Building a strong brand starts with knowing where you stand—in other words, measuring brand awareness is a critical first step toward stronger brand equity. Before diving into how we do just that, it’s important to understand two foundational concepts:
- Brand awareness is how easily people recognize or remember your brand. It’s that instant spark of recognition when someone sees your logo, hears your name, or spots your product and knows exactly who you are.
- Brand equity is the value people place on your brand beyond the product itself. It’s built through every experience and emotion tied to your brand, and it’s what makes someone choose you over anyone else.
In short: Awareness is the gateway to equity. Consumers can’t form positive perceptions (or any perceptions at all) if they don’t know your brand exists.
In this blog post, we’ll dig into how to measure brand awareness, and how to do so in a way that will allow you to develop research-backed strategies to improve your brand’s health. A strong brand awareness study, or brand health study, uncovers not only consumer awareness of your brand but also the attributes that matter most to your target audience. These insights help sharpen your marketing strategy and amplify your impact. Keep reading to see how market research can help you assess, elevate, and energize your brand.
How to Measure Brand Awareness & Brand Health
The first step to measuring brand awareness and overall brand health is establishing reliable benchmarks. A benchmarking study gives you a clear picture of current brand health and provides a baseline for tracking changes over time.
Measuring brand awareness typically involves surveys that assess both unaided recall (do customers name your brand off the top of their head?) and aided recall (do they recognize it when named in a list?). These surveys often go further, capturing other key brand health indicators, such as:
- Brand Familiarity: How well consumers feel they know your brand
- Brand Reputation: Perceived credibility, trustworthiness, and overall image
- Brand Perceptions: Consumers’ associations of the brand with particular traits
- Brand Consideration: Likelihood that a consumer would choose your brand when deciding what to buy
- Brand Usage: Whether consumers have used your brand and how recently or frequently
- Brand Preference: How much customers prefer or choose your brand first over others
Brand tracking studies measure changes in brand metrics like these at regular intervals, helping you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts over time. By following brand tracking best practices, you can continually monitor and improve brand health, ensuring your strategy stays aligned with audience perceptions and market dynamics.
What Are Brand Perceptions?
Brand perceptions are what your brand stands for in consumers’ eyes. These perceptions are why a brand exists—to call up particular thoughts and feelings in connection with the brand—and they are critical in determining a brand’s health.
Branding is all about shaping those perceptions. A brand strategy that taps into a target audience’s key motivations will generate positive brand perceptions that make those consumers more likely to choose and recommend the brand. Measuring and tracking brand perceptions allows you to understand how effectively your brand is owning its strategy.
What Is Brand Equity?
Many clients ask what the difference is between a brand health research and brand equity research. As previously noted, brand equity is your brand’s perceived value and strength, shaped by consumer experiences, associations, and emotional connections. Put simply, it’s the added financial value your brand delivers—what consumers will pay for your brand over a generic alternative.
At Campos, we consider brand tracking studies to be brand equity studies. These studies measure how a brand is performing in the context of consumer perceptions, emotional connection, and competitive positioning. They typically include brand funnel metrics (such as awareness, consideration, and usage) for the brand in question and its key competitors, as well as deeper insights into how the brand is perceived and how strongly it resonates with its audience. Brand equity tracking studies monitor changes in these metrics over time, helping guide strategic decisions about positioning, messaging, and overall brand direction.
Brand Health & Brand Equity Research Methods That Work
Studying brand health and brand equity requires methods that capture both the big picture and the details. Effective approaches include:
- Quantitative Research: Surveys provide statistically significant data on brand awareness, familiarity, and perceptions. This quantifiable approach allows for consistent brand tracking over time and helps benchmark progress against key metrics.
- Qualitative Research: Research methods like in-depth interviews and focus groups reveal the “why” behind brand health metrics, uncovering how consumers perceive a brand and its competitors and revealing motivational insights the brand can tap into.
- Mixed-Methods Research: A methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative research methodologies can give a more complete picture of brand equity. A diary study, for example, may capture interactions with and thoughts about a brand over time. This produces deep, actionable insights to guide strategic brand decisions.
How to Build Brand Awareness Strategically
Building brand awareness is about being recognized and remembered for the right things. That starts with a strong, cohesive brand strategy and consistent brand messaging.
- A Brand strategy is an internal plan that articulates who your brand is targeting for growth, why, and how your brand is positioning itself to attract those target customers. That positioning must be uniquely compelling to target customers, meaning it must be differentiated from your competitors. You can read more about brand strategies here.
- Brand messaging refers to the narrative and language a brand uses to communicate its value proposition to its target customers.
As noted above, a strong brand health tracker can help uncover ownable attributes that drive category behaviors. Once you’ve identified those attributes, the next step is to ensure your messaging and creative bring them to life in a way that resonates.
Maximizing Campaign Impact with Message, Creative, or Advertising Testing
With high-level brand insights in hand, it’s time to test.
Message testing involves gathering diagnostic feedback on various potential marketing messages to ascertain which message resonates most with consumers and is most motivating to them and why. This can help identify which messaging to move forward with, and how to optimize before bringing it to market.
Creative testing, or advertising testing, involves gathering feedback on creative assets—whether early-stage ad-like objects or fully developed executions—before they’re launched with consumers. Similar to message testing, each asset is evaluated with respect to driving key outcomes, like brand favorability or purchase intent.
Message and creative testing can be conducted quantitatively or qualitatively, depending on a client’s needs and budget. Often qualitative research is needed to understand what’s working and what’s not when it comes to a particular message or asset, while quantitative research can give statistical confidence in going with one option over another. At Campos, we also apply mixed-methods research to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.
How to Segment Your Audience for Better Brand Insights
Audience segmentation involves dividing your addressable market into smaller groups of consumers who share certain traits, such as motivations, behaviors, and demographics.
Campos uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify and understand key audience segments. This layered approach enhances targeting and engagement, helping brands connect meaningfully.
Once you identify and profile your target segments, your ongoing brand research and analysis can focus on those high-opportunity groups, allowing you to track brand awareness, perception, and equity where it counts most.
Want to Grow a Smarter Brand? Let Campos Be Your Guide
Knowing your brand inside and out makes the difference between blending in and breaking through. At Campos, we offer a full suite of market research services designed to uncover the most important insights and turn them into strategies that drive growth. Whether you’re benchmarking your brand health, testing creative, or targeting high-value segments, we’re here to help you move forward with confidence.
Ready to learn more? Contact our team to start a conversation on your brand’s health.
