efforts have a positive effect on the perception of your brand. It’s like sending a message without caring for the answer. 

Awareness is the beginning of every customer journey. Without awareness, your audience doesn't know about your product and how it can solve their problems. Without awareness, you don't get customers. Building awareness and making your brand memorable to your customers are the first steps to building a relationship with them.

By tracking your brand awareness, you can see how consumers view your brand, how you compare to your competitors, and how your brand awareness changes over time. 

Changes in brand awareness can provide critical feedback on what is working well or what areas need improvement. These insights will inform your overall strategy and help you make smarter business decisions.

With an effective brand awareness measurement in place, you can answer the following questions: 

• What does our reputation and current level of brand awareness look like? 
• How does our brand compare to competitors? 
• How does brand awareness for our different products and services differ? 
• How has our brand awareness changed over time?
• How many consumers come to our website? 
• How many consumers are searching for our products and services?
• How often are consumers talking online about our brand, products, and services?

Let’s take a closer look at how you implement brand awareness tracking and answer these questions.

4 effective ways for measuring brand awareness

Understanding how to measure brand awareness is key to any marketing strategy. It's about tracking the growth of your brand and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts overall. But how do you measure awareness? And how do you track changes over time?

In the digital age, measuring brand awareness online is crucial. With various tools available, it's now easier to track brand awareness. We will introduce you to four common ways of measuring brand awareness. These methods will help you understand your brand's current standing and track progress over time. 

Let’s dive in.

1. Conduct surveys

Whether you conduct a survey via email, website, or phone, you can either ask existing customers how they heard about you or ask a random sample of people if they are familiar with your brand. The first approach will give you an understanding of how people have heard about you, while the second will give you insight into the number of people who can remember your brand out of context.

Here are some questions you can ask to understand your brand awareness.

Questions for brand awareness surveys: 

• How familiar are you with our brand?
• How did you first hear about our brand?
• What do you associate with our brand?
• Did you buy or use our products or services?
• How is your customer experience with our brand?
• How likely will you recommend our brand to your family and friends?

2. Look at website traffic

Measuring your website traffic over time can provide insights into brand awareness. How are consumers getting to your site? They may type your URL into their address bar, use a browser bookmark, or search for keywords or your brand name.

Google Analytics can give you insight into whether there is more interest in your brand and whether your brand awareness campaigns are paying off. Ideally, you will see an increase in traffic to your website after a successful campaign.

Direct traffic in Google Analytics can be a great metric to get an overview of your current brand awareness. Consumers who come directly to your site by searching for your brand name are a great indicator of brand awareness. Instead of searching for products or services in your industry, they know your brand. The higher the percentage of traffic from people searching directly for your brand name, the better.

3. Look at search volume data

Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner and Google Trends to check the search volume for your brand name and track it over time to see if the search volume is increasing.

This can be a simple but useful tool. Keep in mind that the data may not be very accurate if your brand name is a generic term such as ‘Shell’ or ‘Seat.’

4. Use a social listening tool

Perhaps the most effective tactic is to look where people are already talking – on social media and other websites

.Social listening tools allow you to tune in to organic online conversations about your brand on social media and the web, thereby increasing your brand awareness. Listening to these unsolicited opinions allows you to understand consumers' thoughts as they are naturally expressed.

This also overcomes one of the main problems with surveys, which is response bias . Response bias is where people may not give natural answers simply because of the format in which they are being asked. Brands using social listening platforms can enrich their survey data with social data, uncovering insights that they weren’t previously aware of. 

Social listening tools like Brandwatch allow you to write your own refined searches that can overcome the problem of a generic brand name, allowing you to filter out all irrelevant mentions. You can see how people are talking about your brand, the words and phrases they are using, and the sentiment of their conversations.

These brand awareness tools are also great for tracking your brand mentions over time and seeing how the volume of mentions or sentiment has changed over time. You can set up searches around your competitors, too, and compare your brand performance to theirs.

Key performance indicators and metrics for measuring brand awareness

Key performance indicators (or KPIs) for brand awareness are crucial when it comes to evaluating the success of your marketing efforts. These brand awareness metrics provide a quantifiable way to measure the impact of your strategies.

But what KPIs should you be focusing on?

In this section, we'll explore the key performance indicators and metrics for measuring brand awareness. We'll discuss how to quantify brand awareness, how to test brand awareness, and how to measure its impact on your overall marketing strategy.

Let's get started. 

Calculate your brand awareness score

The brand awareness score is a number or value that provides a quick snapshot of how well your brand is known among its target audience. While not an exact science, it can provide a high-level indicator of how well a brand is known. Your brand awareness score can be based on surveys, social media mentions, traffic, or other sources. The metrics you choose for the score depend on your goals and what your company defines as brand awareness. The approach, therefore, is very subjective and varies from company to company.

Once you decide which metrics to track, you can use it as a benchmark to monitor your brand awareness. You can see how the score changes over time, identify areas for improvement, and see how your campaigns impact your brand awareness.

A good brand awareness score depends on the industry you are in and the stage of your business. The longer you are in the business the more likely you will have a good brand awareness score compared to a business that just started. 

Here are some metrics you can use to measure your brand awareness score.

Look at the volume of mentions

By simply counting the number of times your brand is mentioned online, you can discover the number of conversations your brand is part of and track any changes over time.

Importantly, you can also track conversations that do not include @mentions or that occur outside of your brand's official, owned channels.

Many brand-related conversations are happening outside your social media channels. If you only use inbuilt analytics platforms, you can only see a glimpse of how people are talking about your brand. 

Measure the reach of your content

Reach is the total number of people who are exposed to your content. It gives you an idea of how many potentially see your posts. If someone with a million followers posts about your brand, it will spread brand awareness much more than a share from someone with 100 friends.

This is one of the reasons why influencers are often courted in marketing campaigns; their large audience means that anything they share has the potential to be seen by a lot of eyes.

Calculate the engagement of your content

While reach gives you an idea of how many people potentially see your content, engagement goes into more detail about how many interact with your content. On social media, this can be likes, shares, or comments. 

Engagement shows you if people are interested in your content rather than watching it pass by in their social media feeds.

Mastering Brand Management: Context, Strategies, and Real-World Examples

Here’s how you can create and implement a strong brand management strategy.

Benchmarking in brand awareness measurement

Benchmark historical data and baseline metrics.

Standalone data and metrics are not very meaningful. You need to put them into context. Benchmarking data, be it historical data or competitor data, gives you insights into how your brand awareness is performing over time or compared to other players in the industry. 

In order to track changes in brand awareness, you need to benchmark against your baseline metrics, looking at a long enough time period to spot any natural peaks and troughs, as well as any anomalies.

You can also see the impact of your campaigns on brand awareness. Has website traffic increased? Are more people searching for your brand and products or talking about you online?

With Brandwatch, you can easily measure and benchmark online conversations or compare your social media performance with that of your competitors.

Track your share of voice

Benchmarking your metrics will tell you if your brand awareness has increased, but it will not give you the full picture.

Comparing your brand awareness with that of your competitors can give you an idea of how you perform against other players in your market. 

That's why it's important to track the share of voice. Share of voice is a KPI that gives you insight into how much your brand is being talked about compared to your competitors.

With social listening tools like Brandwatch, you can easily see how many conversations about your brand are happening in your industry. By tracking the share of voice and changes over time, you can add context to the data.

You can then identify potential areas for improvement to increase your brand awareness. For example, you may find that consumers are talking more about your competitors than your brand, which means they are aware of the industry but don't yet know your brand well. These insights can inform your future brand awareness campaign, and with a robust share of voice setup in place, you can easily measure the results of future campaigns.

Tracking your brand awareness is the foundation of success 

Brand awareness is one of the most important indicators of how your brand is perceived. 

Increasing the number of consumers who can recall your brand is an integral part of your success.

In the past, getting an accurate view of awareness was a challenge, but social listening has simplified the process while providing rich data. Using Brandwatch to track brand awareness gives you the tools you need to both monitor and grow the buzz around your brand.

Find out how Brandwatch can help you measure and understand brand awareness with a personalized demo.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The influences of brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process: an event-related potentials study.

• School of Management, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China

Brand awareness plays an important role in most aspects of marketing. However, consumers’ cognitive process of brand awareness, which plays an important role in purchase decision or product usage experiences, is still unclear in the brain. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the influences of two different brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process was investigated. Phone pictures with high or low brand awareness and girl pictures were used to carry out this experiment research. An amended oddball task was designed in which girl photos were taken as target stimuli, and phone pictures were taken as non-target stimuli. Subjects were asked to identify the girl pictures. Smaller ERPs components N2 and P3 along with high brand awareness phone pictures were found compared to the low brand awareness ones. The amplitude variation in N2 and P3 indicated that the cognitive process of identification and attention distribution were changed along with the magnitude of brand awareness, which meant consumers could allocate different attention resources to distinguish high or low brand awareness product unconsciously. This may indicate the identification and attention distribution caused by brand awareness can be detected by N2 and P3, and event-related potentials methodology may be a sensitive measurement technique for brand awareness.

Introduction

As is known to all, brand awareness plays an important role in consumer decision-making, market performance, marketing mix, and brand equity. Keller (2008) have pointed out that brand awareness refers to whether consumers can recall or recognize a brand, or simply whether consumers know about a brand. Just as people buy mobile phones, people are more inclined to buy iPhone or Samsung than a less well-known brand, such as Smartsan or UooGou. Obviously, when consumers face a vast commodity brand, the higher the brand awareness, the easier it is to attract consumers. Scholars have conducted extensive research on the two important aspects of brand awareness, brand recognition and recall. Most scholars have reached a consensus that brands recognition and recall are important while consumers are making purchase decisions ( Emma and Sharp, 2000 ; Thoma and Williams, 2013 ) and evaluating product usage experience ( Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012 ; Stach, 2019 ) or product quality ( Huang and Sarigoellue, 2012 ). Brand recognition and recall also affect consumer attitudes and emotion ( Rossiter, 2014 ; Wilson et al., 2015 ; Xu et al., 2015 ), even the firm performance ( Grundey and Bakowska, 2008 ; Homburg et al., 2010 ).

However, most of the research mentioned above mainly adopted questionnaire ( Emma and Sharp, 2000 ; Koenigstorfer and Groeppel-Klein, 2012 ; Topolinski et al., 2014 ), interview ( MacInnis et al., 1999 ; Turner et al., 2015 ), or market survey ( Naik et al., 2008 ; Homburg et al., 2010 ) as research methods. Despite growing concerns about cognitive research on brand recognition and recall from the perspective of psychology, such as studies on purchase intention ( Ashby et al., 2015 ; Topolinski et al., 2015 ), memory ( Valkenburg and Buijzen, 2005 ; Hubert et al., 2013 ), or categorization ( Esch et al., 2009 ; Dew and Kwon, 2010 ), etc., research into the cognitive process of brand awareness in the brain has not aroused sufficient attention. Even though the approaches above are easy and cheap to implement, the data gathered may include biases. As a consequence, the results of those studies usually do not match the actual behavior of consumers when they buy ( Scheier, 2007 ). The reason for the deviation lies in the unavoidable shortcomings of the above-mentioned methods itself. Whether it is for the collective, the individual, and whether it is conducted in a confidential manner, researchers still rely on consumers’ self-reports to investigate their response to brand awareness. But these methods have limitations. First, the researchers assumed that the respondents were able to describe their own cognitive processes, but in fact, many of the subconscious parts of the process were not known to the respondents. Second, there are many other factors, including incentives, time constraints, or peer pressures, that induce respondents to distort their feelings, so that the results of the survey do not fully reflect the true thinking of the respondents. It is important to note that some earlier studies have already involved the cognitive process and brand awareness in the brain, such as linguistic encoding and retrieval processes of brand experiences ( Esch et al., 2012 ), the basis of the relationship between brand personality associations and brain activity ( Chen et al., 2015 ), the consumer-psychology model specification synthesized psychological constructs and empirical finding using consumer-neuroscience methods ( Schmitt, 2012 ). However, studies on the neural response to brand awareness straightforward have not yet started, which can provide marketers with a theoretical foundation. Therefore, marketers and researchers need to re-examine research methods in order to better understand consumer behavior ( Pozharliev et al., 2017 ).

By using neuroimaging tools, consumer neuroscience might be cheaper and faster than current marketing tools and better understand the decision-making and related processes than usual ( Ariely and Berns, 2010 ; Plassmann et al., 2015 ). With these advantages, consumer neuroscience has attracted scholars’ interest and attention since the “Coke and Pepsi” experiment ( Hoegg et al., 2010 ). People realize that by observing the processing of stimuli in the brain, we can study how consumers respond to external stimuli and to observe and study consumer behavior from the neuroscience level ( Scheier, 2007 ). Based on the theory of consumer neuroscience and earlier event-related brain potential (ERPs) studies ( Sutton et al., 1965 ; Roth, 1973 ), we expect brand awareness to be intrinsically related to brain neural response. In this study, we take phones with different brand awareness, the ordinary wireless communication devices, as research objects to carry out the cognitive research by ERPs. We hypothesize that the process of consumers’ brand recognition and recall will be activated and reflected spontaneously by ERPs components alone with different brand awareness, which might be sensitively associate with the cognitive process such as categorization and memory retrieval according to the literature ( Polich, 2007 ; Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ). The study could provide a novel way to estimate brand awareness from another perspective, especially when traditional evaluation methods are controversial, the evoked components may serve as a sensitive indicator.

Materials and Methods

Sixteen right-handed college students (eight male and eight female; mean age 25.6 ± 2.8 years) were recruited. All subjects reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision. All of them were free of neurological or psychiatric illness, head trauma, or drug abuse. Written informed consent was obtained from each subject according to the local medical ethics committee. Subjects received a small gift as compensation after the experiment.

Stimulation

The critical stimuli were beautiful girl photos, two categories of colorful phone photos. According to the Chinese mobile phone brand reputation report 2018, two phone brands with different brand awareness were chosen in this study. The high brand awareness index was 5.46, and the low one was 2.71. Subjects reported that they had heard of the phone brands before the experiment.

Experimental Design

An illustration of the basic classes of stimuli and the timing of the experiment is shown in Figure 1 . Subjects viewed a sequence of colorful beautiful girl photos ( n = 3) and two categories of colorful phone photos ( n = 4) for each brand. The reason we chose beautiful girl photos is that we want to attract subjects’ attention so that when subjects see these two categories of colorful phone photos unconsciously, we can explore their brain activity. An amended oddball task had been used: the girl photos were taken as target stimulus and phone pictures were taken as non-target stimulus. The target proportion of series was 27.3%.

Figure 1. The sequence of stimuli with beautiful girl photos and colorful phone photos in an amended oddball paradigm.

An electrically shielded and sound-attenuated experimental chamber was used. The Subjects seated in a comfortable chair during the experiment. Each trial began with a screen-centered fixation cross presented in light gray against a black LCD computer screen. The task was programmed and presented by E-prime professional (vision2.0, Psychology Software Tools). Each experimental block contained 11 photos, 3 target stimuli, and 8 non-target stimuli. Each trial presented more than 10 times. One trial consisted of the presentation of the stimulus (duration of 800 ms) followed by a fixation cross (random inter-trial interval with a duration between 800 and 1200 ms) to avoid repeated presentations of the stimuli. Those stimuli were viewed from a distance of 100 cm at the center, visual angle 10.3°, horizontal vertical angle 6.8°. The subject’s task was to identify and verbally report to the researcher the number of target stimuli. If the accuracy was less than 95%, the data would be discarded. Before the experimental blocks, subjects performed one training block to familiarize with the task. Subjects were offered a rest break half-way through the presentation of the stimuli.

Electroencephalogram Recording and Analysis

Subjects wore a 32 channel electroencephalogram (EEG) cap (Quickcap) during their session, with electrodes placed using the International 10/20 system to record and then estimate the ERPs. The electrodes were referenced to the left mastoid. All electrodes’ impedance was kept below 5 kΩ. Vertical eye movements were monitored with electrodes placed directly below the left eye, and horizontal eye movements were monitored with electrodes placed on the outer canthi of the right eye. Electrode recordings were collected by Nuamps amplifiers (Neurosoft Labs Inc.) with a band-pass of 0.01–100 Hz, a sample rate of 1000 Hz. Offline data was processed using Curry7.0 SBA (Neurosoft Labs Inc.). The dataset with more than 6% of the trials rejected was excluded from further analysis. ERPs were segmented into time locked epoches using the picture onset as a reference. The length of the time window was 1000 ms from 200 ms before picture onset to 800 ms after it (baseline = 200 ms). The averages per channel were low-pass filtered through 50 Hz (24 dB/octave) and were computed on the basis of the EEG elicited in response to brand with different awareness index using within-subject repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA).

The time windows of the ERPs components of interest in the frontal, central, and parietal electrodes were presented in Figure 2 . Based on a visual examination of the potential distributions, the scalp topographical mapping of potentials (see Figure 3 ) and the literature ( Potts et al., 1996 ; Polich and Criado, 2006 ; Legrain et al., 2009 ), nine electrodes F3, Fz, F4, C3, Cz, C4, P3, Pz, P4 were chosen for statistical analysis. The average amplitude of N2 in 200–260 ms time window, P3 in 300–400 ms were analyzed. Within each time window, a within-subjects repeated measure ANOVA was used to compare the ERPs (average amplitude of N2 and P3), with brand awareness (high vs. low) and distribution (frontal, central, and parietal) as two within-subject factors. When appropriate, Greenhouse-Geisser correction of degrees of freedom and contrast analysis were used. The significance level was set at P < 0.05.

Figure 2. Raw ERPs waveforms at 9 electrode sites. Grand averaged ERPS elicited by stimuli with low brand awareness (solid line) vs. high brand awareness (dotted line) at 9 electrodes in the frontal, central, and parietal areas.

Figure 3. Topographic maps of the voltage field topography. Topographic maps of the voltage field topography at the peak of the N2 and P3 evoked by stimuli with low and high brand awareness. Red and yellow are positive, blue and black are negative, scaled from −4 to 4 mV (N2) or −2 to 2 mV (P3).

The results showed that, for the N2, there was a significant main effect for distribution [ F (2, 30) = 29.137, p < 0.001], brand variance [ F (1, 15) = 14.629, p = 0.002], and interaction between brand awareness and distribution [ F (2, 30) = 4.493, p = 0.020]. Combining raw waveforms with variance analysis, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher N2 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of N2 appeared on the Fz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared. Besides, the closer to the front of the scalp, a greater amplitude of the N2 waveform could be seen, whether the stimuli were presented with a low or high degree of brand awareness. For the P3, we obtained significant main effects for brand awareness [ F (1, 15) = 11.731, p = 0.004], but distribution [ F (2, 30) = 1.592, p = 0.220] and interaction between brand awareness and distribution [ F (2, 30) = 2.778, p = 0.078]. Similar to the N2 component, our study demonstrated that the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher P3 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region, and the highest amplitude of P3 appeared in the middle of Fz-Cz electrode when the low brand awareness appeared. Besides, the closer to the front-central of the scalp, the greater amplitude of the P3 waveform could be seen, whether the stimuli were presented with a low or high degree of brand awareness.

The present study aimed at contributing to explore consumers’ cognitive process of different brand awareness through two phone brands. In order to better simulate the impact of brand awareness on consumer cognitive process, we did not try to fabricate a non-existent brand to conduct research. The two phone brands which had different brand awareness on market were chosen to carry out ERPs experiments through a pseudo oddball paradigm. The ERPs results showed significant differences between the two categories of colorful phone photos with different brand awareness. Low brand awareness stimulus elicited higher amplitudes of the N2 and P3 than high ones.

As the result showed, the low brand awareness conditions were associated with higher N2 amplitude than the high brand awareness condition in the frontal and central region. It was generally believed that N2 distributed over the front-central of scalp reflected the process of cognitive control ( Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ; Liu et al., 2013 ). We believe that the N2 component could reflect consumers’ identification of brand which corresponded to the recognition process of brand awareness on the basis of previous studies ( Schweinberger et al., 2002 ; Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ; Wiese et al., 2014 ). Stimulation with brands in this experiment had been divided into two categories, one for high brand awareness and another for low brand awareness. According to raw waveforms and statistical analysis, these two categories of phone photos could lead to significant difference in N2 component, we believed that subjects could accurately distinguish the phones’ brand even the phone pictures with a brand awareness difference is taken as a non-target stimulus. As brand awareness was different, subjects allocated more cognitive resources for the stimulus with low brand awareness. Conversely, when stimuli with high brand awareness presented, subject only needed to put less effort into the identification process, therefore the average amplitude of N2 appeared smaller compared to low brand awareness ones. Combining the raw waveforms with topographic maps, we found that the component N2 was mainly distributed over most brain areas from frontal to central area, and its amplitude was lager in Fz than Cz. The result was coincident with previous study ( Ernst et al., 2013 ; Hu et al., 2013 ).

Similar to the N2 component, the result showed that the low brand awareness conditions elicited higher P3 amplitude than high brand awareness condition, and the P3 mainly distributed over fronto-central scalp. The evoked P3 component in this study might be a P3a-like potential due to its distribution. In general interpretation, the P3, which distributed over the central area, was thought to reflect the allocation of attention ( Polich, 2007 ). The amplitude was observed to decrease as the difficulty of the primary task increased, and thus reflected the attention resources devoted to task performance ( García-Larrea and Cézanne-Bert, 1998 ; Polich, 2007 ). As mentioned before, the girl pictures were taken as target stimulus, phone pictures were taken as non-target stimulus, and subject’s task was to identify and report to the researcher the number of target stimuli. According to this interpretation, when subjects concentrated on performing the main tasks in the experiment, the phone pictures could be seen as distractions. The higher the brand awareness, the easier it is to be excluded from the task by subjects. As mentioned earlier, the two selected phones’ brand awareness was 5.46 and 2.71, respectively, so that the decrease in brand awareness indexes between brands increased the task difficulty ( Hagen et al., 2006 ) and consequently led to a more intense P3. Another interpretation is that P3a may be subtended by neural changes in the anterior cingulate function when new stimuli replace the contents of working memory ( Polich and Comerchero, 2003 ; Polich, 2007 ). Compared to the stimuli that had high brand awareness index, subjects were more risk-avoidant considering committing errors and subsequently more likely to activate an anterior cingulate/medial prefrontal network while processing with low brand awareness ones. According to this, the stimuli that had a lower brand awareness could be regarded as a type of non-target distractor. Thus, a larger amplitude of P3 was elicited when the phone photos with low brand awareness presented.

This study had some differences with traditional studies. First of all, unlike the traditional marketing methods such as questionnaire, interview, or market survey, consumers’ cognitive process caused by brand awareness had been studied through an experimental approach. In this study, the relationship between cognitive process and brand awareness was investigated using event-related potentials, and consumers’ cognitive differences caused by high and low brand awareness were explored unconsciously. Second, through the observation of consumers’ cognitive reactions to phone pictures with brand awareness variances, in particular the process of identification and attention distribution, we found that the amplitude deviation of EPR components N2 and P3 could be developed into a cognitive index to measure the process of consumers’ brand recognition and recall, and then to measure brand awareness from another angle.

To summarize, this study explored the influences of brand awareness on consumers’ cognitive process unconsciously. The result showed that stimuli with low brand awareness could elicit higher N2 and P3 than high brand awareness ones, which means that, alone with perceiving the awareness information from a brand, subjects didn’t need to allocate much attention resource to distinguish product with high brand awareness. The amplitude variation in N2 and P3 expressed the change in the identification and attention distribution processing. It can be concluded that EPR components N2 and P3 could serve as cognitive indexes to compare and measure the brand recognition and recall even as people didn’t pay special attention to the differences between brand awareness. Moreover, event-related potentials methodology may be a sensitive measurement technique for brand awareness.

Data Availability Statement

All datasets generated for this study are included in the article/supplementary material.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the School of Management, Southwest University of Political Science and Law. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank all the subjects for carrying out the experiments.

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Keywords : brand awareness, identification, attention, event-related potentials, N2, P3

Citation: Zhang X (2020) The Influences of Brand Awareness on Consumers’ Cognitive Process: An Event-Related Potentials Study. Front. Neurosci. 14:549. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00549

Received: 14 September 2019; Accepted: 04 May 2020; Published: 12 June 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Xuefeng Zhang, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

A Study of Brand Awareness and Customer Satisfaction

• November 2018
• International Journal of Research 5(22):174-184
• 5(22):174-184

• Avantika University
• This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.

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Training Industry

Leveraging l&d podcasts to amplify your brand.

Establishing a strong brand presence is crucial if you wish to reach your audience of learning and development (L&D) professionals. One effective method for achieving this is through podcasts. Podcasts can give you a unique platform to connect with L&D professionals and training managers, fostering brand awareness and creating lasting impressions. Let’s review the unique value of podcasts in marketing, and top tips for getting started.

The Unique Value of Podcasts in Marketing

Podcasts can bring a unique value to L&D marketing campaigns. They can build brand awareness by engaging and attracting a loyal audience through an intimate platform with a consistent delivery of valuable content. This can position any brand as a thought leader in the L&D industry.

Let’s review five unique content marketing benefits of starting and/or speaking on a podcast:

1.     Marketing training solutions.

Podcasts provide an excellent opportunity to showcase vendors’ expertise, share client success stories and discuss industry trends. With valuable content, training vendors can attract L&D professionals who are seeking insights and solutions for their organizations.

2.     The longevity and impact of podcasts.

One of the unique advantages of podcasts is their longevity. Unlike social media posts or advertisements, podcast episodes can be discovered and enjoyed by listeners years after their initial release. This long-lasting impact ensures that the business’s brand message continues to reach new audiences over time.

3.     Podcast series: engaging and retaining listeners.

Listeners often prefer a podcast series that offers in-depth discussions on specific topics. Third-party vendors in L&D can create a series to delve into various aspects of training and development, providing comprehensive content that keeps listeners coming back for more. This approach not only can boost engagement but also can position the brand as a go-to resource for industry knowledge and expertise.

4.     Measuring success in podcast marketing.

While podcasts are primarily used for brand awareness rather than lead generation, it’s essential to recognize that audience building takes time. Success may not be immediately measurable in terms of leads, but consistent, high-quality content can gradually build a loyal and engaged audience.

5.     Incorporating zero click marketing.

Zero click marketing, a strategy where the content’s value is delivered within the platform it is shared on, aligns perfectly with podcast marketing. L&D marketers can offer valuable insights directly within the podcast platform to engage listeners without relying on them to click through to other resources. This approach can enhance the listener experience and solidify the brand’s authority in the L&D space.

Podcasts in Marketing

Podcasts can be a fairly simple marketing tactic to begin. You can choose between starting your own podcast from scratch or participating as a guest on existing podcasts with a bigger presence.

Should I Start My Own Podcast?

You can leverage podcasts as a marketing tool to improve brand awareness in two ways: starting your own podcast or participating in existing industry podcasts. To decide which approach is best for you, you must thoroughly review the benefits of each.

Here are the benefits for starting your own podcast versus participating in a podcast that already has a loyal following:

Both of these options can enhance your marketing efforts to L&D leaders. However, whichever direction the team decides to go with will depend on your budget, time and resources.

Closing Thoughts

Podcasts can be an effective marketing tool that positions training partners as thought leaders and their training solutions as reputable. Whether marketers choose to start their own podcast or to speak on existing ones, the key is to provide valuable, engaging content that resonates with the listener and offers valuable solutions to their challenges. Embrace the potential of podcasts to amplify your brand and establish a lasting presence in the L&D industry.

If you need help marketing your training company,  let us help  connect you with over 250,000 learning and development professionals.

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• #L&D podcasts
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• #The Business of Learning
• #using podcasts to reach learners

Danielle Johnson

Danielle Johnson is an editor at Training Industry, Inc. with 5+ years’ experience in writing/editing and the talent to curate compelling, creative content for a target audience. At Training Industry, Danielle connects with thought leaders to publish articles with actionable solutions.

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Privacy Overview

August Variety Star Brand Reputation Rankings Announced

The Korean Business Research Institute has published this month’s brand reputation rankings for variety stars!

The rankings were determined through an analysis of the consumer participation, media coverage, interaction, and community awareness indexes of 50 popular entertainers, using big data collected from July 3 to August 3.

Yoo Jae Suk continued his reign at the top of the list this month with a brand reputation index of 3,406,291 for August. High-ranking phrases in his keyword analysis included “You Quiz on the Block,” “building owner,” and “Pilot,” while his highest-ranking related terms included “appear,” “participate,” and “save.” Yoo Jae Suk’s positivity-negativity analysis also revealed a score of 92.47 percent positive reactions.

Jun Hyun Moo rose to second place on the list with a brand reputation index of 2,403,353, marking a 21.43 percent increase in his score since July.

Shin Dong Yup climbed to third place with a brand reputation index of 2,077,990, marking a 27.16 percent rise in his score since last month.

Kim Gura came in at a close fourth after seeing an impressive 76.23 percent increase in his brand reputation index, bringing his total score for the month to 2,059,152.

Finally, Park Myung Soo rounded out the top five with a brand reputation index of 1,851,873 for August.

Check out the top 30 for this month below!

• Yoo Jae Suk
• Jun Hyun Moo
• Shin Dong Yup
• Park Myung Soo
• Kang Ho Dong
• Seo Jang Hoon
• Tak Jae Hoon
• Kim Jong Kook
• Kim Jong Min
• Ahn Jung Hwan
• Lee Soo Geun
• Super Junior ’s Kim Heechul
• Park Na Rae
• Lee Young Ja
• Song Ji Hyo
• Jang Do Yeon
• Kim Min Kyung
• Lee Kyung Kyu
• Lee Sang Min
• Kim Dong Hyun
• Noh Hong Chul
• Kim Joon Ho
• Kim Sung Joo

Watch Yoo Jae Suk in “ Running Man ” with subtitles on Viki below:

And Jun Hyun Moo in “ Home Alone ” (“I Live Alone”) below!

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Top Photo Credit: Xportsnews

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