Redefining Brand Awareness Through Social Media

In the digital age, “brand awareness” is not only about increasing brand recognition amongst consumers. Brands, too, need to understand how consumers define the brand. We discuss how you can use social media to increase awareness of your own brand and use that awareness to better serve your customers.

“Brand awareness” is usually thought of as consumers’ knowledge of a brand’s existence (Wikipedia). This definition supposes that the brand itself – be it a product, service, person or campaign – is a well defined entity with its own unique qualities, and thus, something for people to become aware of. Brand managers who seek to “grow brand awareness” typically go about this by promoting those unique qualities through websites, commercials, print ads and so on.

However, the digital age presents a few complications. Consumers now have access to a wealth of online information that influence their behaviour:

• Recommendations from people in their social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
• Consumer ratings and reviews on both review sites and shopping sites (dooyoo.co.uk, Amazon.com)
• Articles and editorials on news and magazinesites
• The rise of social networking (a recent Nielson report cites a 43% rise in social network usage in the past year) paired with the growing dominance of mobile computing makes it extremely easy for people to seek advice online whenever and wherever they choose

These online inputs – conversations, reviews and articles – have huge influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions. And as the number of these influential inputs increase, the relative influence of a brand’s own message becomes that much smaller. This can make any effort to spread brand awareness a bit of a moot point: how can you spread awareness of your brand’s core values when your customers have their own idea of what those core values are?

If you can’t beat em’, join em’

“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room”
- Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon

If your consumers have strong notions about your brand (or issues affecting your brand) why not make those notions work for you?

In effect, social media turns the tables on brand awareness: now, brand awareness is not only about how recognisable you are to your target audience; it’s also about your own awareness of how the brand is defined in the eyes of the customer.

This isn’t bad news for brand managers. In fact, it’s great news. The recent transparency of consumer conversation (thanks to social media) means brands no longer have to shoot in the dark when positioning themselves.

Brand awareness starts with you

Let social media help you build your own awareness of your brand. What can you learn about your brand through social media?

• Understand your brand’s best and worst points. When you know what people like (or don’t like) about you, you’re in a better position to build on your strengths and work on your weaknesses.
• Discover your biggest promoters and detractors. Just because you hired a celebrity to be the face of your brand doesn’t mean they’re your only spokesperson. Social media lets you discover other people who are talking about your brand and connect with them around topics that interest them.
• Discover important topics related to your brand. Social media conversation reflects what people care about. When you know what people care about, you can better align your brand with topics that interest them.

Contexts: the key to building brand awareness

Once you know how consumers define your brand, you’re in a better position to align the brand with values that matter to your customers. The options for doing so – online and off – are myriad. But regardless of the medium, contexts are key. After all, it’s the contexts of conversation that define a brand. Words like “classic” (Gap), “Apps” (iPhone), and “healthy” (Fage Greek Yogurt), are key indicators of how people perceive a brand, and those values need to follow through in all marketing communication.

Photo credit: Melvin Gaal …