12.07.2020
Brand Awareness Examples to Get Inspired From
Brand Awareness Examples to Get Inspired From

These days, the barrier of entry to launching a business is lower than ever before. This is amazing, and opens the market up to tons of interesting products—however, it has also made even niche industries a little more crowded than they were before.

One of the biggest ways to launch your brand above others and build that fanatical following that you’re looking for is to practice and promote brand awareness. But how exactly do you do that?

Good news – there are some choice brand awareness examples you can use as references or become inspired by, and when it comes to implementing those strategies, we at Herman-Scheer are here to help.

What is Brand Awareness?

Simply put, brand awareness is both:

  • A measure of how aware your general audience or target customer base is of your brand/offerings

  • A type of marketing focus designed to increase the above metric

In other words, higher brand awareness means that your brand or company is more well-known to the people you want to sell to. This increases your potential customer base and makes you a more likely choice compared to your direct competitors, as well as contributing to a more timeless, well-known brand.

Why Focus On Brand Awareness?

You have to make sure your brand stands out and that your target consumers are aware of your brand while simultaneously making it harder for your competitors to be noticed.  

Even companies as large as Coca-Cola and Ford prioritize brand awareness because:

  • Brand awareness helps foster trust between you and your consumers. Think about it – when you go to the store looking for new cereal, do you go with the brand that you already know or something completely unknown? Most people opt for the former.

  • Brand awareness can also create positive associations. Consider the Band-Aid. While it’s just one type of adhesive bandage, it's practically the go-to term for its entire product category. Similarly, "Coke" is a stand-in for any kind of soda drink in many places, even though it’s just one type and flavor.

  • Brand equity is strongly connected to brand awareness. Brand equity is essentially the value your brand has based on customer experiences or reputation. The more people are aware of your brand, the more equity your brand has, on average.  

  • As touched on above, it’s harder to regain brand awareness once you lose it. That’s why even big companies continue to prioritize brand awareness since it’s cheaper (in terms of advertising money and effort) to keep people aware of their products than it is to entice them again. That’s why, here at Herman-Scheer, we focus on creating timeless brands with fanatical followings—this will keep you relevant for years to come.

Inspiring Brand Awareness Examples

Need some ideas? The good news is that there are plenty of excellent brand awareness marketing tactics you can start developing right now. In fact, the best way to start getting brand awareness is to meet your customers where they already are spending their time. These days, that’s largely online on social media platforms and through creative outlets like podcasts. Let’s break down several of the best one by one.

Contests

Large brands love to set up contests, as it seems to stir something in all of us that grabs our attention and makes us want to participate. Contests can be as simple or complex as you like, though simpler contests are usually better since more people are able to participate with a minimum of effort.

Still, even if the contest only requires that someone draw a ticket and check your website to see if they won a prize, it ends up being free advertising since people will more than likely stop by your site to see if they got something for their trouble.

The more contests you run, the more engagement you’ll drive between your brand and potential consumers. Even if most of the people who participate in the contest don’t win, they'll have a much higher chance of remembering your brand the next time it's relevant to their needs.

Emails: Getting In Touch With Clients

There’s something old-fashioned and charming about flyers. Think of them as love letters to your consumers based on where you put them and what they contain. That said, they are often a less-effective cheap method of getting word out, not to mention that paper flyers are inherently wasteful. 

Digital fliers – essentially emails – are more effective, because you’re getting the word out on a digital platform that your customers are already using. If you can tailor your email strategy through the use of tools like MailChimp, making it match up with your brand, you can garner attention and awareness this way.  

Thought Leadership Campaigns, Especially With Industry Experts

This form of content marketing bears some similarities to blogging campaigns, but notably, the information and expertise come from inside the existing community. It’s a way to address the big questions of your industry by utilizing the experts that you already have, providing answers to the questions that the wider marker is asking. 

This boosts your brand’s coverage and presence across the Internet: by far the biggest and best advertising platform ever created. 

Take Bobbie, a baby formula company created by expert food scientists and pediatricians—who also happen to be parents. They know everything that there is to know about the industry, both from a medical perspective and a parenting one, and they are using that to leverage themselves into a position of leadership. 

Of course, figuring out all that thought leadership entails can be tricky. Lots of businesses choose marketing firms like us to help them out to great effect.

Brand Collaborations

It’s often a smart idea to look into positive collaborations between your brand and another. Complementary partnerships are great for business since, when done right, they can result in traffic increases for both your brand and whatever you decide to partner with.

For example, many tourism services partner with airline services since the two industries are inherently connected. They advertise for one another all the time and refer new consumers to one another in order to boost shared business.

A great real-life example of this comes with Pottery Barn and Sherwin-Williams. Pottery Brand’s brand is focused on style and exceptional quality, while Sherwin Williams is all about innovation. Not only are these two brands similar enough that customers looking for items at one will be inclined to purchase from another, but aligning the brands in this way allows for brand positioning between the two—now, Sherwin Williams is tied to exceptional quality, while Pottery Barn can move out of the shadow of tradition and into innovation.

Leverage Your Online Opportunities

Lastly, take heavy advantage of social media and other platforms that consumers are flocking to, like podcasts. Brand-related hashtags are not only common practice, but it’s also necessary to drive up conversation on Twitter and other social media platforms.

Along the same lines, you can try to enlist influencers and other social media personalities to promote your brand and net you some of their followers or fans. However, be sure to choose your partnerships carefully, as certain personalities may be incompatible with your brand for one reason or another. 

Podcasts are also growing in popularity these days—making an appearance on a podcast or garnering a mention on a popular one is a great way to raise brand awareness without outwardly seeming to market yourself. You can use these to build trust, both in your product and in your message—it leads to a more authentic relationship with your customer. 

Above All, Focus On Your Brand

When it comes to increasing your brand awareness, the most important part is, of course, the brand itself. When you’re crafting and refining your brand, make sure that you’re not focusing too much on the strategies above. These are great and certainly have their place when it comes to marketing campaigns, but without a strong identity that consumers actually believe in, they won’t do much for you. 

Branding is about philosophy. Creating a set of beliefs that your customers subscribe to. Following through with those beliefs in each point of your business strategy. Without all this, brand awareness strategies won’t be as useful as you’d like. 

Summary

In the end, the above brand awareness examples are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the effort you should expend on this topic. Brand awareness is super important both for short-term sales and long-term success for your brand. That said, your focus on brand awareness should not come at the expense of your brand equity. The wrong collaboration, over-using hashtags, or putting out content that is irrelevant or not suited to your brand will actually be damaging to your brand overall. You have to find the right balance. 

A branding and marketing team like the one here at Herman-Scheer is the perfect organization to contact and start working on a new brand awareness push. Be sure to inquire soon – we can help make your brand’s awareness skyrocket through the careful application of smart branding and top-tier marketing.

Sources

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brandawareness.asp

https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/06/11/how-to-build-trust-with-your-customers/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/target-customer