Everyone recognizes a bottle of coke wherever they see it—whether in Asia or Africa or America, a bottle of coke looks the same. That’s a perfect example of strong brand awareness.
Brand awareness refers to the ability of consumers and potential consumers to recognize your product without assistance. There are so many things involved in brand awareness and they include the following.
- Brand recognition-: This happens when consumers are able to identify and spot out your brand amongst many other nameless brands. Since we are using soda as our example, imagine a bottle of coke in the midst of several other soda brands, it’s likely that one of the first brands consumers would be able to recognize is the Coca-Cola product.
- Brand preference-: Now, this takes things a little further. It is not just enough for consumers to be able to recognize your brand, they must also be able to choose your brand above other brands in the market. There must be something unique about your product that draws the attention of consumers.
- Brand loyalty-: This is another aspect of brand awareness, and it refers to a sense of belonging that a customer feels for a brand that makes him to continue to choose that product over all the others. Everyone has a favorite product—a favorite soap, cereal or toilet cleaner. As for me, I won’t be caught dead wearing another brand of perfume other than the one I currently wear, and I have been wearing it for years. That’s complete brand loyalty—and I plan to continue to remain loyal except the quality drops or another lucky brand is able to woo me (but even that would take time and a lot of cajoling).
- Brand rejection-: Brand rejection is another part of brand awareness, one no manufacturer wishes for. This happens when consumers have a negative perception about a brand such that they start to boycott or avoid the brand.
- Brand non-rejection-: In this case, your brand is a non-factor and doesn’t readily come to the mind of consumers when they have to make a choice.
Now, since brand awareness is not a physical thing that can be easily measured in terms of figures and quantity, it is important to know how to measure brand awareness efficiently. Here are 10 ways you can measure brand awareness.
10 Simple Ways You Can Measure Brand Awareness Online
1. Brand recognition tests
This is more of a practical test that you can use to test brand awareness. To perform this test, you would have to create a list of similar products of different brands among which your own brand would be included. Then ask a group of consumers whether they have seen the brands in the list before. If they have, they should describe them. This would give you a fair idea of how much recognition your brand already has.
2. Brand recall
Your brand has to be top on the mind of consumers when they want to make decisions regarding purchases. And this is why there is a need to perform brand recall tests. For brand recall tests, what you would be testing is your consumer’s ability to choose your brand over others unaided when making purchases. This could be done through observance or by carrying out surveys.
3. Maxdiff testing
Maxdiff testing is a type of brand awareness test where several features of a product are outlined and a group of consumers are asked to rank those features in their order of importance. For instance, if you are performing Maxdiff testing for a brand of detergent, you could ask consumers to pick the features they consider important like fragrance, foaming, effectiveness, skin friendliness etc. This would either send you back to the product development drawing board or show you the reasons why your brand is highly preferred over others.
4. Perception mapping-: This helps you compare your brands performance with other brands. It shows you some of the reasons why consumers would prefer your competitor’s brand over yours—be it the attractively low prices or the fast customer service response.
5. Retailer survey
As a manufacturer, you really cannot do without retailers; retailers have to stock your brand before consumers can get access to it easily. Even if a consumer likes your brand, he can’t chose it if it’s unavailable. Retailer surveys involve talking to retailers to see why they would or wouldn’t stock some brands.
6. Brand image test-: This helps you know what consumers think about your brand. You should have them make a list of both positive and negative things about popular brands in the market—including yours.
7. Search engine testing-: You could also test your brand awareness by using search engines to see the results that turn up and let you know what people are saying about it.
8. Product review websites-: Product review websites are also very good places to observe consumers’ opinions about your brand and products or services.
9. Social media testing-: Another way to test to measure brand awareness is through testing of consumer engagement through social media.
10. Impression Management-: This helps you test the effect that your advertising and publicity strategies has on your consumers.