How to Measure Brand Awareness

In previous posts we discussed branding in terms of How And When To Brand Effectively, How To Add Value To Your Brand etc. Now we are going to talk about “How to measure your brand awareness”. (Brand awareness means how much the target market is aware of your brand, its emotional/rational associations so on and so forth).

Following those posts, most of you have been branding through various target market touch points (Internet, mass media, business outlets etc), implanting rational/emotional associations (brand image/associations) for your brand but now you are wondering “how are you doing in terms of all that you have been doing for branding” “Am I moving in the right direction, Is my business/brand achieving goals related to branding, brand awareness”.

These are all reasonable questions, so let’s find reasonable answers to all such questions.

Measuring Brand Awareness

Measuring brand awareness isn’t such a hard thing to do, if you are familiar with different research techniques (Qualitative & Quantitative), And even if you are not that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get through this post, well at least you would learn how this all works, how it’s done?. 

I am not going to take you into the nitty-gritty of it or the expert way of doing it, don’t worry, I am going to provide the whole approach in layman understanding.

Target Market Research

To measure brand awareness you need to start with Target Market Research. The research should be based on those brand associations/brand image that you have been implanting in your target market through various touch points.

And like I always say in my posts, when it comes to target market research you are required to use traditional research techniques (qualitative and quantitative) in such a way that weaknesses of one technique/method are covered by strengths of others ⁽¹⁾. 

And to get even better, refined research picture utilize social media, internet, web research techniques along with traditional research as it has been proven (via research) that it helps researchers in gaining insights, data on those aspects of target market where traditional research fails ⁽²⁾.

Assess

Assess how much, what portion of your target market associate your brand with those “associations/brand image” (associations/brand image you have been implanting through various touch points)

Such assessment will give you an overall picture of your brand awareness, like for instance if majority of your target market associate your brand with those “associations/brand image” for which you have been carrying out branding. 

That would mean you have done it, you are moving in the right direction and if things aren’t clear, target market is confused or in ambiguity etc then you got to re-plan, tweak your branding strategy to achieve the desired outcome.

You can also use this approach to assess the effectiveness of a specific customer touch point in improving/enhancing brand awareness.

And if you are not so sure about how to do it the right way, I recommend taking help from branding professionals as professionals know what they need to do and how they are required to do it, to achieve effective results.

Being reluctant in taking help from professionals can have serious consequences on your business, brand and in worst cases can lead to complete demise of your business ⁽³⁾, which I am sure you don’t want to happen.

You may also like to read Five Reasons Why Small Businesses Needs Branding

That's it, over to you guys!
  

References:                                                          

1.      Deshpande, R. (1983) ‘Paradigms lost’: on theory and method in research in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 47, 101–110.

2.      Mahr, D. (2011), “Customer co-creation of knowledge during the innovation process”, European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC 2011), Ljubljana, May 24-27, 2011.

3.      Sean Ennis, (1999),"Growth and the small firm: using causal mapping to assess the decision-making process- a case study", Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Vol. 2 Iss: 2 pp. 147 - 160