Brand Awareness
This article covers meaning, importance, types & example of Brand Awareness from marketing perspective.
Brand awareness is the likelihood as to how aware a customer is about a brand, product or service. Brand awareness is how much a customer or prospect recalls or recollects about a particular company & its goods. Brand awareness is one of the key dimensions of brand equity & its includes a customer’s ability to remember the product, logo, tagline, name etc.
Importance of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is often considered to be a prerequisite which stimulates a customer’s buying decision as it represents the main factor for keeping a brand in the consideration pool. Brand awareness leads to consumers’ assessment of perceived risk and their determination to make a purchase decision, driven by the familiarity with the brand and its varied characteristics. Brand awareness can further be segmented into at least two facets – unaided which is also known as brand recall and aided which is known as brand recognition. It is important for a company as it helps in its brand equity and is one of the basic steps of brand building.
The fact that brand awareness plays a very important role is driven by the cut throat competition which exists in the market due to minimal differentiation in commodity items. High degree of brand awareness leads improved brand knowledge to better sales and high market share.
Elements & Types of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the ability of a customer to identify a particular brand. It is basically what all a customer remembers about the company’s offering. Brand awareness can be how a customer recollects various elements about a brand like logo, product type, slogan, advertisement, brand name etc.
Brand awareness is basically of the following types:
1. Brand recall: Customers are able to identify the brand themselves without any aid, known as unaided recall.
2. Brand recognition: In this type of brand awareness, aided recall helps customers remember a particular brand.
3. Top of the mind brand: Any brand which a customer recalls without any help and is the first thing on their mind is top of the mind brand.
Brand Awareness Models
There are several ways in which brand awareness leads to enticing a customer into a purchase decision. Some models, which highlight the importance of brand awareness that creates a positive brand image & which leads to customer buying a product are mentioned below:
a) Hierarchy of Effects Theory:
The hierarchy of effects theory typically demonstrates how a customer sequentially moves from an unaware stage to ultimately ending up in buying of the product. There are three main stages through which the customer goes through. These are: -
• Cognitive: - The first stage which focuses on building up the brand awareness about a particular product and associate the brand with it.
• Affective: - If the hammer strikes well in the first stage, the customer gets affected and develops a liking or preference for that particular product.
• Conative: - This is the last stage which results in the purchase of the product after the customer is fully convinced.
Brand awareness falls in the first stage i.e. Cognitive, to make an impact on the customers’ mind that shows the brand value lasts for a longer span of time.
b) AIDA
AIDA is a marketing concept which describes the different stages from brand awareness to developing interest to buying the product. The complete meaning of AIDA is:
• Awareness: Brand awareness attracting the customer
• Interest: Generating the interest of the customer
• Desire: Customer feeling the need or desire to buy the product
• Action: Customer eventually taking action and buying the product.
Methods of Creating Brand Awareness
Creating a positive brand awareness is extremely important for any business which wants to showcase its products & services and engage customers. There are several ways in which companies can create brand awareness in the mind of the customer. Some of the methods are:
1. Advertising: Advertising is the most powerful tool to create brand awareness. Companies can create advertising campaigns, which can be shown through TV commercials, print media, online ads etc. This leave a lasting impression in the mind of the customer creating positive advertising awareness.
2. Events & Sponsorships: Companies can sponsor and organize events which are related to the product or service. This helps in creating a strong brand awareness among the actual target audience.
3. Social media engagement: With the increasing penetration and use of mobile devices, engagement on social media platforms using content marketing can be a huge way to create strong brand awareness of a product or a service.
4. Celebrity Endorsements: Popular celebrities like movie stars, sports persons etc can help generate more buzz with the audience. This method of brand awareness is very popular with big companies who use star power to connect with customers.
5. Website & Blogs: With the internet penetration increasing, brand awareness can get a huge boost by writing relevant content on websites & blogs, which helps to percolate information and can also lead to viral marketing.
There can be several ways in which brand awareness can be created apart from the above-mentioned points. The whole idea is to constantly showcase the product offering and value proposition to the customer.
Examples of Brand Awareness
Below are some examples as to how brand awareness has help people connect with a brand and its product or service offering.
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of “cold-drink”?
There are numerous soda and soft drink brands available in the market. But by default when it comes to soft drinks, people associate it with majorly two brands, Coca Cola and Pepsi. This is because the brand awareness level of these brands is very high as compared to other brands and this draws out the reason for their stupendous market share and sales.
What brand comes to your mind when we say “burger”?
The answer is McDonald's and Burger King. This is because these companies have constantly engaged customers with advertising, discounts, offers etc to create a strong brand awareness among people.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Brand Awareness along with its overview.
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