Measure brand familiarity

Business Benefits

Understand your position in your market.


Utilize brand awareness surveys to determine whether your brand tends to yield top of mind (TOM), spontaneous, or prompted awareness among consumers.

Here is the breakdown of consumer awareness types:

  • Top of mind or TOM awareness is attributed to when a brand is the first to come to a consumer’s mind for a given product or industry.
  • If your brand does come to their mind but not first, then it’s considered to be spontaneous awareness.
  • Prompted awareness is when a consumer verifies their awareness of your brand from a list of others.

Produce further surveys with an emphasis on buyer scenarios to gauge the salience of your brand and understand how to formulate cues that serve to reveal consumer opinion.

Similar to TOM awareness, brand salience is a familiarity metric that involves the use of opinionated buyer scenario cues to see if your brand is prompted by those surveyed. Some examples of cues aimed at testing brand salience:

  • This brand is always reliable.
  • I find this brand affordable.
  • I’m likely to recommend this to my friends.

Strengthen the online presence in your website and social media to maximize your brand salience and chances of attaining TOM awareness

Make sure your website is sleek and user friendly. It should be easy to navigate and updated regularly.

Interact and respond to users on social media. Brands like Wendy’s, MoonPie, and JetBlue Airways have found success through the personable and unique way they convey themselves on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. The more online mentions, engagement, respect, and overall presence you have, the further salient your brand becomes.

Evaluate how your brand distinguishes itself from competition and how to maintain that identity.

Elements such as these are important to keep in mind for keeping your brand distinct:

Brand or product name:

  • Does it roll off the tongue?
  • Does it sound like your competitors or any other prominent brand/product?
  • Are you represented by a memorable font? Is that font consistent amongst your various platforms and services?

Visual identity:

  • Do you have a unique logo?
  • Is it too detailed or too minimal? Are your color choices bold or reserved?
  • Do you have consistent, original, and relevant typography across all mediums?

Voice and tone:

  • Messaging and response framework.
  • Taglines.

Product packaging.

Compare your findings with your sales data, along with gauging and fostering consumer advocacy.

Check that your sales are backing up the results of your survey. TOM awareness and brand salience can only be reflected through the success of your brand, so taking the steps to maximize those items will mean you ideally see an increase in sales.

From your sales data, promote advocacy from your consumers. Consumer advocacy is when a consumer recommends a brand or product to someone else, and it can be measured through single question surveys that generate a Net Promoter Score, which both maps out consumer advocacy and predicts brand growth. If you take notes from brands that both generate your own TOM awareness and that you would advocate for, you should be able to incorporate elements from them into your own strategy.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:20:23Z