The importance of Brand Awareness in a competitive world

English

Details: Category: Blog; 07 November 2017

5 years ago

At first, this may sound paradox seeing as the internet offers dozens of possible ways for businesses to target and address potential customers, be it end customers (B2C) or business clients (B2B). Nevertheless, this applies to every organisation with a web connection resulting in an abundance of information for consumers to process. As described in the previous paragraph, this circumstance is overwhelming for people, but equally essential to businesses hoping to sell their products and services to consumers. So how do companies initially get to the point of sale with acquired customers? In short: brand awareness. Brand awareness can be defined as the degree to which consumers are able to remember and recognise a specific brand. In this context, the recognition of a brand does not necessarily include the remembrance of a brand name, but rather requires a minimum mental distinction of brand features in comparison to other similar brands. Putting brand awareness into context Brand awareness is a crucial strategic performance indicator for businesses as it plays an important role in the initialisation of a purchasing process. This is where consumer behaviour, the purchase decision funnel and the brand awareness set come into play. Consumer behaviour Consumer behaviour is concerned with studying how consumers, e.g. individuals, groups or organisations, make purchasing decisions based on emotional, behavioural and intellectual influences. Purchase decision funnel The purchase funnel is a model based on consumer behavioural studies which depicts the customer journey through different funnel stages before purchasing goods or services. This decision funnel is subcategorised into four phases: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. The Action phase which represents the actual purchase is strongly impacted by the three preceding phases which lead a consumer from brand awareness to brand desire. These steps are the crucial contact points for businesses to win over customers. Brand awareness set Typically, when the need to purchase a product or service arises, consumers consciously or unconsciously search their memories for any known brands, called the awareness set, which are then subdivided into suitable and unsuitable options depending on the extent to which these options satisfy the respective need at hand. Unsuitable brands move into the consumer's inept set, indifferent brands into the inert set and suitable brands into the evoked set. In cases that an insufficient number of evoked brands are accessible in the memory, external research, e.g. search engine queries, product/service comparison web pages, recommendations from friends and family, can be used to round off the purchasing decision. Brands that are then rejected make way for brands that are finally purchased. The goal for businesses is then to deliver an amazing product or service and provide an extraordinary experience to the customer to confirm his/her assumption that he/she bought the best option with the time and resources available. If this process is successful, companies will be able to complete the purchasing cycle by remaining the top-of-mind awareness brand which awards them the competitive edge needed for the next time the customer goes through the purchase decision funnel. The top-of-mind awareness concept refers to a brand coming to a consumer's mind first when thinking about a certain industry or product/service category. Levels of brand awareness There are different levels of brand awareness. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most desirable state of brand awareness is the top-of-mind awareness. This kind of brand awareness does not require any external impulses to recall a certain brand. One level of brand awareness is the unaided recall. Customers are able to recall a brand without any external inducement. Another level is the aided recall. A consumer will not be able to remember a brand without external help. A concrete stimulus needs to be deployed to prompt a consumer's brand awareness. Brand awareness survey Brand awareness is an important indicator in a world strongly impacted by online shopping as customers can't always test brands before deciding to purchase them unless they have been buying these brands habitually. After all the previous talk of what brand awareness is and how it is majorly important for businesses, it ultimately comes down to one question: how am I supposed to know consumers' brand awareness? The answer is simple: by asking them; and what better way to ask them than by conducting a brand awareness survey. LimeSurvey offers a Brand Awareness Survey Template which contains questions aimed at identifying the levels of brand awareness. Are consumers able to recognize a specific brand when asked to freely list brands based on certain product or service categories (unaided recall)? Are they able to recognize a specific brand when it is placed in a list including other brands (aided recall)? Which sources have lead consumers to specific brands? How familiar are specific brands, what is the consumer's purchasing behaviour and how does the consumer rate specific brands? Brand awareness is oftentimes a decisive factor when a consumer chooses to buy a certain product or service. Maintaining a top-of-mind awareness is crucial to spur growth, especially for online shops as a higher level of positive brand awareness can make up for the lack of being able to physically touch and examine a brand’s products or services. Conducting brand awareness surveys are a good way to start your brand awareness campaign. If you want to give us feedback, comments or suggestions regarding our brand awareness survey template, feel free to send us an email.

What is brand awareness?

In the past few decades, modern society has been experiencing a strong shift from traditional brick and mortar store shopping to purchasing products online. The reason for this? It's more convenient, easier, faster and the selection is endlessly broad. From a consumer perspective, the phenomenon of online shopping has become a truly paradisiac state. From a business company perspective, it has never been more difficult to gain a competitive edge over rival companies. At first, this may sound paradox seeing as the internet offers dozens of possible ways for businesses to target and address potential customers, be it end customers (B2C) or business clients (B2B). Nevertheless, this applies to every organisation with a web connection resulting in an abundance of information for consumers to process.

As described in the previous paragraph, this circumstance is overwhelming for people, but equally essential to businesses hoping to sell their products and services to consumers. So how do companies initially get to the point of sale with acquired customers? In short: brand awareness. Brand awareness can be defined as the degree to which consumers are able to remember and recognise a specific brand.

In this context, the recognition of a brand does not necessarily include the remembrance of a brand name, but rather requires a minimum mental distinction of brand features in comparison to other similar brands.

Putting brand awareness into context

Brand awareness is a crucial strategic performance indicator for businesses as it plays an important role in the initialisation of a purchasing process. This is where consumer behaviour, the purchase decision funnel and the brand awareness set come into play.

Consumer behaviour
Consumer behaviour is concerned with studying how consumers, e.g. individuals, groups or organisations, make purchasing decisions based on emotional, behavioural and intellectual influences.

Purchase decision funnel
The purchase funnel is a model based on consumer behavioural studies which depicts the customer journey through different funnel stages before purchasing goods or services. This decision funnel is subcategorised into four phases: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. The Action phase which represents the actual purchase is strongly impacted by the three preceding phases which lead a consumer from brand awareness to brand desire. These steps are the crucial contact points for businesses to win over customers.

AIDA purchasing funnel

Brand awareness set
Typically, when the need to purchase a product or service arises, consumers consciously or unconsciously search their memories for any known brands, called the awareness set, which are then subdivided into suitable and unsuitable options depending on the extent to which these options satisfy the respective need at hand. Unsuitable brands move into the consumer's inept set, indifferent brands into the inert set and suitable brands into the evoked set. In cases that an insufficient number of evoked brands are accessible in the memory, external research, e.g. search engine queries, product/service comparison web pages, recommendations from friends and family, can be used to round off the purchasing decision. Brands that are then rejected make way for brands that are finally purchased.

The goal for businesses is then to deliver an amazing product or service and provide an extraordinary experience to the customer to confirm his/her assumption that he/she bought the best option with the time and resources available.

If this process is successful, companies will be able to complete the purchasing cycle by remaining the top-of-mind awareness brand which awards them the competitive edge needed for the next time the customer goes through the purchase decision funnel. The top-of-mind awareness concept refers to a brand coming to a consumer's mind first when thinking about a certain industry or product/service category.

awareness set graph

Levels of brand awareness

There are different levels of brand awareness. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most desirable state of brand awareness is the top-of-mind awareness. This kind of brand awareness does not require any external impulses to recall a certain brand.

One level of brand awareness is the unaided recall. Customers are able to recall a brand without any external inducement.

Another level is the aided recall. A consumer will not be able to remember a brand without external help. A concrete stimulus needs to be deployed to prompt a consumer's brand awareness.

Brand awareness survey

Brand awareness is an important indicator in a world strongly impacted by online shopping as customers can't always test brands before deciding to purchase them unless they have been buying these brands habitually.

After all the previous talk of what brand awareness is and how it is majorly important for businesses, it ultimately comes down to one question: how am I supposed to know consumers' brand awareness? The answer is simple: by asking them; and what better way to ask them than by conducting a brand awareness survey.

LimeSurvey offers a Brand Awareness Survey Template which contains questions aimed at identifying the levels of brand awareness.

Are consumers able to recognize a specific brand when asked to freely list brands based on certain product or service categories (unaided recall)? Are they able to recognize a specific brand when it is placed in a list including other brands (aided recall)? Which sources have lead consumers to specific brands? How familiar are specific brands, what is the consumer's purchasing behaviour and how does the consumer rate specific brands?

Brand awareness is oftentimes a decisive factor when a consumer chooses to buy a certain product or service. Maintaining a top-of-mind awareness is crucial to spur growth, especially for online shops as a higher level of positive brand awareness can make up for the lack of being able to physically touch and examine a brand’s products or services. Conducting brand awareness surveys are a good way to start your brand awareness campaign.

If you want to give us feedback, comments or suggestions regarding our brand awareness survey template, feel free to send us an This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The evolution of surveys has kept up with the development of technology: going from door to door, mailing questionnaires out, calling people to complete phone interviews, using portable computers – and finally online surveys. Online surveys provide some obvious advantages such as reduced paper and administration costs. However, it makes sense to look a bit deeper into the differences between the two general options, online and offline surveys, especially with respect to the quality of the collected data. Quality of data The quality of survey results is made up of the right questions, representativeness of the examined group of interest, and the validity and depth of the answers. Error in your data can occur systematically due to biases, like researcher bias, survey bias, respondent bias and non-response bias, or randomly by misrepresentation. But it’s not just the accuracy of the data: Especially when surveying feedback on customers or an event experience or gathering new ideas and suggestions for improvement, the quality of free text fields are crucial for usable data. All those aspects are notably influenced by your choice of survey format. Response time and rates Online surveys most certainly produce quicker responses, since you can share the link to your survey immediately after creating it without having to call people, mail it to them or meet them in person. Offline surveys, on the other hand, usually produce higher response rates with in-person surveys being the most effective, followed by mail surveys. Online and email surveys still have a better response rate than telephone surveys. The height of response rates doesn’t necessarily translate to representation: If you want to represent the whole population of one country, you’ll need a much lower response rate than when you wish for feedback from a defined group. In a smaller group, you’ll get much smaller sample sizes and it’s much more likely to miss neutral responses and get more positive and negative results. Target group selection Most of the time, the lower response rates of online surveys can be compensated by being able to reach more people – even worldwide if you wish. With the right software you can run a survey in multiple languages of which the participants can select. If the survey has a specific target group or needs a certain frequency distribution in order to be representative, quota setting is a solution that can be used in survey software. A downside to online surveys is that random sampling is more difficult, since generating random email addresses like with phone numbers is not possible. That is not a problem if the group of interest consists of the members of a club, the students of a certain university, or registered customers to a shop. Otherwise panel companies can offer a solution to getting the wished sample size. The benefits of offline interviews include going to specific places after an event to reach specific people and also reaching the computer-illiterate population. Though the “online population” used to have special characteristics like being younger, better educated and more tech-savvy, the computer literacy has drastically increased in the last 15 years. Online surveys are thus reaching more and more people, whereas phone surveys, being still a popular medium of choice, are reaching less and less people, since households that have no landline are increasing, in particular with younger people. (Perceived) anonymity Especially upon addressing sensitive topics like smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, cheating on taxes or gambling, self-protective answering can be observed. This means the participant is not answering honestly, downplays or exaggerates his or her answer. It occurs especially with an interviewer present and even depends on factors like age, gender and ethnicity. But also when asking less sensitive questions, and instead about the experience with a product or event, the results might be biased by the presence of the interviewer in in-person interviews, since people may be more polite and less honest. This also applies to situations with an existing relationship of dependence, as often observed at universities, where the professor to be rated is present at the evaluation. Oftentimes people mistrust online surveys, when they are unsure of their data safety. Particularly if you want to prevent multiple participation, you either have to select setting cookies, saving the IP address or only allow access with a personalized token. All those options might prevent the participants from answering upfront or from answering at all, if you neglect assuring the participants of their anonymity and also choosing a software tool that allows anonymization as needed. This not only concerns the data accessible to the survey creators but also to the software provider. This is why the hosting and data storage should be at best on servers within countries with high data protection legislation like Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain. Other technical advantages Although the readability of black ink on white paper goes unchallenged, online surveys still win the victory in the design category. By not being restricted in space, it is not only possible to create a more appealing appearance with more coloring and implementation of pictures and videos, but also to provide unlimited space for free text entries. To keep participants interested, online surveys allow many options for personalization, including branching to only show relevant questions, piping to reuse answers or defining different end URLs. Though readability might be better in paper surveys, online surveys grant access to people with disabilities such as poor eyesight by being compatible with screen readers. On the researcher’s side deciphering handwriting is being skipped and less errors in data entry occur with online surveys. Interaction A special benefit of personal interviews arises when you want feedback to an event taking place or to ask for customer feedback immediately after the experience: Since the experience (and the excitement at best) is still fresh in their mind, the motivation to fill in a questionnaire might be higher, particularly in regards to open text fields. The interviewer bias, that has already been mentioned, can be utilized in a good way: From my own experience, a face to face interaction can be beneficial when you are looking for answers in form of free text fields. I learned that people often do not think of their opinion or thoughts as relevant, and so they’d rather skip a question than entering something they deem wrong. In personal interviews you can encourage those to share their experiences. If required, you can give further explanations or ask further questions when fitting. Although offline surveys immediately after the examined experience make a lot of sense, online surveys are still superior when it comes to time management. People are often reluctant to answering at all or fill out their questionnaire as quickly as possible if they feel pressured. Did you know? When creating questionnaires with LimeSurvey, you can have respondents take your questionnaire offline with no need for internet availability. The free Android app OfflineSurveys enables caching any LimeSurvey survey and collecting your data offline. Once the Internet is available again, the app can automatically synchronise the collected responses with your LimeSurvey system. Feel free to check it out here. Conclusion The question whether to choose an online or offline survey cannot be answered conclusively – and it does not need to be. The choice has to be made based on the particular cause depending on the survey goal and type, employee or customer feedback, academic research or feedback to an event. In many cases a combination of both might make the most sense, because that way you can also combine the benefits of both: broadly speaking, the quantity of online surveys with the quality of paper surveys and the combined accessibility of different target groups. LimeSurvey provides a convenient way to combine both: questionnaires that have been created online can be easily converted into a word document or a PDF file. The question display is thereby adjusted in order to be used in a written or personal interview. Afterwards the collected data can be entered manually into LimeSurvey, so that in the end both data sets can be analyzed collectively. All aforementioned features like multiple languages, data security, choosing the degree of anonymity and personalization of the survey design are also provided by LimeSurvey.

Blog

5 years ago

The future of surveys

The history of surveys During a time with lesser technological possibilities, but an equally intense interest in ...

The enormous effort and time this consumed made it very difficult for conducting quantitative research. Potential respondents had to be researched, approached, questioned and subsequently data had to be processed and evaluated by hand to derive proper results. Response rates during these early times of survey research were astonishingly high and could often reach 90% or higher levels. This was due to the huge effort of the process which resulted in only very few surveys being conducted at all. The next stage of survey-taking from approximately the 1960s until the 1990s included questionnaires via telephone, i.e. cold-calling potential respondents that were verbally asked a list of survey questions. The present of surveys From the 1990s until today, face-to-face interviews declined due to difficulties in contacting and interviewing target audiences for personal questioning, but also the number of telephone surveys decreased due to the prevalence of mobile phones. However, technological advancements in the shape of new communication channels running via the internet and an increasing network of users online lead to a shift in survey research. Web-based surveys became the prominent way to collect research data from questioning people as they were contactable at any time and any location in large quantities. As a result, adjustments had to be introduced that would change population construction, survey sampling, survey design, statistical evaluations as well as technological expertise in mastering new tools for data acquisition. Due to lower costs per respondent acquisition since the arrival of the internet, people have been overloaded with the quantity and exposure of online surveys, thus leading to strong response rate drops. Consequently, more money has been necessary to recruit samples large enough to meet survey specifications. Strangely, making contact with prospective respondents is harder nowadays than it used to be in past times despite the technological possibilities. No technology at its current status quo can automatically persuade people to participate in surveys, especially when the aforementioned overload puts people in an emotional state of aversion towards survey invitations. Nevertheless, due to the availability of vast personal data and survey panel providers, targeting the most suitable potential respondents for a representative population sample as well as voluntary and beneficial survey participation options have only become possible due to the intelligence of technological innovations. The interplay and long-term consequences of the negative and positive factors attributed to modern-day survey research methods and approaches cannot be conclusively forecasted at this point in time. What is safe to say though is that technology will keep advancing in the future and with it the tools and possibilities to conduct survey-based research. The future of surveys The question remains what the future of survey research will look like. This question affects several factors or entities involved with survey research. What will future survey tools and methods look like? What will future peoples' attitudes or general emotions toward surveys be like? How will future survey creators deal with possibly tremendous shifts in their professional fields? We have put together some theories on how survey research may change and affect these aspects in question. Issues concerning high respondent survey fatigue and low response rates will most likely prevail within the future, especially due to digital communication opportunities that tempt many people or organisations to get their surveys out there. → This will potentially require an even stronger incentivisation or compensation of surveys for respondents to overcome inhibitions or aversions. Interactive surveys might become a predominant form of conducting surveys, thereby enabling respondents to chat with survey creators. → This might increase the attractiveness of general survey experiences due to a proper dialog, a kind of hybrid of old and new methods, i.e. bringing the old-school face-to-face interview format into a digital survey context. Open text questions will be increasingly easy to analyse for artificial intelligence (AI) tools and therefore deployed more often without concerns about the evaluation. → This might benefit survey creators in a manner that it offers more flexibility and appreciation for respondents who may then respond in their own words instead of being forced into a certain response grid. The current trend toward the dominance of mobile survey-taking will likely persist and grow. → Depending on the technological direction we are going to take with regard to portable smartphone computers, responsive web technologies will remain most important also for survey tools; furthermore humans' attention spans within digital environments will continue to converge to zero. A potential alternative approach with respect to technological advancements could be surveys conducted via augmented or virtual reality experiments, i.e. putting people into a digital environmental context or a real-life-digital-hybrid context where real-life interviews or surveys are simulated which ultimately might augment the entire survey-taking experience. There is a reasonable possibility that a replacement of human respondents by intelligent machines might take place when conducting surveys to avoid the central issue of survey fatigue. → Machines with sufficient learning progress may hence represent opinions of a human population which would render human respondents obsolete. Looking even farther into the future with an even more speculative theory, the possibility of humans and machines fusing to create cyborgs of sorts may alter survey research as we know it. This could potentially someday enable survey creators to download contents including opinions and feedback from respondents' brains which will render the actual process of taking surveys obsolete. Admittedly though, this is rather far-fetched at this moment in time. Nevertheless, just like any other area of our everyday lives, survey research will continue to be subject to intense paradigmatic shifts in the future which might bring a new sense of excitement to this field again.