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.
Would love to know what you count as scientifically derived category drivers given the hefty lack of correlation between actual and reported behaviour?