1. Brand Awareness and Perception
April 30, 2009 by gromit | 0 comments
Awareness and Perception are the two key metrics that any company would use to
measure their brand strength.
Awareness in simple terms - how many people know my brand? Usually, awareness is
measured through surveys that asks participants a series of questions for example “What
brand comes to your mind if you want to buy shoes? In general, companies measure
unaided awareness- what % of survey participants mentioned the brand without any kind of
hint. For top brands like Coke, McDonalds the awareness will be close to 100%.
Perception is the values consumers attach to a brand. For example, perception for Volvo
will be safety. To measure perception of a car company, survey will have questions like
“How do you rank car brands in terms of safety? And various questions will be asked on
quality, performance, or green. Outcome of the survey reveal the brand perception. List of
questions depends on what is goal for the brand and how you want customers to think of
your brand.
Studies have shown that awareness and perception plays a big role in the market share of a
product. What is important? Awareness or perception? For a growing company (trend) like
Twitter, awareness would be the prime driver to grow the product usage. As more people
are aware of micro blogging and Twitter, more people would use Twitter. Hence % of
awareness level would decide Twitter’s growth and penetration among online population.
On the other hand, for a mature business segment like ’cars’, awareness may not be the
major driver of market share. Close to 100% of people might be aware of BMW but many
would not buy BMW cars. Hence perception matters the most for BMW. Not only the stage
of company and industry, other factors such as type of product, level of competition,
switching cost, risk of switching also drive the importance of awareness vs. perception.
Generally, it takes at least frequency of 5-6 ads through various mass media to gain 1%
increase in awareness among population. Cost for such a campaign will be close to $100M.
Since consumers are constantly bombarded with huge number of ads, new products and
brands, cost for gaining awareness is constantly going up. Given the high cost involved in
conventional mass media, small startups leverage non conventional and inexpensive media
like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and YouTube to generate brand awareness and perception.
Most importantly, companies leverage current user base to generate awareness and
perception. Facebook and Twitter effectively used their user base to increase awareness.
Services like Facebook are useful to consumers only when more people use the service.
Hence users inherently have an incentive to popularize the service. For any company to be
2. successful in the future, its product or service should have some way to provide an
incentive for the users to recommend the product to others.
