Brand Recognition

Table of Contents

What is Brand Recognition?

Brand recognition is when customers can recognize the brand logo, design, and advertise, tagline or the packaging of a certain product or service. Audio/video theme songs or jingle tunes also assist in the process of brand recognition.

Companies and brands should have a consistency in their audio/video marketing campaign and advertisement. It would create a knowledge base about the company’s product or service in the minds of customers.

Two companies use TV commercials and spend millions of dollars on them. One uses the product ads throughout the year; therefore, it would have a higher brand recognition value. The other company only plays its ad during the sports season, and people would forget about its product or services within a few weeks.

Brand recognition requires two things; how often you’re playing the ad, and it should be consistent. The company should create its marketing ad either about character or brands core concept.

Examples: Verizon, an American wireless telecom company, plays its TV commercial where a ‘Test Man’ uses a marketing campaign phrase ‘can you hear me now?’ while talking to the other person on the phone. GEICO, an American insurance company, uses a fictional salesman character by the name of ‘flo’ in its marketing campaign.

Brand Recognition Vs Brand Awareness

We can compare brand recognition with brand awareness, where customers are familiar with the brand name/logo/design of the company. They can recognize the company’s products or services with it. In brand awareness, customers can recall the company’s brand. However, brand recognition has some competitive edge over brand awareness like customers’ loyalty, trust, and their preferences.

Brand Recognition Vs Brand Recall

Brand recall means that the customers can remember your brand name in their memory while talking about certain products. If you compare brand recall with recognition, then brand recall is a stronger bond.

Importance of Brand Recognition

Here are some of the factors that can help you to understand the importance of brand recognition, and they are as follows;

Drive for Repeat Purchase

If a company plays TV ads and commercials of its products and services frequently, then people would be familiar with the company’s products and the brand as well. Whenever they need a certain product, then the brand name would come to their mind. Then at that level of marketing campaign, customers would keep buying your products intentionally or unintentionally. It’s because the customers can only recall the name of your brand in their mind, and they’d keep buying it repetitively.

Provide Competitive Edge

When customers of your target market recall your company’s brand unintentionally; and they buy products and services of your brand repetitively. Trust and loyalty comes with repetition when you maintain quality. It gives a unique competitive edge to your brand that the new competitors can’t have it.

Unless the new competitor offers something new and better, only then he can take away your market share. Otherwise, brand trust and loyalty won’t let people purchase competitors product.

Increase Products Marketing

Unintentionally recalling the brand name of your products and repetitive shopping would make people to share their product experience with others. Sharing product experiences with their social circles would be the marketing of your company indirectly. More people would be interested to join your brand and use your company’s product or service.

Levels of Brand Recognition

Brand recognition is a step by step process. How customers move in different stages, here are the 5 levels of brand recognition;

Brand Rejection

Brand rejection is the stage when customers have a terrible experience with your brand, and they share their negative experiences with others. We all have good or bad experiences with the product or service of certain brands.

When bad experience happens, we swear to ourselves that we would never use such a product again. We also share the same experience with our social circle later.

If your product is making people to have experiences, then you should change your marketing strategy, update your product or service, and launch some new ad or commercial.

Brand Non-recognition

As the name implies that brand non-recognition is the phase when customers aren’t familiar with the brand name of your company. It could be due to many factors like; your brand is new in the market. You, marketers and designers, haven’t differentiated the trademark in the packaging and advertisement. If that’s the case, you should always clearly describe the services that you’re offering.

Most importantly, how your product is different from the competitors in terms of features and other characteristics. Your marketing strategy should be bold and merciless; this is the only way to stand out in the competition.

If your company is new in the market and is facing competition, then brand recognition is a plausible stage for you. It’s the phase where people are familiar with the brand name of your company, and also the product or service you’re offering.

If customers are familiar with your brand name printed on the packaging, then they will recognize your product among the crowd of competitor’s product. If you offer more features, and your marketing campaign presents your product better. Then customers would choose your product or service.

Brand Preference

Brand preference is the selection stage where customers have to make a choice, whether they should choose your product or the competitor’s product. The secret to convince customers all depends on the differentiation strategy. The better you differentiate your product, the better the chances are that customers would prefer your brand over competitors.

When we talk about differentiation, then what extra value you’re offering in your product that’s useful to the customer. If you’re offering something extra what customers are looking for, then they would choose your product.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is the stage that comes with repetition and time. If your brand keeps on delivering the quality product and service to the customers, then customers would become accustomed to your product or service. The best way to achieve a high level of customer loyalty is to better differentiate your product, add some extra value and provide quality. When you offer all of these things at once, then your customers would always prefer your product.

Strategies for Building Brand Recognition

Here are some of the steps to follows if you’re building a brand recognition strategy.

Who is Your Target Audience

If you want the customers to know and recognize your brand, then, first of all, you have to understand your target audience. Understand their demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers like their age, income, ethnicities, education level, beliefs, values, likes, dislikes, and choices. When you have all the demographic and psychographic information, then you can devise a good marketing strategy for your targeted audience.

Most importantly, there should be a consistency in your marketing campaign and you should also update your advertisement regularly. It’s because all the marketing material like TV ads and commercials would serve as a communication channel between the company and the customers.

Therefore, the communication channel should send the right marketing, brand and product message to the customers. If you send the right message, then it would not only represent your product better. But it would help to achieve the desired results what your marketing campaign planned to do.

Brand Visuals

Brand visuals are comprised of logos, color schemes, trademark and design of your brand. It’s better to decide typefaces before deciding any logo, color or design of your brand. It’s because different shapes, colors, and geometry of the logo design convey different messages. You have to be very precise about the message that you want to convey.

For instance, tech industries usually use angular shapes and fonts because it sends the message of innovation and creativity. Service industries, on the other hand, use round shapes to convey the message of creativity, friendliness, and completeness. Black color is usually easier to remember and it makes a good impact in terms of brand recognition.

It is better if you use a combination of two colors, and the combination of colors should be appealing and unique. Trending colors are good, and they usually attract the young and teen customers. Classic colors are usually long-lasting. Therefore, knowing the age, education level, values, and choices are important to make the right decision about the company’s logo design, color scheme, and design.

Use Social Media

Using social media for your brand would help you to informally engage with your targeting market. Funny, comic and light marketing ads are usually easily recognizable. Social media also helps you to get more exposure to your brand in a very short time. Furthermore, doing live shows, publications, webinars, company blogs and articles, and trade shows also play a very important role in terms of getting more user engagements.

Customer Feedback

Customers’ reviews and feedback are also very important to find out the weak areas of your brand, where you need to work more. If the company keeps improving the product or service by using the customers’ feedback, then customer’s loyalty would remain intact. Most importantly, always be thankful to the customers for their feedback.