Brand Salience, Brand Availability and Other Metrics
This article is the second part in a series where we examine the best way to drive brand growth and the market research approaches needed to support it.
If you missed the first part in this series, you will find it here.
In the first part of our series, we established that brand salience is essential for brand growth. So, what exactly is brand salience?
Brand salience and brand awareness are often confused. The difference between brand salience and brand awareness are important. Awareness records brands that come to mind when asked to recall brands in a given category. It is not rooted in the moment of purchase and may well be a more logical and less-emotional metric. To grow your brand, you need to make your brand “more famous”, not just make more people aware of it.
And this is different to brand loyalty. We know that most customers are not 100% loyal to a single brand, especially in frequently purchased or prescribed categories. In fact, most loyal customers are very promiscuous, in that they also purchase rival brands based on availability; for example, the majority of Pepsi drinkers also buy Coke from time to time. Equally, trying to increase the loyalty of a buyer may not result in increased purchasing behaviour – they may become more loyal but buy the same amount as they did previously.
And what about brand commitment? Byron Sharp’s view is that purchasing is habitual rather than based on any commitment to a given brand. We are creatures of habit, not commitment.
Sharp argues that brand’s grow by focusing on measures to increase customer acquisition. In this way, you not only attract new users to your brand, but also convert occasional users to frequent users. Above all, Sharp argues that for brands to grow and increase brand equity they need to have:
Brand Salience, i.e. clear and distinctive branding using sensory cues (colours, logo, design…) that are easy to remember and recall at the point of purchase.
Brand Availability, i.e. maximised distribution and physical availability
In the third part of this series of articles, we will explore the role that digital marketing plays in increasing brand salience.