Famous and distinctive… but, for what?
It’s something most marketers know but very few will ever discuss: not all brand awareness is positive and not all positive brand awareness is useful. It’s the second part of that sentence that, for most marketers, challenges their current marketing measurement. Ken Roberts, executive chairman and founder of Forethought, explores.
For Malaysian Airways, brand awareness in 2014 reached the high-water mark. Tragically, in that year, flight MH370 disappeared from radar and, flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the airline quickly saw a 60% drop in bookings.
Of course, in the case of Malaysian Airways, it was obvious that the increased brand awareness would never lead to increased sales. But it does raise a question: what exactly makes up awareness and even if it is positive, is it always useful in driving behaviour? If you are in the school of thought that believes most if not all positive brand awareness is useful, then it’s time to have a rethink.
If a brand is new to market, then brand awareness is foundational. Some marketers mistakenly believe they start with a blank canvas, but in fact, the market assigns attributes almost immediately such as challenger brand, discounter, untrustworthy, innovative, and so on. Right from the very first piece of marketing communication, the brand owner needs to create awareness of the attributes that represent the key (and quantitatively derived) drivers of how consumers in the category behave. And the fewer the attributes, the better.
Most organisations do not think about what is useful brand awareness; instead, they simply measure naked brand awareness. Naked brand awareness is when the marketer has not determined what category drivers are responsible for brand choice and simply measures spontaneous and prompted brand name awareness.
It is common to hear marketers talk about being famous and distinctive but often ignoring the “why”, that is, famous and distinctive for what? Worse, when they ask, “for what?”, some then hand the critical of finding an answer to that critically important question to their creative agency. In other words, they ask someone else to do their job.
It makes sense to state that the most important element of the creative brief is the identification of the drivers of choice the brand owner is seeking to communicate. And yet, too many brand owners hand the responsibility for producing the creative brief to the creative agency.
Allowing the creative agency to draft the creative brief is like allowing the builder to do the architectural design. “Famous and distinctive for what?” should be answered with marketing science, not intuition.
What determines “hard-working” brand awareness from “useless” brand awareness are thoughts and feelings, that is, the thoughts that spontaneously come to mind and the feelings the brand elicits. Best case, the thoughts or “reasons to believe” that the brand is known for are the rational building blocks of buyer preference, and the feelings are the detonators of buyer behaviour.
Most companies’ brand measurement captures neither, but instead addresses made-up measures objectively shown to have little to no relationship with preference or buyer behaviour.
Good examples of made-up measures are “likeability” and the equally nonsensical “brand equity”. The latter is nonsense because it fails to predict or even reflect changes in market share. If you have ever experienced an increase or contraction in market share that is not reflected in your brand tracker, then do not feel alone: your brand measurement is at fault. The question is, why are you putting up with it?
If your brand tracker is not based on your category’s rational and emotional drivers, then it will not reflect your true brand health and it will not reflect market performance. Brand is simply stored value made up of future purchase intention. Therefore, brand measurement should strongly correlate with changes in market share. If the correlation between your change in brand as reported by your brand tracker and changes in market share is less than 0.5, then you can be sure that you have a crooked sight on your marketing measurement and you should reassess your brand measurement.
As long as marketers talk about awareness metrics without reference to being distinctive for scientifically-derived category drivers, they will remain the neanderthals of business. What’s more, if your marketing communications do not address the rational and emotional drivers of brand choice, then you may as well donate your media budget to charity.
Remember two key things. First, naked brand awareness is an empty and meaningless measure. Awareness needs to primarily relate to the rational and emotional drivers of choice. Second, when you set out to make your brand famous for something, before you start spending money demand to see the science behind the claim that being distinctive for something, whatever it, will make your business more successful.
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Would love to know what you count as scientifically derived category drivers given the hefty lack of correlation between actual and reported behaviour?
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