What exactly is Brand Awareness?

If there is one term you will hear again and again in the media industry, it's 'Brand Awareness' - but what does this actually mean? The term is so flippant and used so casually that I begin to forget what it actually is. Media owners are always the first to say that their medium will create 'high brand awareness' and it's almost as if upon hearing this, advertisers are meant to jump out of our seats and book them right there and then. Brand awareness, to me, is almost now a selling terminology which is not always used at the right moment and in the right context - at least people don't explain it properly, I mean what metrics are people using?


Brand awareness is essentially a marketing concept, used to represent how many consumers are aware of a brand - it's metrics are usually referred to as 'high' or 'low', but what exactly is high brand awareness? It is usually measured through surveys by way of brand recall, brand recognition and top of mind awareness. Looking more closely at these metrics; Brand recognition is when the brand and brand category are presented to the consumer and they say if they are aware of them or not; Brand recall is when only the product category is given to the consumer, who then lists all the brands they know within that category and Top of Mind Awareness which is done in the same way as Brand Recall but only the first brand answer is recorded (spontaneous brand recall).


Research has suggested that there is lack of consistency and stability in consumer responses, as their responses can be very attitudinal with lots of external factors affecting their choices. For example, people may recall your brand as you have a campaign running at that moment, but might forget as soon as it finishes. However, if most people say your brand(depending on how many people you ask, of course), even if its not 100% consistent - that is still high brand awareness right? I suppose the very best position for companies to be in, is 100% of all consumers in the world are recalling their brand unaided, both pre and post campaign.


However, what exactly do you do with this information? I suppose high brand awareness becomes an asset which needs to be maintained. The level of a brands consumer awareness is always taken into consideration when planning marketing campaigns and coming up with the idea for the creative. In terms of brand awareness, questions we ask ourselves are; how well do people know it? Can we afford to be more risky with the creative? Do we need to let more people know about the brand? Do people know about the brand but not buying the product/service? What is the level of their brand awareness relative to other similar products/service within the category? This basically allows brands to place ourselves against the competition and form a strategy based on consumers awareness, consumers attitudes and perceptions of the brand in order to change a certain type of behaviour.


Lesson 15: Challenge the next media owner who claims that their communication medium gives 'high brand awareness' - I would like to know exactly how they go about proving this and why they are better than the next.




Laurent, Gilles, Jean-Noel Kapferer, and Francoise Roussel (1995), "The Underlying Structure of Brand Awareness Scores," Marketing Science
Day, George S. and Robert W. Pratt (1971), "Stability of Appliance Brand Awareness," Journal of Marketing Research, 8 (February)
Dall'Olmo Riley, F., A.S.C. Ehrenberg, S.B. Castleberry, T.P. Barwise, and N.R. Barnard (1997), "The Variability of Attitudinal Repeat-Rates," International Journal of Research in Marketing