Brand awareness is a measure of how easily your brand can be recalled or recognized by potential customers. Recall refers to the ability to think of a brand spontaneously just by being asked about the category it’s in. Recognition, by comparison, means being able to remember a brand when it is encountered, such as on a store shelf.
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you work to make your brand easy to recognize and recall.
Be Memorable
Pay attention to the type of awareness that your product or service must rely upon.
Services like pizza delivery or landscaping rarely have visual or other clues for consumers to rely on and are thus considered recall dominant. This means you have to stay in front of people and be easy to remember.
“To be consistent and unique is clearly a strength of a logo.”
Fast moving consumer goods like snacks and toiletries are usually purchased at retail outlets where packaging and point-of-sale branding acts as a visual reminder. As a result, they rely more heavily on recognition. Your brand has to be immediately familiar and have a solid positive emotional connection with the consumer.
Keep it Simple
In a study of brand recall reported by “The New York Times” a sample of consumers was asked to draw several iconic logos from memory. Even very well known marques were quite difficult for the study participants to recreate with perfect accuracy. Only 16-percent could draw the logos for Walmart and Burger King without errors.
In general, simpler logos scored better, but even they were not recalled with terrific ease. 41-percent of the subjects didn’t remember the number of circles in the Target logo (hint: it’s just one circle around a dot).
Seeking greater memorability and bowing to current aesthetic trends favoring ‘flatter’ designs, several major brands such as YouTube, Uber, and Dropbox have redesigned their logos in recent years to be simpler and more minimalist. You should strive to keep your brand logo simple and easy to identify and recall.
Ikea is a good example of a company that benefits from a flat and simple wordmark that has been around for some time, existing in pretty much its current form since the 1980s. Asa Nordin, a senior coordinator of Ikea trademarks told “The New York Times”:
“The logo is merely the symbol for what the Ikea brand promises and delivers. The logo shall mirror that ‘promise’ as near as possible, as well as stand out from its surroundings. To be consistent and unique is clearly a strength of a logo.”
The instructions that come with their furniture might be a touch inscrutable, but just about everyone can see that Ikea has developed a brand that is highly memorable and easy to recall and recognize, which is what every company should be striving for.
Stay Present
Finally, there are three major factors that influence how well brand information is recalled or recognized:
- Practice: the frequency with which it is detected
- Recency: how long ago it was encountered
- Context: how meaningful the encounter was
No matter what design you have for a logo, you have to put it in front of the right target audience and do it often. Also, be sure you’re doing it in a way that makes a positive impression on them and drives a meaningful and memorable connection.
So, when creating a strategy for driving brand awareness, be sure to keep it simple, make it memorable, and keep it in front of people as much as possible and in a positive way.
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