A marketer knows their job is done when the first thing that pops into the customer’s mind is their brand’s products in their respective field. Want a beverage? There’s Coca-Cola. Ready-to-use furniture? There’s Ikea. Think about butter in the Indian household, and those witty Amul cartoons come to mind.
To achieve this recognition and brand marketing level, the first step is creating adequate and lasting brand awareness. Marketers must know where they stand in the customer’s eyes so that they can take the next big step accordingly, in unity with the much-used AIDA model of marketing.
But this is easier said than done. Measuring brand awareness among a target audience is not an easy job to do. Brand awareness is a hazy concept that is tricky to quantify. There are biases and loopholes which can wreak havoc on a simple number that a marketer has come up with.
But just because it’s hard to pin brand awareness down to a simple percentage point does not mean that it must be ignored completely. On the contrary, as mentioned above, brand awareness is vital in informing the relevant marketing strategy that a firm has to take.
Using Surveys to Gauge Brand Awareness
Conducting consumer surveys is one of the most popular approaches that firms take to get a sense of their brand’s popularity in the market at a point in time. Unfortunately, it seems this is also the only approach available to achieve this goal.
Before we dive into using surveys, we need to define two critical components of brand awareness.
1. Brand Recognition:
Brand recognition is all about how well a consumer can spot a brand from afar. It is used to see whether from a lineup of several competing and popular brands in the same product and price range a consumer can accurately recognize a particular brand.
2. Brand Recall:
Brand recall is the ultimate goal that a marketer hopes to score. While recognition evaluates the “visibility” of the brand among its peers, recall tends to measure the brand’s power in the market. Brand recall refers to the customer getting a particular brand name in mind instantaneously (like Coke for cola) when considering a specific product.
Armed with this knowledge, marketers can design questionnaires that give an accurate measure of brand recall and brand recognition from consumers. To do the same, marketers use what are called aided and unaided questions.
3. Unaided Questions:
As the name suggests, these are questions where the consumer is directly asked about their preference without any prompts. In other words, these questions likely measure a brand’s recall-ability.
An example of an unaided marketing question could be as simple as What brand comes to mind when you think of sports shoes?
The question is straightforward and would likely demand two or three answers. A good marketer will look at the answers and pay close attention to the order in which these brand names appear. Ordering of brands can bring forth interesting observations and patterns.
4. Aided Questions:
Aided questions are for consumers who possess some knowledge about a particular brand when prompted. These can be questions like: Have you ever heard of Nike shoes? Usually, aided questions are asked only if the respondent fails to answer unaided questions. For example, respondents can be provided with a list of prominent brands for a particular product mixed with those which are not that prominent, and they can be asked to check all the brands they think belong to that product.
How is Brand Awareness Calculated?
The final number is the sum of the aided and unaided question metrics. For example, if 41% of people recalled the brand, and 29% recognized it, brand awareness equals 70%.
How Can Consumer Surveys Help?
Now that marketers have a rough idea of their brand’s market sentiment, they can plug the pain points. They can run a quick analysis of the numbers are look for patterns. For instance, they may find that their brand is preferred by men or that a particular age group responds to their brand better. Accordingly, the manager can strategize to strengthen their brand name in areas where its awareness is low.
Consumer surveys are indispensable for brands to take a good look at their markets and see what needs to be improved on. So it is no surprise how often brands use them!