How do you gain recognition and brand awareness?

Gaining Recognition and Brand Awareness

 

Brand power is partly measured by brand awareness : how many people around the world know the brand, if only name? This is nothing unusual: the brand is a sing . Brand awareness measures the number of people who know what the brand stands for and are ware of what promises this has given, namely in terms of know – how (which products, which services ). A brand with no awareness is just something struck on a products , meaningless and speechless.

The purpose of investing in advertising is to reveal the meaning of the brand and convey it to the largest number of people : they should thus feel tempted to try the product being presented by the brand . Three types of awareness are usually distinguished :

 

· ‘Top of mind” awareness measure whether the brand is the first to come to the mind of people who are interviewed on the brands of a given product category ;

· ‘unaided’ awareness measures the brand’s impact, ie to what extent it is spontaneously associated with a given product category :
· ‘aided’ awareness – consists in asking the target – audience if they have already heard of certain brands or if they have at least heard their names.

 

As we can see, the level of difficulty increases from one type of awareness to the next, from the cheapest – ‘aided’ awareness – to the most expensive – ‘top of mind ‘ awareness . From this hierarchy, it is often inferred that ‘top of mind’ awareness should be every brand’s goal. It is mistake. Each type of awareness has a different purpose and specific implications. Depending on the market, it might or might not be appropriate to invest in order to reach a high rate of ‘top of mind or might not be appropriate to invest in order to reach a high rate of ‘top of mind awareness ‘.

The purpose of aided awareness is to reassure-the brand has already been heard of. The brand is not totally unknown so that salespeople can allude to it when selling something to a hesitating
Client. Unaided awareness refers to the few brands which immediately come to mind: this will benefit them if the buyer, unwilling to spend too much of time choosing among them, rather relies out of convenience on immediate memory. In industrial marketing, this awareness rate provides a list of names which will be quickly scanned in a first phase and among which some might later be more thoroughly analyzed ‘top of mind’ awareness benefits the brand any time the buyer have to make a quick decision (as when ordering a drink in a café, for instance)or want to decide without too much effort (because they are not very involved in the task), as is the case with many household products.

 

As a result the differences, it is clear that the pursuit of a particular type of awareness really depends on the way in which buyers of a product make their decisions and on their level of involvement. The financial investment which is needed by a brand eager to gain a strong unaided awareness is not always justified: the market share of a household appliance brand dose not simply double if its unaided awareness doubles. However, if it has a satisfactory level of aided awareness, a white goods brands should invest to increase the number of its points of sale. Indeed, with regard to durable products, which are only purchased infrequently, clients do not always know beforehand either what is available on the market or what criteria they should use to decide. They decide on the spot, after lengthy comparisons with other products on sale in the store. Even if the brand only brings back a vague memory, customers are bound to evaluate its products.

 

Thus, in france, hoover has a low unaided awareness rate, but a very high aided one. Before deleting the Philips brand name, whirlpool aimed at reaching two-third of Philips’ aided awareness rate

As for products which require less involvement by the purchaser, the unaided awareness rate has more impact on choice since customers neither perceive any great risk nor want to spend any great amount of time in choosing. Yet experience has shown that under certain market conditions, gaining any unaided awareness at all is almost impossible. The brand’s aided awareness rate increase but not its unaided awareness? Why is that?

Unaided awareness is not a cold, merely cognitive measure: it has an emotional dimension. This is shown by the correlation that exits between awareness and preferences or global evaluations. Awareness, therefore, dose not come simply form high pressure advertising. It comes from making people feel attracted and interested. It will thus be more difficult for an unfriendly brand to stand out because of the well-known mechanisms of selective exposure, attention and memory.

 

Unaided awareness is always acquired at the expense of another brand. If one brand’s awareness increases, another’s necessarily decreases. This is demonstrated by a fact that is
Commonly observed in most markets: people who are interviewed usually quote an average of three or four brands. Given such a limited number, accepting a new brand in such a selective club necessarily means that in turns some other brands will no longer be quote d. this result in the following: when three brands on the market are strongly rated in unaided awareness, scarcely any other brand has a chance of even getting quoted. Access to such markets is said to be ‘blocked’.

 

In new markets, where no brands have strong unaided awareness, this selective memory phenomenon dose not exit. Unaided awareness can be pursed by investing in advertising and thus gaining a share of voice. In a competitive environment, it must be pursed: not only to escape the blocking mechanism described above, but also to benefit from the first mover’s, or pioneer, advantage.

 

In young markets, at the beginning of the category’s lifecycle, the brand which first enters the market and is aggressively marketed has what is called the ‘first mover’s advantage’ most brands which start creating a market still dominate it several decades later, even in markets in which competitive advantage does not consist of technological know – how, learning curves or gains in productivity. The Psychological explanation of this is that when a market first opens, buyers neither have a set of preferences nor any stabilized decision criteria. Thus the first brand to get know in a new market becomes its prototype and main reference. In other words, this brand is the one to initially define the ideal brand, the cluster of attributes that will generate customer satisfaction. This brand is the one which defines the values. That is why later entrants have a handicap. Since they generally adopt a ‘me – too ‘strategy and want to look like the first mover, they lose some of their distinctiveness and become less conspicuous.

 

Taking Distributors in to Account

 

In the field of consumer goods that do not require much consumer involvement it is no longer the consumer who is solely responsible for the success or failure of new brands but the distributors .in deciding whether or not to give room to a new brand, they are the ones who Can cause it to fail. They are also the ones who can cause the premature decline of a new brand if they judge its turnover to be too slow. Because of this, many project based on excellent concepts and good products have not survived. New brands now have to fight distributors own new brand now have to fight distributors own brands which have not survived, Which are pushed forward because of their margin. The problem is that when the weighted distribution percentage increases too slowly, investment in advertising has little or no impact. If these are spread out over time or delayed the new product on the market will not rotate quickly enough and thus will eventually get taken off the shelves after just a few months. Because distributors have such power, it is absolutely necessary to take their reaction in to account when predicting a brand’s chances of succeeding. A good example of this is Sironimo.

 

This new brand of fruit flavored beverage concentrate, launched by the French beverage group pernod – Richard, was on innovation offering real added value. The popular drink was introduced to the 6 - 11 age group in very difficult packaging bottlers which were fun, collectable and easy to handle, and were designed and shaped especially for children, unlike the large cylindrical cans of Teisseire or those distributor’s own – brands. All six flavors in the line were bottled in bowling – pin – shaped containers , each one representing a different kind of animal , in test , consumers unanimously acclaimed this innovation both in france and aboard, eg in the UK .

 

A very creative, attractive and well target ed advertising campaign soon made Sironimo the leading brand in terms of unaided awareness among 6 – 11 year old. Unfortunately though Sironimo was not sold by enough number of expected distributors. The Brand was based on a concept which required many shelf facings this could only be achieved by reducing the leader Teisseire’s facing or those of the distributor’s own brand, which were a major source of profit for the distributor. With out these crucial facings, the launch of the Sironimo product line concepts could not be pulled off. Moreover, of the six flavors, some rotated faster than others and so were more likely to be out of stock if the sales reps did not pay attention quickly enough. All these factors were a serious handicap to the launch of Sironimo. In the end, the Pernod – Richard group decided to sell the brand to the market leader instead.

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