Keys To Building Brand Awareness

Our goal at Branding Strategy Insider is to help marketing oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands. Regular readers know we answer questions frequently.  Today, Laine, a CMO in Austin, Texas writes:

I work on the account services side of an advertising agency here in Austin. I have a few questions concerning brand awareness. If one of our clients has not seen significant growth in the past two years, is that necessarily a bad thing? What are good ways to get them going upward again? How do you grow brand awareness after it has already been well established?

Thanks for your question Laine. Awareness and relevant differentiation are the most important drivers of customer brand insistence. As brand awareness increases, brand quality perceptions, preference and purchase intent also tend to increase. The primary effect of marketing communication is to increase brand awareness so all forms of marketing communication from advertising and publicity to word-of-mouth and social media interaction can increase brand awareness.

You indicated that the brand in question has been around for a long time but you didn’t indicate how high its unaided top-of-mind brand awareness is. If its top-of-mind unaided awareness is 95% or higher, it will be very difficult to increase it. On the other hand, if it is say 50%, one should be able to increase it with a highly targeted and well thought through marketing plan. The trick is to specify the appropriate target audience and then to develop and execute a media plan and messaging that is efficient and effective. I tend to favor frequency over reach with a highly targeted group.

Brand news, new products, new formulations, new customer services, new locations, etc. can also be the source of brand awareness building.

If the brand’s awareness is not at an extremely high level and its marketing campaigns are not increasing its awareness, then one or both of these may be happening: (1) not enough resources are being used to market the brand vis-à-vis competitive brands (the brand in question is being outspent) or (2) the marketing campaigns are ineffective (wrong positioning, inefficient customer targeting, poor messaging, etc.).

Given a large enough ending sample (usually 384 people depending on the size of the overall target audience population to achieve a 95% confidence level +/-5%,), one should be able to track changes in brand awareness over time. Measuring this annually is usually sufficient, unless the brand is running a substantially larger than normal marketing campaign. Then it is possible to discern changes immediately after the campaign has been run.

If the brand’s top-of-mind unaided brand awareness is already extremely high, it would be more productive to focus on communicating the brand’s unique value proposition or its (one or two) relevant point(s) of differentiation.

Laine, you will find more of our ideas on building brand awareness here and measuring brand awareness here.

We wish you great success in building awareness and relevant differentiation for your client’s brand.

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