By having able to remember your brand under certain conditions can immensely increase your sales. If you are building your business and trying to build a good brand you should focus on brand recall.
What is brand recall? Brand recall is a phenomenon that happens so that people remember your business under circumstances when they are in demand for your products. For example, if you’re feeling hungry – eat a McDonalds.
In this article, I will take you through some of the important academic theories that can help you understand brand recall.
1. WHAT IS BRAND RECALL?
A person’s capacity to recall a brand from memory is referred to as brand recall. More specifically, there are two ways a person can retrieve a brand from their memory.
Sense & Feelings
The first way is spontaneously or with a brand cue. A brand will pop into someone’s mind because of a sense or a feeling. For example, if you are hungry and unable to cook, then fast food may seem like the ideal solution. When the thought of fast food comes into your mind, you immediately think of McDonald’s, KFC and Subways.
To get these results can take decades of training people’s minds through advertisements. A spontaneous memory is linking a feeling or a life style to a brand. We achieve this through the power of associating aspects of life with your business. It becomes an instinctive event to recall the brand under specific circumstances.
This in my opinion is the result of the most successful branding exercises as it links directly to the subconscious.
Familiarity
The second way is interchangeably with brand familiarity. A brand will pop into someone’s mind because they see something that reminds them of that brand. This could be brand names, non-word brand names, and other associated brand cues.
This is a simpler form of brand recall, and it less expensive to achieve. However, it will not be as successful because it only engages a person on a conscious level.
2. WHY IS BRAND RECALL IMPORTANT?
Out of sight, out of mind! Brand recall is especially important for a business because it is free advertising. This can lead to giving you a competative aive advantage as iincreases your chances of being connected with a specific service or product. It one of the best forms of free advertising as long as the attitude is good.
The longer you stay in the minds of your consumers, the higher your market share and bottom line will be. Customer retention and loyalty are also boosted by brand memory, since consumers are more likely to trust brands that are trusted by others.
By thinking of a brand can:
- Achieve a sense of credibility – by having, thought of a brand under a specific circumstance can actually provide a sense of status.
- Activate a longing – seeing a brand can create a yearning and longing to trial that product. It can make you lust over them. For example, if you watch a Fosters advert and the setting are on a hot beach and a cold beer puts you in that frame of mind. This makes you want to be part of the experience you have just seen on your TV.
Achieving both credibility and longing will put you in a very competitive position which will give you the edge and furthermore the increased revenue.
3. COGNITIVE PROCESSING IN THE CONSUMER
Information processing theories tells us that both content and experience form the preference of a brand image.
BRAND MESSAGING
This is the communication that forms a percived brand image. This means that the recalled knowledge content on the brand helps the consumer judge a brand. For example, let’s take the example of recalling the brand Nike. When people see content such as shape and colour, people will be able to recall benefits such as comfort and even the tagline “Just do it”.
However, customers will process the information you give them against the information they already have in their mind. This information is collected from their own personal experience and will result in that person forming his or her own individual perception.
BRAND EXPERIENCE
You second way you can form brand recall is through experience. The type of experience includes your previous involvement with the business, and the ease to process the brand messages. This type of brand recall helps a customer to judge a brand unconsciously. By this, we mean subconsciously, we make our opinions without us realising it.
When considering the shoes category, research shows us that the people retrieve the brand Nike with ease in their mind. This ease-of-retrieval is the experience that makes the consumer argue non-consciously, whereby they justify that: “It must be a good brand or else why will it pop-up so easily when I think about shoes?”.
In memory based choice situations, this relative ease-of –retrieval experience enhance the probability that a person will choose that brand over the competition according to Nedungadi.
CONCLUSION
Brand Recall is the process of building a brand imagine that is perceived well, and easily remember by potential customers. It is important to associate common things that happen in peoples lives which triggers them to remember your business and the benefits of what you sell them under a persons certain scenario.
