What Is Brand Awareness and How Do Marketers Use It?

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is a marketing metric which quantifies the familiarity consumer have with a brand. While there are several different awareness metrics, they all indicate the percentage of a consumer population that has some level of knowledge about a brand.

How is brand awareness calculated?

Brand awareness is typically calculated using a quantitative research survey. Researchers create a survey that asks consumers a variety of questions to measure familiarity with a brand. The responses are then compiled to provide insight on a brand’s awareness.

Note that researchers and marketers must be disciplined in how they craft the respondent group. In order to utilize the insights generated from this brand research, marketers must ensure they survey their target customers. Marketers may get unusable data if the wrong customer group is used for the survey. Imagine surveying men to find brand awareness in the women’s shoe category. Women are the consumers making these shoe purchases. The data would have no use to marketers trying to influence females!

There are two primary awareness metrics: aided awareness and unaided awareness. Let’s dive into these two metrics and explore their differences from each other.

What is unaided awareness?

Unaided awareness is a measure of consumers’ ability to remember a brand without any reminder or stimuli. Some marketers call this “top-of-mind” awareness because survey respondents are asked to name brands that come to mind in a specific product or service category.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose a luxury men’s shoe brand marketer wanted to measure their brand’s unaided awareness. Here is an example of how a survey question could be written to measure unaided awareness:

What luxury shoe brands are you aware of? Please list them below.

Note that this question is open-ended. The respondents must list all the luxury men’s shoe brands that come to mind.

The unaided awareness metric is shown as a percentage. Specifically, it indicates the percentage of respondents who list a brand in their response. Let’s look at the formula below.

Let’s suppose we asked our luxury shoe research question to 1,000 respondents. Of the 1,000 respondents, 100 listed our marketer’s brand. In this example, our unaided awareness formula looks like this:

In the above example, we divide the number of respondents who listed our marketer’s brand (100) by the number of total respondents included in the study (1,000). Thus, our unaided awareness is 10%.

What is aided awareness?

Aided awareness is a measure of consumers’ overall familiarity with a brand. Because unaided awareness requires customers to remember brands without any stimuli, results often do not capture less explicit consumer familiarity. How many times has a friend mentioned a brand or product, and you instantly remember hearing that name before? Or perhaps you remember seeing a magazine ad but can’t remember the name of the company. Aided awareness helps to capture familiarity in such cases. Aided awareness provides a “hint” to consumers, helping them remember more subtle familiarity with a brand.

Let’s see how an aided awareness question is structured. Using our previous example, suppose our marketer now wants to measure the aided awareness for his brand—Elliot’s Shoes. Here’s how our survey question could be structured:

For each luxury men’s shoe brand listed below, check the box if you’ve heard of the brand:

☐ Gucci

☐ Prada

☐ Salvatore Ferragamo

☐ Elliot’s Shoes

Note that by listing brand options, the respondents get a “hint” to jog their memory. This results in aided awareness metrics being higher than unaided awareness metrics. Let’s look at how we calculate aided awareness. Aided awareness is calculated by dividing the number of respondents who, upon receiving “aid”, are familiar with a brand by the total number of survey respondents.

Let’s suppose our luxury men’s shoe marketer now wants to measure the aided awareness for his brand. He administers a survey using the aided awareness question we composed above. After counting the results, our marketer finds that 700 people indicated they’d heard of Elliot’s Shoes. Using our aided awareness formula, our marketer finds that the aided awareness for Elliot’s Shoes is 70%.

How do marketers use brand awareness?

Brand awareness plays an important role in the marketing funnel. Awareness is the first stage of the marketing purchase funnel. This means that all customer purchase journeys begin with awareness. How can consumers buy a brand or product if they don’t know it exists? Awareness begins the process of building engagement with consumers.

Brand awareness marketing is very important for most industries. Successful marketers invest heavily in building, growing, and retaining brand awareness.  New brands or products, in particular, focus heavily on building brand awareness. Established brands such as Honda, Toyota, Coca Cola, and Pepsi constantly invest in awareness advertising across multiple channels. Since there are always new consumers getting into the market, new competitors arising, and changing market needs, awareness can be an ongoing investment.  You can learn more about the marketing funnel here.