Measure
Brand Awareness: Build Brand Power
How smart brands
measure awareness, recall, and improve their brand power.
Today, you’ll rarely
find a company that’s the only one in its market. Want a can of chicken noodle
soup? If you go to your local grocery store, you’ll see at least 10 different
soup brands, priced roughly the same, with roughly the same ingredients. What makes
you choose one brand over the other? Is it the taste? Maybe. What about Pepsi
and Coca-Cola?
What is brand awareness?
If you’re involved in
marketing, you know that your job is to make sure people are choosing your soup
(or cola, or running shoes, or cable service
no matter how similar it is
to your competition’s product. But where do you start?
First, you need to figure out
where you stand in terms of brand awareness. Brand awareness is the extent to
which consumers are familiar with your product or service. Is your brand the
first that comes to mind when someone wants to buy a laptop? When you know how
visible (or invisible) you are to consumers, you can target your marketing
efforts accordingly (so you can drive more traffic to your website or store).
Writing
effective brand recall and brand recognition survey questions
When you’re writing a brand awareness survey, you want to take two
measurements. The first is brand recall, which is your consumers’ ability to
remember your brand without help. Because you need to get a true measure of how
well consumers know your brand, you don’t want to bias them by presenting them
with your company name right away. For example, if you really want to know how
present your brand is in consumers’ minds, ask them unaided (no brand name
help) questions like these:
·
How familiar are you with canned soup?
·
When you think of canned soup, what brands come to mind?
Your first question, “How familiar are you with canned soup?” can
be a multiple-choice question with answer choices like these:
·
Extremely familiar
·
Very familiar
·
Moderately familiar
·
Slightly familiar
·
Not at all familiar
The second unaided brand recall question, “When you think of
canned soup, what brands come to mind?” can be an open-ended question–meaning
you should give your survey respondents a text box where they write in any brand
they can think of (Progresso, Campbell’s, Amy’s, Healthy Choice, etc.).
Aided
brand recognition
Once you know if consumers have your brand in mind, the second
measurement you should take is brand
recognition (your
consumers’ ability to recognize your brand among a list of alternatives). Use
aided questions, in which you mention your brand, to measure how you stack up
against your biggest competitors:
·
Have you heard of Progresso?
·
How familiar are you with Progresso?
·
Which of the following brands of canned soup have you heard of?
·
Which of the following brands of canned soup have you purchased?
·
Which of the following brands of canned soup do you currently
have in your home?
But when you ask a brand recognition survey question like, “Which
of the following brands of canned soup have you purchased?” how do you know
which brands to present to consumers when you write out your answer choices? Do
you remember the open-ended brand recall question, “When you think of canned
soup, what brands come to mind?” Because your respondents already entered in
the brands they’re familiar with, you’ve got the most popular brands (and most
likely your biggest competitors) at your fingertips.
So your answer choices for your aided brand recall question,
“Which of the following brands of canned soup have you heard of?” would be the
following:
·
Progresso
·
Campbell’s
·
Amy’s
·
Healthy Choice
·
Other (Please specify)
Note that there’s an “Other (Please specify)” option at the end of
the list. Part of writing a good survey is making sure you never force
respondents to choose an answer that doesn’t reflect how they really feel. (And
you want to make sure you haven’t overlooked any other relevant brands.)
Digging
deeper: Understanding what consumers think of your brand
Finding out how familiar or aware consumers are of your brand is
only one part of the equation. If you want to assess your overall brand power,
visit our Branding and
Brand Identity resource
page to learn how to run a brand attributes
survey and
access brand loyalty, brand equity, and brand awareness survey templates.
