You can choose and register a brand name at a moment’s notice. But in order for this brand name to become a brand and brand awareness to arise, you need weeks, months and years of effort, so brand and branding is more than a brand name .
The result of your efforts will be that a capital is formed around your brand that your audience and customers know, become loyal to your brand, look for that brand in stores, search for it on the Internet, talk about it with others. Your brand is discussed and in short, what is called a brand asset is formed .
An important part of this brand asset is the share that the brand has in the mind of the customer. The more you gain a bigger and better position in the mind of the customer, the more successful you can say you are. But how can this position be measured?
Defining brand awareness
Each of us understands and imagines brand awareness in a different way . The most general definition of brand awareness is that customers are aware of our brand and consider us as an option in their purchases and decisions.
Many brands go to advertising with this motive .
If you ask company managers why you advertised or took a billboard, one of the common answers is that we want our Orness brand to increase and others remember that we exist and are present in the market.
But is there a more precise definition of brand awareness? What are the indicators of brand awareness? What can be done to measure brand awareness?
Three measures of brand awareness
- Brand recognition or brand recognition
- Brand recall
- The highest position in the audience’s mind or TOMA, which stands for Top of Mind Awareness
In the following, we will describe each of the three mentioned criteria.
1- brand recognition
Brand recognition or brand recognition means that the customer or the audience, as soon as they encounter the brand signs, recognize and recognize it. Recognition means that the audience will come to the conclusion that they have already seen and been exposed to this brand.
For example, you can go to a statistical community of a thousand people and show them the following picture and ask if you have seen this sign somewhere before?
Note that we do not expect the audience to tell exactly what IBM is and in what areas it operates. We don’t even expect the audience to remember where they’ve seen this sign before. It is enough for the audience to see a sign of the brand and say that they have already been exposed to that brand.
Let’s assume that out of 1000 people surveyed, 900 people say that they are familiar with this sign. You can say that brand recognition or brand recognition was 90% in the surveyed population.
In addition, the choice is yours which brand sign to use. For example, in the case of Apple, you may use the Apple name or the bitten apple logo.
Of course, you can ask another question in addition to yes or no and ask the audience to say how sure they are that they have seen and encountered this brand before, by giving a score of one to five.
We often test brand recognition in our daily conversations. For example, we say to our friend that I don’t know if you have heard the name of Telubion or not.
If you ask the same simple question to several thousand people, you can say that you have done a simple brand recognition test for that specific brand.
2- Remembering the brand
When you think of a specific need or a specific product or a product category, what brands come to your mind? Brand recall is exactly what comes to your mind.
Suppose you go to a statistical community of several thousand people and ask each of them to name three or five universities in the country. The average brand position of a university shows the power of brand recall.
For example, Azad University may rank 2nd on average. So we can say that the Brand Recall of Azad University is equal to 2 in the category of universities in the country.
3- brand position
TOMA is one step more stringent than brand recall. Because it examines the question that in a certain category, am I the first brand that comes to the customer’s mind?
Suppose a brand like Tapsi wants to measure TOMA in the field of internet taxi driving.
This brand should go to several thousand or tens of thousands of people and ask them to name an internet taxi.
If, say, 28% of people mention Tepsi, the brand can say my TOMA is 28%.
Note that only one brand is asked in the TOMA measurement. So, if someone says internet taxis like Snap and Tapsy, in this case, we can conclude that Snap took the place of TOMA from Tapsy, because Snap’s name is ready first.
Measuring brand awareness
Brands go to various activities to increase awareness. For example, they may advertise in mass media or specialized media. Or they may act as sponsors in related events.
The question must be answered as to how effective a particular advertising campaign , sponsorship or any other activity has been. Measuring brand awareness is one of the methods that can partially determine the effectiveness of the campaign.
Suppose the national brand wants to activate a heavy six-month campaign in radio and television.
The brand can measure brand awareness before and after this campaign and see how well the budget it spent paid off.
Based on this result, the brand can decide whether to run a similar campaign six months later.
Of course, this is not the only method of measuring campaign effectiveness. Because the campaign also affects sales, and sales changes can also be measured. But considering that sales are affected by other factors and measuring sales alone is not accurate, and considering that part of the goals of advertising is to have a long-term effect on the brand’s position , and many managers consider advertising on the brand to be a long-term action. Measuring brand awareness can be used as one of the effectiveness measurement indicators.
Brand category recognition
One of the interesting uses of brand awareness and specifically brand recall is that we can see in which category our brand is classified in the customer’s mind.
Consider a brand like Porsche. If Porsche tests its brand recall on the car category, it probably won’t do well.
It means that it is unlikely to be listed among the three main brands in the automobile field.
So Porsche can go down a level and see if the audience remembers this brand in the sports car category?
If he can’t get points in this level as well, he has to go one level lower and measure himself in the category of German sports cars.
As an Iranian example, consider a brand like Alis. Alis is known and remembered for most of our people in the buttermilk category.
Now Alis can measure its position in the beverage category and see if the variety of products has made Alis become a general beverage brand?
It is even possible to design advertising messages with the aim of changing the brand category in the mind of the audience. In certain periods, it is possible to measure the change of the category and measure the achieved success by measuring the awareness of the brand.
Measuring brand awareness in the digital world
Many online activists and digital marketing experts have different suggestions for measuring brand awareness, but in my opinion, to achieve valid results, you should go for indicators such as the following:
- The number of backlinks that the website has received from other sites (Back link)
- The number of times the brand or its hashtag is mentioned in social networks (Mention).
- The number of times a brand’s account posts are shown to others (Reach)
- Number of times the brand name appears on the search results page (Impression)
It should be emphasized that such indicators may be correlated with brand awareness. But probably, according to the definition of brand awareness and brand recall and brand recognition, you have come to the conclusion that these indicators do not definitively represent brand awareness.
For example, you may be directed to a brand’s site many times through a Google search , but not pay much attention to where you have arrived and read something and leave. In such a case, you probably won’t have the power to recognize that brand.
Therefore, while we cannot deny the importance of these indicators, we must remember that designing a brand awareness questionnaire and field survey is the best and most accurate method to measure brand awareness.
Finally, I would like to know if you have a brand in mind that has performed strongly in the TOMA index? We will be happy if you share the name of that brand with us.
