While it may seem that brand recognition and brand awareness are, more or less, the same thing, there is a huge discrepancy between these two terms. In fact, the difference between them might be enough to make or break your business. Brand recognition is, simply put, the ability of people to recognize your brand upon hearing its name or seeing its logo. As for the brand awareness, it is something much more complex and, provided that you know how to build it the right way, more lucrative. Let’s further examine the relationship between these two phenomena.
Why people come back?
One study discovered that a person who makes a single purchase from your brand tends to return in 27 percent of situations. After the second purchase, the likelihood of them making a third purchase rises to 45 percent, while the chance of making a third purchase has a likelihood of 54 percent. This clearly indicates that a previous successful deal makes people more comfortable when it comes to trusting you with their money. The reason behind this lies in the fact that they have more confidence in you. In other words, they are not only comfortable with your brand, they are familiar with the way in which it operates and have come to fully trust you. Needless to say, this is not mere brand recognition but fully expanded brand awareness.
Being unique
Another thing that helps your brand stand out is the idea of being unique. While this may clearly seem like an aspect of brand recognition, you need to understand the way in which brands are conditioning the emotional viewpoint of their customers.
American poet Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Think about a person waiting in line at Starbucks, do they think about the financial aspect of the purchase or can they feel the taste of their favorite hot beverage already in their mouths?
In order to become unique and raise your brand awareness, you need to learn how to sell an idea, rather than a product or a service. Once you manage to associate your business with a sensation rather than raw data, you will manage to transcend the brand recognition status and achieve brand awareness.
Turning to traditional marketing
The next reason why brand recognition is much more widespread nowadays lies in the fact that most startups and SMBs start as online enterprises. Sure, humans are predominantly visual beings and are spending more and more time in the digital world. Nevertheless, it is not that easy to become familiar with a brand that you’ve never encountered in the real world. In order to deal with this problem, you might want to turn towards traditional marketing. You don’t even have to give away gifts or hire billboards, seeing as how some agencies offer customizable envelope printing services and that you can use as an alternative to the branded product packages.
Exploit the idea of influencer marketing
One of the things that you can learn from sports brands is that they commonly get associated with celebrities that are endorsing them or acting as their brand ambassadors. Needless to say, as a startup, you don’t actually have to hire an A-list celebrity. Even a micro-influencer that is relevant to your niche will suffice. In this way, you will get someone’s personal brand to vouch for the quality of your own company, which can serve as a huge step forward for your own brand.
At the end of the day, it is virtually impossible to imagine a business becoming successful without reaching the status of a brand, at least in their own niche. What you need to understand, however, is that people who are aware of your brand are much closer to becoming paying customers than those who merely recognize it. With this in mind, making the issue of raising your brand awareness into a top priority seems like a sensible choice.
