Brand Awareness Measurement: a new audit type to evaluate your brand strength and perceptions in key market segments

In June 2021 we have released a new audit to enable businesses to measure and evaluate their brand awareness and brand perceptions. Just within a few days of making it available on our website, the Brand Awareness Measurement audit became the most sought-after product among all audits we offer.

We are getting tons of questions about what this audit does, and what to use the insights for so we decided to put this informative post together, covering most questions about this audit.

What is brand awareness?

Putting it simply, brand awareness describes what percent of people in a specific market segment are aware of a brand.

According to Wikipedia & Oxford Languages:

Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model.
Oxford Languages

How to measure brand awareness?

Let’s take a simplified example to demonstrate the process of brand awareness measurement.

Your market segment is 30 to 40-year-old senior marketing managers in New York. To measure brand awareness in that segment, you will need to survey a large number of marketing managers of that criteria and ask them if they are aware of your brand or company.

If you take 10,000 responses, and 15% know your brand, then it indicates a 15% brand awareness in that segment.

For the most accurate market research results, measuring brand awareness by segment is recommended. This is an industry-standard approach that enables the measurement of brand strength among various groups of potential customers.

What are brand perceptions?

Qualtircs describe brand perceptions as follows:

Brand perception is what customers believe a product or service represents, not what the company owning the brand says it does. Brand perception comes from customer use, experience, functionality, reputation, and word-of-mouth recommendation.
Qualtircs

This definition accurately describes what brand perceptions are. Brand perceptions are the result of several factors, some can be controlled while others cannot be shaped by brand management tools.

A perfect example is the German automotive company, Audi. In certain parts of the United States, Audit has a reputation of being low-quality and unreliable compared to other import car brands. Customer perceptions about the Audit brand are negative. Meanwhile, in most parts of Eastern Europe, Audi is often compared with Mercedes and BMW – the leading premium consumer car brands from Germany.

This example shows that despite the internal positioning, brand management, and global PR efforts of the brand, results can differ greatly from segment to segment.

How to measure brand perceptions?

Brand perception measurement is done based on market research. Typically, brand awareness and perceptions are measure and evaluated in the same surveying campaign.

In a brand perception survey, the market research respondent will be asked questions like:

Do you like this brand?
If yes – why?
If no – why?

Collecting a large number of responses from a specific segment will get accurate indications regarding what people like and dislike about a brand.

What insights can a brand awareness and perception audit provide?

Our brand awareness measurement solution is designed to answer the following questions:

In which areas, regions, or countries your brand is known or least known?
How does your brand awareness compare to your top 3 competitors in each region?
Do your potential customers have a negative or positive opinion of your brand? Why?

Let’s see some use cases and examples.

1. Brand awareness: in which regions your brand recognized?

Measuring brand awareness by region, cities or countries is mission-critical when your company invests in developing international brand recognition.

The audit report will clearly show that in which locations your brand is well known, and where it is less recognized among your target customers. This information can provide valuable feedback regarding the efficiency of your brand-building efforts.

2. Competitive analysis: how does your brand awareness compare to your competitors?

The second page of our brand awareness audit will show how the brand recognition of your company performs against 3 competitors of your choice.

This information is very helpful to understand where your company outperforms the competition or losing commercial opportunities due to low brand strength.

The heatmap makes it easy to visually scan the report and spot any major variations.

3. Brand reputation: do people like your brand or not? Why?

The third page of the audit shows the perceptions of your brand by country or region, based on the feedback, ratings, and comments of the targeted market research respondents.

The first chart shows the like and dislike ration by country. This information is important to understand where your brand enjoys positive reputation, and in which areas the audited brand is disliked.

The two other charts show common reasons and opinions regarding why your target customers like or dislike your company.

What type of businesses should measure brand awareness?

Every business that aims to establish and secure awareness in multiple regions should measure brand awareness regularly.

Aside from small local businesses that focus on serving exclusively the local community, companies that aspire to be recognized in various markets should get feedback from time to time.

Our most frequent brand awareness audit customers are: