Brand Awareness – It’s all about ambition

What is Brand Awareness?

The likelihood that consumers recognise the existence and availability of a company’s product or service. Creating brand awareness is one of the key steps in promoting a business.

A brand should be a conduit for the relationship between the organisation it symbolises and the customers it serves, to develop; without this relationship a brand will always fail.

Brand awareness is extremely important for the simple fact that if the customer doesn’t know about it, they’re not going to purchase it.

The less a product differentiates from its competition in a physical or functional sense the more important it is the brand values express emotive and intangible cues.
Therefore, a product that maintains the highest brand awareness of a superior offering will usually win “battle of the sales”.

For example

In the energy beverage industry, very little separates one energy drink from the other, in terms of their taste or perceived energy benefits.

When we very naively assess the energy-drinks market, what brand do you think of? Try it out on the office and see what’s the most popular.

The iconic red and blue coloured can and the fierce red bulls at locker-heads, usually comes out on top. Your colleagues may even divulge deeper connotations of excitement, adrenaline or extreme sports?

If we think about it, the term Brand Awareness is pretty self-explanatory, but the means of customers becoming “brand-aware” is not so easy to achieve, especially as brands and society become more merged than ever before.

A very interesting article from Nicola Kemp at Marketing Magazine, on the six marketing lessons from Red Bull Stratos, discusses values all brands should seek to enforce to help build relationships.

Now, we don’t all have a multi-million pound marketing budget like Red Bull, and we sure-as hell don’t have a space shuttle, and if you do – touche, but the principles can most definitely be applied to any brand:

Develop a sense of purpose – It must be made clear to your customers what your brand offers

Do more than grow your bottom line – See everything you do as an investment in your brand, not just for now, but for the future

Think bigger than ROI – Remember the intangible benefits of your brand. Winning the hearts-and-minds of your customers will allow your business model to work a lot harder for you

Embrace creative marketing – Do something different and make a stand to break through the noise

Behaviour vs Brand Value – In the modern world of marketing, consumer’s seek a social etiquette more and more from brands; a way the brand can add value to their lives.
Consumers are researching, discussing and sharing more online than ever before; mobile-browsing to tweeting, blogging to vlogging, face-timing to snap-chatting.
It’s no longer a case of “build it and they will come”, consumers have become more sophisticated and now ask, “Why should I?”

Commit – If you don’t invest in your products and services, how do you expect your customers to?

With the rise of the digital age, the marketing spectrum is becoming more and more diverse, whether it’s crowd funding, social media, mobile apps or viral videos, there are numerous ways to express your brand messages.
It’s important to consider these 6 underlying principles and strategise how your brand will communicate, more importantly, how will you make your customers aware of your messages?

“Not every brand has the inclination or budget to invest in something bigger than itself, but the best marketers should at least have the ambition to try.”  – Nicola Kemp