Brand awareness

Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions.^[1] Brand awareness is one of the two key components of brand knowledge, as defined by the associative network memory model.^[2] It plays a vital role in consumer behavior, advertising management, and brand management. The consumer's ability to recognize or recall a brand is central to the purchasing process because buying decisions cannot begin unless a consumer is first aware of a product category and a brand within that category. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but they must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for a purchase to happen. Creating brand awareness is the main step in advertising a new product or revitalising an old one.

Brand awareness consists of two components: brand recall and brand recognition.^[2] Several studies have shown that these two components operate in fundamentally different ways as brand recall is associated with memory retrieval, and brand recognition involves object recognition. Both brand recall and brand recognition play an important role in consumers' purchase decision process and in marketing communications. Brand awareness is closely related to concepts such as the evoked set and consideration set which include the specific brands a consumer considers in purchasing decision. Consumers are believed to hold between three and seven brands in their consideration set across a broad range of product categories. Consumers typically purchase one of the top three brands in their consideration set as consumers have shown to buy only familiar, well-established brands.^[3]

As brands are competing in a highly globalized market, brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand's competitive market performance.^[4] Given the importance of brand awareness in consumer purchasing decisions, marketers have developed a number of metrics designed to measure brand awareness and other measures of brand health. These metrics are collectively known as Awareness, Attitudes and Usage (AAU) metrics.

To ensure a product or brand's market success, awareness levels must be managed across the entire product life cycle – from product launch to market decline. Many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels, and if they fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level.