Brand Awareness: What's The Deal?

A customer of mine with whom I've been corresponding recently asked a question that I think is cogent to the point of being worthy of posting to this blog.

Question: "...[Y]our thoughts are clarifying and as you know I read your book (How to Build and Maintain A Powerhouse Brand) with much interest. I very much like the concept of "Strategic Awareness"-- it makes sense.

However, I am still intrigued about the importance and relevance that is given by marketing professionals to the concepts of "Awareness" and especially "Top of Mind - Awareness". I have always been a bit skeptical about their correlation with market performance.

How come so many professionals tout "Awareness/Top of Mind" so much????"

Answer : In my opinion, it is because traditional ad agencies and marketing consultants can relatively easily measure awareness and can demonstrate to their clients their ability to increase brand awareness. Further, ad agencies tout awareness as the ever-important metric because that is how they make their money from clients.

Agencies create very creative and catchy ads, spend lots of client money to get the ads out there by saturating the media and then, not surprisingly, consumers can recall the brand because they've been exposed to it many, many times.

Creating strategic awareness and brand preference, however, is more difficult and they are also more difficult to measure. To do both while simultaneously increasing profits is extremely difficult. To do so is also the core of what good brand builders do.

To quickly review some definitions, Brand awareness is simply when consumers recognize your brand. Top of mind awareness occurs when you ask a person to name brands within a product category and your brand pops up first on the list. Strategic awareness occurs when not only does the consumer recognize your brand but they also understand the distinctive qualities that make it better than the competition. Brand preference happens when those consumers then prefer your brand over competing offerings.

If ad agencies promised increases in strategic awareness, brand preference and increased profits, then most of those agencies would go out of business because their clients would fire them. The agencies simply could not deliver on their promise.

Awareness is a much easier--and much more certain--needle to move so that's what agencies promise.