How Brand Awareness Affects Perception

Brand awareness is the degree to which consumers in the marketplace are familiar with particular brands. Small businesses can find their products at a disadvantage compared with larger competitors' alternatives, which can be backed by millions of dollars in advertising. Brand awareness has a number of distinct effects on consumers' perception of different brands, and working to build brand awareness is crucial for small business success.

                                                                   

Perception of Quality

Consumers have a tendency to expect highly advertised brands to offer higher quality products than generic products or brands they have not seen before. In grocery stores, for example, consumers are often presented with a mix of options for individual products, ranging from highly advertised and recognizable brands to generic products. Grocery store shoppers are likely to view the higher-priced "name brands" as superior to store brands, even if both brands contain the same ingredients or are manufactured in the same factory.

Presumption of Availability

Highly advertised brands are most often widely distributed as well, creating a psychological association between well-known brands and easy availability. Brand awareness can cause consumers to assume they can find a well-known brand in a variety of outlets, causing them to specifically decide to purchase a specific brand before even entering a store.

Consider the Budweiser brand and the Baltika brand of alcoholic beverages, for example. Consumers in the U.S. can safely assume that the highly advertised, highly recognized Budweiser brand can be bought at virtually any fueling station, liquor store or grocery outlet. Baltika, on the other hand, can only be found in a select few specialty liquor stores in the United States. A consumer entering a random fueling station in the U.S. looking for beer is much more likely to go straight for a Budweiser than to look around for a Baltika.

Brand Name Recall

Brand awareness is an end goal, but it can also serve as a catalyst for further demand growth. For each product category, a consumer can immediately recall several brands, remember several more with a bit of assistance and fail to recognize many that they have likely seen before. Earning a top recall spot in consumers' minds is the ultimate goal of brand marketing. A high level of brand awareness can keep your brands coming up in consumers' conversations, on social media and in a range of settings that serve to spread word-of-mouth advertising.

Niche Identification

Niche brands with a high level of brand awareness can build a sense of identity with specific consumer groups in such a way that certain brands are seen as marks of pride and association in specific groups.
The Nike brand, for example, dominated the basketball shoe product category with its Air Jordans for more than 20 years. Virtually every serious basketball player felt that he had to have a pair of Air Jordans in the product's heyday to reflect his passion for the sport, and it would be extremely rare to find a non-player wearing a pair.


references: www.chron.com