Guide

Brand awareness

Definition, importance, strategy examples, and how it works

Brand awareness refers to the level of familiarity consumers have with a particular brand. It is measured by how well consumers can recognize the brand’s logo, name, products, and other assets. An effective brand strategy defines a brand’s target audience, develops a unique selling proposition, and creates a consistent brand experience across touchpoints.

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What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness, or brand recognition, refers to a customer's level of familiarity with a product or service by name. It marks the beginning of a consumer’s interest in a product or service. Brand awareness is also the first step on a consumer's path to purchase, as well as the starting point of their relationship with a brand.

Ever wonder why you recognize, remember, and have an association with a company, even if you don’t use their products? It’s because they have strong brand awareness, which means consumers are familiar with, or aware of, their brands.

A business’s brand is much more than just a logo or a tagline. It’s a combination of what products they sell, how they tell their story, their aesthetic, the customer and brand experience they deliver, what the company stands for, and more.

For example, think about your best friend. The first time you met that person, they made an initial impression on you. Additional interactions with that person informed your feelings about them over time. And based on that, you’ve developed a sense of who they are and what they stand for. In your mind, your best friend has a brand. It’s formed through the combination of all your experiences with them.

A customer’s perception of a brand is based on a range of inputs over time. Companies build brands by delivering a consistent message and experience across touchpoints. That consistency—that repetition of messaging and experience—is fundamental to making your brand memorable, which is key to building brand awareness.

Why is building brand awareness important?

Brand awareness helps your brand become top of mind with potential customers when they begin to consider purchase decisions. After all, a strong brand is important, but to grow your business, you need consumers to know about it. Brand awareness is important because it helps foster trust and allows brands to tell their story and build equity with consumers.

According to a 2022 global survey from Statista, 5 out of 10 consumers said they would be willing to spend extra for a brand with an image that appealed to them. “In 2022, the aggregate value of the world’s 100 most valuable brands increased by over 22% and reached a record $8.7 trillion,” according to Statista. “By comparison, this figure stood at around $5 trillion just two years earlier.”

Brand awareness is also important because it helps develop a strong identity through which a company can share its values and mission. This type of connection is important to consumers. According to a 2022 Amazon Ads and Environics Research report, 79% of global consumers say they are more likely to purchase from brands whose values align with their own.

How does brand awareness work?

Brand awareness works to help familiarize customers with a brand or product through promotions, advertising, social media, and more. A successful brand awareness campaign will work to help differentiate a brand or product from others. Many brands may connect brand awareness with consideration: The more consumers who are aware of your brand or product, the more likely they may be to consider purchasing.

Though the purchase journey is not linear, the traditional marketing funnel still provides a useful way to visualize it and to demonstrate the importance of awareness.

Awareness is at the very top of the funnel, where there are consumers who may be interested in learning more about your products. Here, a brand that can grab customers’ attention with a positive experience will help raise awareness and possibly inspire them to seek more information.

When customers begin to seek information, they enter the next phase of the funnel: consideration, when they are considering making a purchase. Their intent to purchase has increased, based on the inspiration they’ve received at the awareness level. Those who are compelled further, through additional information, then enter the conversion phase, when they’ll look to make a purchase.

Throughout the process, your potential customers are narrowing down their options. Companies that already have brand awareness with customers are ahead of the curve, because they don’t have to explain who they are and what makes them different. Essentially, they’ve already introduced themselves, so they can focus on delivering more specific information that is relevant to a potential buyer’s purchase decision.

Let’s say you’ve just heard about a cutting-edge new television that piqued your interest. And let’s say that two companies are selling the same TV at a similar price—the first is a company you know nothing about, and the other is a company with strong brand awareness. Even if you’ve never purchased a product from the second company, its brand awareness is a strength that lends credibility to its product. And that’s why building brand awareness is so important.

Everyone’s attention is limited. With countless brands vying for the same consumers’ attention, it is useful to be the first brand they think of when considering a product in your category. Big brands know this, and that’s why we know them. It’s no coincidence that many consumers have existing associations between these brands and what they offer. And it’s no mistake that these well-known brands have long invested in increasing awareness.

How do companies increase brand awareness?

Companies can help increase brand awareness through promotions, social media, influencer programs, and, of course, brand advertising. Brands are also finding other creative ways to increase awareness through streaming, content marketing, immersive storytelling, interactive advertising, experiential advertising, and more. According to a 2022 Statista survey, the leading goal of content marketing worldwide is to “create brand awareness.”

For example, brands can use Sponsored Display video to make a product and brand story more memorable while customers are shopping or consuming the content they love. Advertisers who used video creative for Sponsored Display and selected the “optimize for conversion” bid optimization saw on average 86% of sales from new-to-brand shoppers, compared to 78% for those using image creative.1 Sponsored Brands can help brands get noticed with creative ads that showcase a brand or product in shopping results. Advertisers who used all Sponsored Brands ad formats saw, on average, 79% of their sales from new-to-brand customers.2

How do you measure brand awareness?

Amazon Ads offers several ways to measure brand awareness, such as new-to-brand metrics. Sponsored Brands offers unique reporting with new-to-brand metrics, which help you measure the total number of first-time customers or total first-time sales in the past 12 months.

Knowing that many non-Amazon channels play a role in the customer journey, you can gain visibility into how audiences discover your products with Amazon Attribution. The console helps you unify your advertising measurement, across search, social, video, display, and email. By understanding the impact of your digital advertising across touchpoints, you can better drive awareness and achieve your brand marketing goals.

No matter what your budget is, there are solutions that can help you that drive measurable outcomes.

Brand awareness metrics

There are a number of brand awareness metrics and KPIs that marketers use to measure consumers’ familiarity with a brand or product. These brand awareness metrics allow marketers to track and understand the effects of their marketing efforts and if their campaigns are helping consumers learn about their offerings, values, or brand story.

Impressions

In marketing, impressions is a simple metric used to indicate how many consumers see an advertisement or how many times an ad is shown.

Traffic or page views

When brands talk about “increasing traffic,” they refer to customers who take an action online to visit a product page or some other resource that exists on a brand’s site. More in-depth reporting—beyond page views—includes Store visitors, unique visitors, Store page views, and sales generated from your Store.

New-to-brand

New-to-brand metrics give visibility to advertisers to determine whether an ad-attributed purchase was made by an existing customer or a new buyer for the brand’s product on Amazon within a year.

Brand Lift studies

Amazon Brand Lift helps advertisers quantify how their Amazon Ads campaigns are driving marketing objectives such as awareness, purchase intent, and ad recall.

Marketing reach

Reach in marketing is the measurement of the size of the audience that has seen your ads or campaign content. Reach measures your actual audience, and marketing reach measures the potential customers a campaign could reach.

How do brands build brand awareness on Amazon?

Brands of all sizes have driven awareness and grown their businesses on Amazon by using a range of complementary brand-building solutions—whether they’re large companies, or first-time authors promoting a new self-published Kindle novel, and everyone in between.

To raise awareness and develop a deeper relationship with potential customers, Amazon Ads offers a range of relevant and effective solutions. Sponsored Brands, for example, helps brands engage shoppers as they browse and discover products on Amazon. You can create a custom headline to share your brand message and showcase products to customers when they’re looking to buy. If they click on the logo in your ad, they’re taken to a custom landing page or to a Store, where you can showcase your brand products further through a more immersive shopping experience. A self-service Store helps raise brand awareness at no additional cost, as do Posts and streaming with Amazon Live.

Brand awareness examples

Here are some examples of the creative and successful brand strategies that businesses have used to grow their brand awareness with consumers.

Case Study

In 2022, Loftie set out to build awareness of their mission and products to help customers sleep better with an improved tech/life balance. To achieve these goals, the small business launched a campaign that included Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and more Sponsored Display ads—especially near the holidays.

Loftie also focused on Sponsored Brands video, which they used to highlight the key benefits of their products for customers. With video ads, Loftie was able to communicate with customers how their alarm clock stands out from others, which helped increase consideration and allowed them to better stand out in their category. In 2022, Loftie’s Sponsored Products campaigns saw an average return on ad spend (ROAS) of $5.66 and an advertising cost of sale (ACOS) of 17.68%. Meanwhile the brand’s Sponsored Brands campaigns had a click-through rate of 1.06%, which put them in the 75th percentile for their category.3

Loftie table lamp and clock

Case Study

In 2022, Volkswagen wanted to find a creative car marketing campaign to inform consumers about their new ID.4 electric SUV. The Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab, Amazon Web Services, and Volkswagen developed the first ever Test Drive With Alexa, a program that allows customers in select regions to take Alexa-guided test-drives of Volkswagen’s ID.4 EV SUV.

After test-driving the car with Alexa, 28% of participants requested more information about the Volkswagen ID.4, and a majority requested a follow-up from a dealer.4 Brand measurement from the campaign showed a statistically significant lift in awareness among 18- to 34-year-olds.4

Volkswagen test drive with Alexa

Case Study

In 2022, KITKAT approached Amazon Ads looking to reach new adult Gen Z and millennial audiences in new ways. The team wanted to explore how they could position the heritage chocolate bar in the best way to appeal to this digitally savvy audience.

Amazon Ads and KITKAT identified Twitch premium video as the ideal solution to help the brand build awareness and affinity with the gaming community. The Twitch premium video ads enable brands to connect with Twitch’s hyper-engaged community by incorporating ads into live broadcasts across desktop, mobile, tablet, and connected TV devices.

The campaign was able to raise unaided brand awareness by 52%, which surpassed the average benchmark of unaided brand awareness across similar campaigns by 3x. Having seen the ad, audiences were also more than 2x more likely to associate KITKAT with gaming.5 Twitch viewers who watched the ad were also twice as likely to attribute the KITKAT message, “Even the biggest champ needs a break,” to the right brand, compared to the average benchmark across similar campaigns.

Kit Kat chocolate

If you have limited experience, contact us to request services managed by Amazon Ads. Budget minimums apply.

1 Amazon internal data, 2023
2 Amazon internal data, 2022
3 Advertiser-provided data, 2023
4 Advertiser-provided data, 2022
5 Twitch and Amazon Ads internal data, June 2022