Promotional Strategies that Build Brand Recognition and Awareness
Believe it or not, the phrases brand recognition and brand awareness aren’t synonymous. The jargon is similar, but they’re more fraternal than identical. While the differences are slight and must be approached in unique ways, a marketing strategy can be implemented to achieve both brand recognition and awareness.
Twins or Friends?
A great marketing strategy can build both brand recognition and brand awareness. But, how are the two different?
Brand recognition is only one element of brand awareness. It’s a subcategory, the definition of which is often muddled and confused. Brand recognition is a customer’s ability to recall what a brand does–plenty of people have a brand awareness of the tranquil green of a Starbucks awning. Target superstores have a bright red target, the iconic staple of this monolith. However, Brand awareness delves more into the loyalty of knowing and using a brand.
It’s one thing for someone to recognize the green awning of Starbucks and step further up the totem pole of loyalty for that individual to see the awning and flock to the store to buy the drink. You should desire both, but brand awareness is the endgame of brand recognition. Brand awareness infers that your product is not simply recognized, but recognized as the premier product within its lane. Fabrik Brands described the distinction as such:
The Peak of Brand Recognition
So now that we know a basic distinction between brand recognition and brand awareness, let’s pinpoint areas in our marketing strategy that we can fortify to improve them. We’ll start with brand recognition and segway eventually into the larger umbrella of brand awareness. Here are three notable ways to improve brand recognition:
- PR Campaigns
- Live Events
- Focus on organic search
- Omni-channel content
PR Campaigns, live events and content generation are common ways to increasingly expose audiences to your brand. These activities provide a foundation to build your eventual awareness. Creating events and contents that give your brand name recognition will create a pipeline and a variety of outlets through which your customers can connect and engage with you. These are all tactics that should be applied in the introductory phases of your marketing strategy implementation. Plan in advance so that you can execute each stage of growing recognition and engage with your audience in new ways. Once you earn the trust and recognition of your audience at this basic level, you can begin to focus on brand awareness.
Securing Brand Awareness
Brand recognition is only a single element under the larger umbrella of brand awareness. Once we’ve built brand recognition through social media content, PR campaigns and live events, if we sustain that growth and begin to go the extra mile, we’ll achieve brand awareness. Fabrik Brands described this leap, saying that once:
We must sustain the output of content and the levels of interaction that we’ve achieved from brand recognition, however, the next step is creating unforgettable experiences for your audience. One brand that’s done a home-run job of delivering this experience is Adobe through its Adobe Max creative conference. They’ve created much more than a conference for visual artists and graphic designers. Adobe has gathered musicians, photographers, authors, writers and yes, even comedians (John Mulaney) to attend its conference and deliver an unforgettable experience. They’ve gone from simply being a brand that people recognize, to being one other choose even faced with a barrage of other choices.
A Marketing Strategy that Secures Both
Brand recognition and brand awareness can both be achieved through a succinct and intelligent marketing strategy. The best way to achieve our goals, achieve objectives and surmount obstacles is to plan. Creating a marketing strategy using the advance Robotic Marketer software will provide you with the means to achieve both.
