Raising Brand Awareness Through Internet Marketing Tools
Brand awareness is the first stage in a company's branding strategy. Marketers use promotion within the marketing mix to let consumers know about the brand so that consumers understand what the brand stands for.
This scholarly article discusses brand awareness in internet marketing. Note that it was written with a focus on Lithuania, but internet and social media marketing are currently very common and effective everywhere.
The Concept of Raising Brand Awareness
Hoffman, Fodor, (2010) stated that traditionally brand awareness is measured through tracking studies and surveys. Online, however, marketers have a number of ways to track brand awareness. In the social media environment, the company gains increased
exposure to its brand, often in highly relevant contexts every time a person uses an application created by or about the company.
According to Keller (2009), the concept of brand equity and the important intangible value that brands bring to organizations has been the most popular and potentially important marketing topic, emerging in recent years.
Homburg, Klarmannn, and Schmitt (2010) argue that brand awareness informs us about this product. Branding campaigns have a unique goal to increase the value of the product, service or other matter, advertising awareness and visibility.
Pikturnienė (2009) admits that brand awareness (memory, vision, decision-making environment) is a necessary condition for selection.
Černikovaite (2011) argues that brand awareness can be a prerequisite to buy the product. The high quality of the goods or services encourage users to buy and produce means an additional profit. Brand associations are typical consumer attitudes to brand,
the company delivers their advertising. Such associations can enrich the brand by new features, perceived by the creation of added value, providing consumers with a positive impact on safety or exclusivity, increasing the value of the brand.
Urbanskienė et al (2006) asserts that brand awareness indicates whether this brand raises the consumer's mind and his thought of a certain category of goods and whether it happens quickly. This is one of the main dimensions of the value of the brand.
Incidentally, it is important that brand evaluation of the individual user's position is useless, if the user does not know the whole analyzed brand.
Thus, new original target of the brand is well known, but it maintains a high level of awareness on the market. It also states that the user's aspect on the brand's image can be analyzed through associations, arising when the user analyzes the brand in
mind. Association assessments may be: brand association prototypes (features, benefits, common position of brand terms); loyalty, strength, and uniqueness. Apart from that, the brand must not be limited to the superposition that brand name's recognition
is very important and this causes the association with trademark, when the user attempts to grasp it.
Probably the most important part of the company's strategic plan is to attract new customers and keep them loyal to the business. Loyal customers increase the company's turnover; the increase of company's awareness is a great tool to increase customer's loyalty. Raising awareness among young people is particularly important for every company for successful expansion of their business in the future, as ideally these new clients grow into long time loyal customers. Without that pipeline, the result may be a decline in customer volume.
Every day a variety of messages come to us; various manufacturers want to tell us about their products or services. Their main goal is to acquire the advertised product or service, and also increase the company's visibility. Hsiao (2011) mentions several
authors' opinions: "this is the buyer's ability to recognize and distinguish the brand so that he immediately understands the goods category owned by the trademark. For example, if someone mentioned the well-known theater name, most people immediately
recognize it, and think it is the cinema".
Table 1: Concept brand awareness
| Author | Concept |
|---|---|
| Somayeh Shojaee and Azreen bin Azman (2013) | Brand awareness could be raised through marketing communication channels, which notify, remind, and convince customers about their brands, products or services. |
| Kelly (2015) |
Brand awareness is one of the most commonly cited goals of marketers today. |
| Arora and Sharma (2013) |
There are three strategic roles that help to build the brand. Marketers must use social media to serve their brand building objectives. It can help the brand to:
|
| Vukasovič (2013) |
Brand awareness is created through advertising, promotion, selling, public relations, and direct marketing. The company needs to communicate the values of the brand and then reinforce brand associations to start the wheel of usage and experience, and keep it turning. Through the combination of the stimulus of consistent communications and satisfactory usage and experience, brand awareness, confidence and brand equity are built. |
| Neti (2011) | Benefits of social media include: brand reach and awareness, consumer interactions through transactions, referrals and reputation management. |
| Chi, Yeh, Chien, Yang (2009) | A product with higher brand awareness will have higher market share and better quality evaluation. In addition, while consumers select a product, they care about perceived quality and brand awareness. |
| Aaker (1996) |
Brand awareness means the ability of a consumer to recognize and recall a brand in different situations. |
| Hoeffler and Keller (2002) | Brand awareness can be expressed in both depth and width. Depth means how to make consumers recall or identify a brand easily, and width means when consumers purchase a product, a brand name will come to their mind at once. If a product owns brand depth and brand width at the same time, consumers will think of a specific brand when they want to buy a product. |
| Percy and Rossiter (1992) | Brand awareness can help consumers to recognize a brand from a product category and make purchase decisions. |
| Ghodeswar (2008) | Different sources and levels of knowledge such as awareness, attributes, benefits, images, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and experiences get linked to a brand and its understanding by the consumer. |
| Hong-Youl, (2004); Aperia and Back (2004) |
Brand awareness can also occur without any actual involvement or relationship, for example people might recognize a brand and spread word of mouth (WOM) or have an opinion about it. |
| Sarangan, Ragel, (2014) |
Building strong brand awareness requires creating a brand that consumers are sufficiently aware of it. This involves designing of marketing messages and supporting marketing programs that capitalize on a well-convinced brand positioning. Marketing messages can be designed and delivered through both traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers and on-line media such as internet and social media. Marketers have found that interactive and targeted marketing are the keys to success and that traditional advertising is essentially a waste of money. |
| Zailskaite-Jakste, Kuvykaite (2013) |
In social media brand becomes dependent on the wish and will of a consumer. Consumers themselves decide how to interpret a brand, i.e. shared creativity between a brand and consumers. Companies seeking to expand brand awareness must learn to communicate in such a way when a message would spread among consumers like a virus. Word-of-mouth communication or viral marketing when used together with other marketing communications means can increase brand equity. Therefore companies have to prepare for the communication with consumers. |
| Karam, Saydam (2015) |
Brand awareness has turned into an important variable that impacts customer's perceptions of a brand. Achievement in brand management arises from understanding and overseeing brand image and loyalty correctly to create strong characteristics
that will impact consumers when making decisions.
|
Brand awareness can be divided into two main parts:
- Brand's recognition. People have heard or seen the brand, but their consciousness can be completely "locked", meaning that they are about this brand and will remember it only in the case if someone mentions it.
- Well-known trademarks. These are the brands that most people remember. Most often these are the trademarks of the services that people use most often.
Koniewski (2011) asserts that in total there are five levels of brand awareness: - Company's or brand's rejection and negative
associations. If somebody associates the company or brand with something negative, especially if they avoid the company's products or services provided. This can happen for the following reasons, such as: negative customer's complaints, product
defects, and other causes that may impair public opinion about the company or brand.
- Company's reputation. People were thinking about the company, allowing the decision, if they have not heard about your company, or know what it provides. In order to avoid this, it should make the brand much easier to remember,
and associate it with something uniquely different from the others.
- Company's recognition. After reaching this level, the customer immediately recognizes the name of the company and knows what it is performing. This allows increasing the company's turnover, because people usually choose the company that
they know and have heard about, rather than any other about which they have heard for the first time.
- Priority. Potential customers have two choices between two different companies and they can choose where to set up their business. This usually happens due to differentiation. Consumers know which the company is doing in the other
way and best meets the needs of the users, the quality of services and communication.
- Loyalty. Users regularly choose your company, even if they occasionally suffer from poor service quality, or if a new product with much higher quality and more attractive price entered the market. In order to win the loyalty of
users, you need to give them a product that is clearly and strongly differentiated to customers. Visitors need to provide the highest service and its quality that they will not find anywhere else. And finally, the companies have constantly grown together with the customers and adapt to their constantly changing needs.