Brand Awareness: Becoming Another Kleenex
In today's world of
marketing, if you are not marketing online, you are missing a very big
boat. Marketing is now a science with logistics and parameters that were
largely unheard of just a few years ago. However, that is not the case with
the notion of brand awareness. The auto industry was probably the biggest
contributor to the idea that brand loyalty could be utilized to sell more
products. That industry is over 120 years old, and brand awareness became a
fashionable tool in marketing automobiles by the early 1900s.
Brand awareness, of course, is the extent to which a name, label, logo,
catch phrase, jingle, or another identifier that is associated with a
brand, a specific product, or a company is easily recognized by customers.
Brand awareness may be old news, but the Internet has taken the concept to
new heights, becoming far more measurable and quantifiable as part of an
overall marketing strategy.
There are many examples of successful brand awareness implementation. It
has always been primarily produced by effective advertising. The most
dramatically successful advertising campaign is the one where your product
becomes synonymous with the product category. For many years now, a facial
tissue has been called a Kleenex regardless of what actual brand was used.
This is the same result we see when some people refer to any sport-utility
vehicle as a Jeep and any cola drink as a Coke.
The objective in advertising or any brand awareness marketing endeavor is
not simply to get your product name or image in front of the consumer. It
is to get the image into the mind of that consumer, so when the buying
customer wants a product, he or she wants your product before that of any
competitors. Repetitious advertising creates a memory trace that remains
and is reinforced with every additional occurrence. Think of mayonnaise,
hot dogs, ketchup, beer, and coffee. The odds are pretty good that in each
case you thought of a specific brand. It is no coincidence that the biggest
selling brands are also among those most heavily advertised in various
media.
While a successful advertising campaign can create solid brand awareness, a
limiting or cessation of advertising can erase the gains in a remarkably
short time. Forty years ago, a steel wool soap pad was known as a Brillo
Pad. Today, SOS brand is the big seller. Brillo sometimes doesn't even get
any shelf space, and we must ask when was the last time you saw an ad for
Brillo scouring pads? The manufacturer failed to maintain the brand
awareness level they had established. A massive advertising campaign by the
manufacturers of SOS soap pads was the driving force that changed the
landscape.
Advertising remains key to this process, and today the most critical medium
for reaching the customer is the Internet. No other medium offers such
widespread advantages in both reach and monitoring capacity. With the
Internet, you can track how many times your ad has been viewed and how many
times it has been clicked on.
Furthermore, social media and blogging have opened up new avenues for
tracking your brand's impact. Programs exist that can tell you how many
times your brand has been searched for by a search engine. Others can
reveal how many times it has been mentioned in a blog anywhere on the World
Wide Web. These "mentions" can be even more critical to brand
awareness than page views or clicks because each one may represent an
impartial testimony to your product. Even negative discussion tends to
reinforce brand awareness. The old saying applies: There is no such thing
as bad publicity.
Establish it, reinforce it, and nurture it. Brand awareness can make the
difference for you in becoming another brand like Kleenex.
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