Brand awareness has a branding problem

Saying "awareness" in the context of marketing and it apparently makes sense to people. Put the word “brand” in front of it and the whole thing seems to rapidly drift sideways.

Suddenly it's assumed we’re really just talking about logos, colours, fonts, and the fluffy stuff that for some reason isn't seen as being so commercially relevant. Something that likely requires an expensive agency who are "just a bunch of creatives locked in a room excitedly waving their hands around", followed up with an equally expensive piece of research designed to tell you whether anyone even recognises any of it.

Somewhere along the way, “brand” seems to have become disconnected from the success of the business. Perhaps the word has simply had terrible PR. Somewhere between brand guidelines, personal brands, and, well, Russell Brand, we managed to make a commercially important activity sound almost pointlessly decorative or deeply annoying.

Which is unfortunate, because brand awareness is much bigger than whether someone recognises your logo. It’s what comes packaged with that recognition.

Do they know what you do, who you are for, and what they can expect from you? Do they trust you? Do they feel like you understand their world? If a relevant problem appears six months from now, does your name come back into their head?

That is much closer to the territory I mean when I talk about brand awareness.

Take Comic Sans as an example - and okay yes, it's a font not a product per se, but stay with me. If you've been on this planet for a while, just by hearing those words I reckon there’s a decent chance a whole pile of associations just arrived in your head: The school newsletter... Eye-wateringly offensive PowerPoint... Early 2000s websites (shout out to GeoCities, you still hold a special place in my heart, ngl)... But when was the last time you saw a serious company proudly using Comic Sans as its main corporate typeface? Did one ever? Yet the name still carries an extraordinary amount of cultural baggage.

Clippy is another good example. He spent years appearing in Microsoft Office at precisely the moment nobody wanted him there. People hated him, and that eventually became part of the joke. Over time, the annoyance turned into nostalgia and then into something much more iconic. And even if you've missed the frankly marvellous Clippy Comeback Tour (featuring Sarah Young as Chief Groupie), anyone who used Microsoft Office at the time can still picture his "helpful" little self decades later.

That’s the interesting bit. Recognition is one part, sure, but so are memory, emotion, meaning, and expectation - a whole suitcase of mental associations that come along for the ride.

So I'm calling it now: Comic Sans is probably only one decent redemption arc away from becoming cool again. You read it here first, friends.

Brand awareness is more than brand recognition

Anyway, back to the issue in hand... One of the problems with how we talk about brand awareness is that we often reduce it to a fairly shallow question: have people heard of us? And whether they have (or indeed haven't), that tells you part of the picture, but it doesn’t tell you much about the quality of that awareness.

Someone might recognise your company name and still have no damn clue what you do. They might understand perfectly well what you do and still feel that it has nothing to do with them. They might even know your offer, your market, and your point of view, and have an immediate sense that these are people who understand the problem they’re trying to solve.

Those are all very different outcomes.

Good brand awareness creates connection. Someone sees enough of you over time to understand where you fit, what you care about, and whether you feel relevant to them. Your language makes sense, your point of view feels familiar, and they start to build a sense of what working with you might be like before they’ve ever spoken to you.

And ultimately, it's emotional, which I know is where some people start to get twitchy about the whole subject.

Arguably nobody really needs to form a deep spiritual bond with their endpoint security provider, but people are still people when they’re buying for work purposes. They notice behaviours, form associations, develop preferences, and remember how companies make them feel.

Without wanting to sound too AI-esque with the short sentence malarkey:

Words matter. Visuals matter. Experiences matter. Identity matters.

Brand starts with identity

Brand is also where smaller companies can feel particularly disconnected - maybe because “brand” has the ringing of "expensive". It sounds like something you commission once you’ve raised enough money, followed by several weeks of workshops, excited hand waving, a deck the size of a small novella, and rules about exactly how much empty space the logo needs to breathe.

And yep, you can absolutely spend a fortune on brand, and you can also spend a fortune trying to measure it. But you really don’t have to - some of the most important brand work can happen in a room with the people building the company. And it should start with identity.

Figuring out the answers to these questions can be done without spending a <pick your currency of choice> - beyond the time it takes you to answer (and ideally agree):

• Who are we?
• Who are we building for?
• What do we want to be known for?
• What do we believe about the market we’re operating in?
• How do we want people to feel when they encounter us?

When you get into it, answering is somewhat harder than just picking a colour palette, but it costs considerably less than rolling in a major branding agency - who, btw, will ask you those questions anyway...

Of course, the visual identity piece is absolutely part of the whole brand gubbins - colours, typography, photography, design, and all the other visible bits help create recognition and communicate personality. But they work best when they are expressing something underneath rather than trying to invent it. Just like the foundations of a building, what's underneath is what keeps everything else from falling over.

Identity is who you are as a company, who you serve, why you exist, how you behave, and how you present that to the outside world. And actually once you look at brand in that way, it becomes difficult to keep it boxed inside the marketing cupboard.

And brand awareness is what survives that journey into somebody else’s head.

Your product contributes to it, and ideally reflects it. Sales conversations and actions contribute to it. Customer support, leadership behaviour, hiring, partnerships, events, and the way people from the company show up in public all contribute too. Even pricing sits in there somewhere as well. If everything about the way you present yourself communicates a certain level of expertise and quality, people arrive with some context for why you might cost more.

The market is always learning who you are

Every interaction teaches and enforces the beliefs people hold about you, your company, and your products.

And when those interactions reinforce each other rather than feeling like they came from five different companies wearing the same logo, something wonderful happens. This is where consistency comes into play, and again I don’t just mean making sure everyone uses the approved shade of purple.

People rarely see something once and remember it forever. Memory builds through repetition. Messaging can evolve, campaigns can change, and individual people can still sound like themselves, but there still needs to be a recognisable identity underneath it all.

Relevant difference is key here too, and I'll explain why relevant is, well, relevant. “Be different” is lazy, and in some cases, toxic advice. Different isn't just about standing out from a crowd - it can be irritating, confusing, or completely detached from what your audience cares about.

Memorable ≠ good, different also ≠ good

A couple of years back, an AI company ran a deliberately aggressive campaign around replacing human employees. It was very noticeable, definitely 'different', and very memorable. Their same messaging was blasted everywhere at a conference I attended this year, including all over a booth where their team had to stand there smiling away whilst no doubt wondering where they ranked on the replaceable list,

So memorable, yes. Different, yes. But how it made me feel about the company is where it falls down faster than enterprise-level, weapons-grade, AI-powered gravity on steroids. Personally, I would not buy ANYTHING from them if they were the last option on earth. Well done on creating awareness, I guess. But zero points for creating an emotional association strong enough to rule themselves out for me before they ever got close to a sales conversation. Ergo, memorability alone clearly isn’t enough.

The more useful brand question to think about is this: What do you want people to remember about you when your name comes up? And this is also where the commercial impact starts to become more obvious.

A sales message from a company you have never heard of has extra work to do before it can get anywhere near the actual offer. At an event, people are more likely to walk over to a booth when the name already means something to them. Partnerships are easier when there is already some understanding of where you fit. Inbound has a better chance of happening because people know enough about you to seek you out.

A lack of brand awareness creates friction everywhere. Every interaction starts further back because somebody has to establish who you are before they can move on to why anyone should care. You’re constantly pushing the proverbial boulder uphill, in a heatwave, and also somebody has released a bunch of wasps. That friction costs money too, which is why I always find it slightly odd when brand awareness is treated as the indulgent option.

There’s a simple exercise I like here. Think of a company you know reasonably well and don’t look at its website. Just notice what comes into your head when you hear the name. What does it do? Who is it for? What is it good at? What kind of experience do you expect? Would you trust it, recommend it, or want to work with it? Some of those answers will have come from marketing. Plenty of them won’t. And that collection of associations is much closer to what brand awareness really is.

What do people actually remember about you?

So the next time someone asks how strong your brand awareness is, I wouldn’t start with whether people recognise the logo. I’d ask them what turns up in their head when they hear your organisation's name.

If the answer is “not much”, changing the hex code probably isn’t the brand action you need to take next...