Run brand awareness surveys

Business Benefits

Create more effective marketing campaigns.


Make a list of brand recall questions to discover whether your target audience can remember your brand without any prompting.

Many marketers make the mistake of using leading questions to prompt recall, thus leading to results that don’t reveal the actual strength of their brand. Example questions include:

  • How familiar are you with {product}?
  • When you think of {product type}, what brands come to mind? Select all that apply.
  • Can you think of when you most recently used {product}?

For familiarity questions, use a multiple-choice answer format with choices like very familiar, familiar, somewhat familiar, and not very familiar. For questions that simply ask about brands that survey participants can think of, use an open-ended answer format such as blank rows that can be filled in.

Create a list of brand awareness questions to discover how well your brand stands out amongst other brands in your industry or product field.

Brand recognition is especially helpful if you’re launching a new brand or product, or if you’re entering a new market. It’s also helpful to know where people are more likely to gravitate to a brand with which they’re well acquainted. Example questions include:

  • Which of the following brands of [product type or industry] have you heard of before?
  • Which of the following brands of [product type or industry] have you used before?
  • Which of the following brands of [product type or industry] have you most recently used?
  • Have you heard of [brand name]?
  • How familiar are you with [brand name]?

Ask about the positive and negative attributes of your brand.

When you ask your target audience about their familiarity with your brand, you also want to know how they perceive it. After all, if they are familiar with your brand for negative reasons, you’ll want to adjust your messaging accordingly. Example questions include:

  • Which of the following attributes would you attribute to {product or brand}?
  • Which of the following attributes would you attribute to {top competing product or top competing brand}?
  • How well do you trust the [main positive attribute you want] of {your product or your brand}?

Example questions should be aligned with your specific product or brand values. For example, if you sell a vegan protein drink, you may want to include options such as:

  • High protein
  • Plant-based
  • Organic
  • Low fat

Choose a survey platform like Constant Contact, Qualtrics Core XM, SurveySparrow, or SurveyMonkey that aligns with your budget, technical skills, and analytical capacity

Many platforms are free. Others charge per survey taker or for the number of surveys you want to run.

Some survey platforms allow you to do advanced coding, so your survey provides a branded experience. Others are more basic and use a drag-and-drop interface.

Some platforms will provide an in-depth breakdown of answers and give you clear insights into your results. Others will simply give you a raw data dump.

To encourage survey completion, tell participants how much time the survey will take, offer an incentive, show progress through the survey, make questions clear and easy to read, and add some novelty to answer formats.

The more participants successfully complete your survey, the better your insights. Incentives can be emotional in nature, such as telling participants how they will make a difference in the industry or how they will shape future product development, or more tangible, such as entering the survey taker into a monthly drawing for a prize.

Don’t make every question a multiple-choice or open-ended option. Depending on the capabilities of the survey platform you’re using, try making your survey more interactive. Use sliding percentage bars or add emojis or icons to indicate an answer.

Send your brand awareness survey to people who will help you gain the insights you need.

  • Send it to everyone on your website, customer list, or email list if you want a 360-degree perspective of your brand.
  • Send it to non-customers. For example, you can target paid ads at people who have never purchased from you before. This gives you insight into how your marketing can be improved to reach these individuals.
  • Send it to different segments of the customer journey. For example, you may send your survey to new customers, long-term customers, and former customers who aren’t repeated buyers. This gives you insight into how each stage of the customer journey is affected positively or negatively by your brand.

Review answers to your closed-ended questions to identify winning trends in brand recall and awareness. Use your survey platform’s cross-tabulation features to see if the answers change based on demographics, like new versus returning customers.

Distribute qualitative (open-ended) questions to team members to review and identify areas of strength and weakness in your brand or brand awareness campaigns.

If this is the first time you’re conducting a brand awareness survey, this survey will act as a benchmark. However, if it’s a recurring survey, compare the results with that of previous surveys to see if brand awareness has improved or deteriorated.

Map the trends and answers you found to your customer journey.

For example, if brand attributes are perceived as very positive among regular customers but as very negative among potential customers, it’s clear that your brand messaging needs refinement.

You may even choose to return to certain subsets of your survey takers, whose results are very encouraging or very alarming, to gain more insights.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:25:46Z