What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is the measure of whether people know you exist, and how readily you come to mind. It comes in two strengths. Aided awareness, or recognition, is when someone sees your name or logo and knows it. Unaided awareness, or recall, is when someone thinks of a category (running shoes, say, or a night out) and your brand is one of the names that surfaces on its own. Recall is harder to earn and far more valuable.
Awareness sits at the top of the funnel. It does not sell anything by itself, but almost every later decision depends on it, because people rarely choose a brand they have never heard of. A brand can also be well known for the wrong reasons, so awareness is usually tracked alongside perception: how many people know you, and what they think when they do.
Why it matters
Why brand awareness matters
Most purchases are made from a short list of brands someone already knows. If you are not on the list before the need arises, you are competing on price and search ranking at the last moment, which is the most expensive place to compete. Awareness also makes every other piece of marketing cheaper: a known brand gets more clicks on the same ad, more coverage for the same story and more trust for the same claim. Brands that cut awareness spending to fund short-term sales tend to discover the cost a year or two later, when the short list stops including them.
In practice
How brand awareness works in practice
- 01
Awareness is built with reach and memorability together. Reach puts the brand in front of enough of the right people, through media, partnerships, earned coverage and content that travels on its own. Memorability makes sure they leave with something: a distinctive look, a sound, a line, a character, an idea worth repeating to a friend.
- 02
It is measured with brand lift studies, surveys of aided and unaided awareness, search volume for the brand name and share of voice against competitors. The useful habit is tracking the same measures over long periods, because awareness moves slowly and one campaign's spike says less than the trend.
At RIOT
Brand awareness at RIOT
Some of our work is built for exactly this job. The e.l.f. Mirror Mix launch film reached about five million views, which is awareness in its plainest form: a lot of people meeting a product at the same moment. For Red Bull Kumite we made content for the screens in Times Square, the most public wall in New York, where the job is to be seen and remembered by people who did not come looking for you.
Watch out
What people get wrong about brand awareness
Chasing awareness without distinctiveness. A campaign can reach millions of people and leave nothing behind if it looks like every other brand in the category, because viewers remember the ad and forget whose it was. The opposite mistake is judging awareness work on immediate sales. It is meant to pay off later, at the moment someone is ready to buy, and it should be measured on that timeline.
