Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of the two key components of brand knowledge, as defined by the associative network memory model. It plays a vital role in consumer behavior, advertising management, and brand management. The consumer's ability to recognize or recall a brand is central to the purchasing process because buying decisions cannot begin unless a consumer is first aware of a product category and a brand within that category. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but they must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for a purchase to happen.
Brand awareness consists of two components: brand recall and brand recognition. Several studies have shown that these two components operate in fundamentally different ways as brand recall is associated with memory retrieval, and brand recognition involves object recognition. Both brand recall and brand recognition play an important role in consumers' purchase decision process and in marketing communications. Brand awareness is closely related to concepts such as the evoked set and consideration set which include the specific brands a consumer considers in purchasing decision. Consumers are believed to hold between three and seven brands in their consideration set across a broad range of product categories. Consumers typically purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set as consumers have shown to buy only familiar, well-established brands.
As brands are competing in a highly globalized market, brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand's competitive market performance. Given the importance of brand awareness in consumer purchasing decisions, marketers have developed a number of metrics designed to measure brand awareness and other measures of brand health. These metrics are collectively known as Awareness, Attitudes and Usage (AAU) metrics.
To ensure a product or brand's market success, awareness levels must be managed across the entire product life cycle – from product launch to market decline. Many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels, and if they fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level.
Importance of brand awareness Brand awareness is related to the functions of brand identities in consumers' memory and can be measured by how well the consumers can identify the brand under various conditions. Brand awareness plays an important role in the consumer's purchasing decision-making process that tends to sustainable business growth and loyalty. Strong brand awareness can be a predictor of brand success. Brand awareness is strengthened by its brand-related associations such as the consumers' evaluation of the brand and their perceived quality of the brand. A brand has a strong position when first consumers have a frame of reference or goal they can expect to achieve when using the brand, and second a point of difference or an indication that their selected brand is superior in achieving the goal.
Brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand's market performance. Brands competing in a highly globalized market invest in global advertising and distribution to compete for consumers' attention and awareness. As the capitalism and global transport contribute to consumer behavior, many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels. If these levels fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level. In marketing planning and brand management, it is important to set objectives to promote brand awareness to motivate consumers to purchase a given brand's products.
Brand identity includes the visible and experiential elements that distinguish a brand from others, such as its name, logo, design, messaging and customer experience. It may also include the values, positioning and associations that an organization seeks to communicate to its target audience In brand management, a distinction is often made between individual visual identifies, such as a logo, and the broader set of associations that shape how a brand is perceived.
Brand awareness is one of the major brand assets that adds value to the product, service or company. Investing in building brand awareness can lead to sustainable competitive advantages, thus, leading to long-term value.
Brand equity
Brand equity is the sum of assets and liabilities relating to a brand, its name and logo, and the sum or difference is the value that is offered by the product or service or a company or the company's customers. For the assets and liabilities to have effect on brand equity, they have to be related to the name or logo of the brand. If the brand's name or logo changes, then, it can either have a positive or a negative impact on the assets and liabilities of the brand, with some of them getting transferred to the new name and logo. The brand equity stands on the assets and liabilities and it can differ from factor to factor such as, brand loyalty, brand name awareness, how a customer perceives the quality of a brand, and other proprietary assets such as patent and trademark. Research indicates that brand equity is a resource for a company to pull from strategically to connect with its consumer-base.
Types of brand awareness Brand awareness is divided into two components: brand recall (also known as unaided recall or occasionally spontaneous recall) and brand recognition (also known as aided brand recall). These types of awareness operate in entirely different ways with important implications for marketing strategy and advertising.
Brand recall Brand recall is also known as unaided recall or spontaneous recall and refers to the ability of the consumer to correctly generate a brand from memory when prompted by a product category. So, for example, a person is thinking about laundry and writes down Tide on their shopping list. Brand recall is a retrieval component based on the strength of association between a brand and other relevant information stored in long-term memory. When prompted by a product category, most consumers can only recall a relatively small set of brands, typically around 3–5 brand names. In consumer tests, few consumers can recall more than seven brand names within a given category and for low-interest product categories, most consumers can only recall one or two brand names. Competitive brand advertising can suppress awareness of other brands, as exposure to advertising positively influences brand recall.
Research suggests that the number of brands that consumers can recall is affected by both individual and product factors including; brand loyalty, brand knowledge, situational and usage factors, and education level. For instance, consumers who are highly experienced with a given product category or brand may be able to recall a slightly larger set of brand names than those who are less experienced with a given product category or brand.
Brand recognition
Brand recognition is during the point of purchase when a person recognizes a brand and associates it with a product category or category need. So an example would be a customer seeing a Gatorade, associating it with a sports drink and putting it in their cart because their son has a soccer game. Brand recognition is also known as aided recall and refers to the ability of the consumers to confirm that they have seen or heard of a given brand before. This does not necessarily require that the consumers have to identify the brand name. Instead, it means that consumers can recognize the brand upon presentation, either at the point-of-sale or after viewing its visual packaging. In general people are more likely to recognize a brand than to recall one. It is 8 to 10 times more difficult to recall a brand than recognize one. For example, when you identify a brand you may associate that brand with a product category, but when given the same product category your memory may not trigger the same brand identifier.
Top-of-mind awareness Consumers will normally purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set. This is known as top-of-mind awareness.Solomon, M., Hughes, A., Chitty, B., Marshall, G. and Stuart, E., Marketing: Real People, Real Choices,pp 17–19 Focusing on brand awareness and gaining brand equity, companies work to achieve an increased probability that consumers will include the brand in their consideration sets.
By definition, top-of-mind awareness is "the first brand that comes to mind when a customer is asked an unprompted question about a category."Farris, Paul W.; Neil T. Bendle; Phillip E. Pfeifer; David J. Reibstein (2010). Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, When discussing top-of-mind awareness among larger groups of consumers (as opposed to a single consumer), it is more often defined as the "most remembered" or "most recalled" brand name(s).See, for instance, Koniewski, M., "Brand Awareness and Brand Loyalty", PMR Research Paper, Feb, 2012, www.research-pmr.com
A brand that enjoys top-of-mind awareness will generally be considered as a genuine purchase option, provided that the consumer is favorably disposed to the brand name.Manternach, L. (2011). Does your brand have top of mind awareness?. Corridor Business Journal, 7(52), 26. Top-of-mind awareness is relevant when consumers make a quick choice between competing brands in low-involvement categories or for impulse type purchases.Driesener, C., Paech, S., Romaniuk, J., & Sharp, B., "Brand and Advertising Awareness: A Replication and extension of a known empirical generalization," Australasian Marketing Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, 2004, pp 70–80
Marketing implications of brand awareness
Brand awareness is closely related to the concepts of the evoked set (defined as the set of brands that a consumer can elicit from memory when contemplating a purchase) and the consideration set (defined as the "small set of brands which a consumer pays close attention to when making a purchase decision").Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J.N. (1969). The Theory of Buyer Behaviour. Wiley, N.Y. One of the central roles of advertising is to create both brand awareness and brand image, in order to increase the likelihood that a brand is included in the consumer's evoked set, or consideration set, and regarded favorably.Meenaghan, R., "The role of advertising in brand image development", Journal of Product and Brand Management, Vol. 4, no. 4, 1995, pp.23 – 34 Brand image is how consumers perceive a brand based on the various things they associate the brand with.