Brand awareness describes the extent to which customers, prospects and the general public are able to recognize and recall a brand.
It is the first step in engaging potential customers/clients and is often the most crucial. Measuring brand awareness, noting how readily the brand comes to mind and monitoring how this changes over time can be a very effective way of measuring the overall health of a brand. Although tracking brand awareness has been a mainstay of consumer marketing for generations, b2b marketers are increasingly discovering the value of monitoring this vital metric.
During a typical brand health tracking study, brand awareness is measured in 3 different ways:
- First mention (or “top-of-mind” recall)
- Spontaneous recall / spontaneous awareness
- Prompted recognition / prompted awareness