Brand awareness plays a huge part in successful brands, as it is vital to building a strong brand.However, it is often a forgotten piece of the marketing puzzle.
What is brand awareness? Brand awareness describes how well people are able to remember and recognize your business, brand, logo and products in the marketplace.
In this article, we will discuss the importance brand awareness plays for the long-term success of your business.
1. What Is Brand Awareness?
The phrase that is commonly thrown around is “building brand awareness“, which is referred to the amount of people that recognise your business name, logo or products in the market. It is how well the consumer can identify your brand under the intended conditions.
By intended conditions I mean how well can a person can think of your brand under a defined problem. For example, if you are hungry and do not have time to cook, fast food is a solution to your hunger. So, which brands do you think of under this circumstance?
- Is it Mc Donald’s, KFC, Subway…
- What if you are wanting, fast food, but you want to eat healthily?
- Healthy fast food is part of Subways brand identity.
Brand awareness is being able to link your brand identity into the person’s memory, so they remember you. There are many different ways to market a brand in order for it to display this certain image in the minds of the customer. The most known forms are a logo, name and colour.
2. Why Is Brand Awareness Important?
Brand awareness is massively important to all businesses, especially those in high competing markets. This is because if someone has not heard of your business it will be unlikely that they purchase your product. The science of persuasion tells us a lot about how people act under these circumstances.
The studies of psychology research is relatively new however, marketers have observed it for decades. Academics such as Keller once said that brand awareness facilitates choice. Rossiter and Percy later explored Keller’s as they commented, “Brand awareness is defined as the buyer’s ability to identify the brand in sufficient detail to make a purchase”. Celedon took this further in their research by observing that people who know a brand name within a category, will search less and even select the known brand over the higher-quality brands.
This leads to the most important aspect of brand awareness which is that people will choose to purchase from a brand that they know. Is it the first step towards trust and by knowing someone and being familiar with it you more instinctively like it.
3. Building Brand Awareness in Red Oceans
Brand awareness is a particularly important metric for new businesses entering a market. This is because people need to know the available products circulating in the market for them to purchase. Whereas, more established corporations are already known to the consumers in that market.
This is important to understand when building a brand awareness strategy.
Smaller businesses are more agile and usually target a more niche blue ocean market. Whilst for corporations to sustain their growth in red oceans they need to be constantly innovating to stay ahead of the competition. This is because we are living in rapidly changing times businesses are forced to innovate; otherwise they may get left behind by other competing businesses that enter the new market space. This results in well-established brands facing new category buyers, as a news innovations can be supplementary as a substitute in other markets. In addition, when medium to large business identity new markets they may decide to extend their business into more competitive market places.
In these circumstances a more effective brand awareness strategy is focused towards re-educating your customers about this new revolutionary value that you can deliver. Whereby, brand knowledge and brand opinion become a more relevant factor to consider, rather than getting the point across of who you are as a business.
5. Push Or Pull Strategies?
When a person enters a store with a strong idea of what they want to buy, is usually because of some advertisement they have seen. A person has been influenced to come into your store or website by some offer or great deal they have seen from an advertisement.
This is the idea of bringing the customer to your business because of their preferred brand, which is pull brand awareness.
However, others enter without a strong preference toward any specific brand and can easily change their preferences inside the store. They are looking for something to satisfy their desire and are not totally set on what to purchase.
A shop that creates choice, offers, or a replacement brand, if the intended brand is out of stock, or bait-and-switch. Then push branding can be achieved. Trying to control these types of behaviors inside the retail stores are defined as ‘compromised demand’ for frequently purchased products (FPPs) and are indispensable part of push strategy..
Conclusion
The research shows us that just by knowing a brand well enough can significantly increase a person’s chance of purchasing it. Consumers are less likely to choose a brand they hardly know. As there are underlying factors why a brand is hardly known and it comes with a risk.
Whereas, if you have heard of a brand you subconsciously think it is a good for you to have already heard of it. This concludes that if you know the brand well enough you will have enough confidence to make a purchase. Furthermore, people choose known brands over the higher quality brands.