Advertising Awareness - Definition, Importance, Types & Example

Published in Marketing and Strategy Terms by MBA Skool Team

What is Advertising Awareness?

Advertising awareness is a marketing strategy designed in a way to enhance the consumers’ awareness with what the company is offering in a short term (products) and long term (message). Advertising awareness can be formulated according to the goals and objectives of the company in the image the company seeks to form in the minds of the consumers. This also determines the capital expenditure on advertisement. Advertising awareness is generally not done with the purpose of profit making in the short term. Rather, it aims at increasing the brand recognition.

In layman terms, advertising awareness is the amount of attention a brand gets through its advertisements. It is also responsible for how much customers recall a brand. This may or may not be used by a brand in its initial days in the market.

Advertising Awareness


Importance of Advertising awareness

1. Increasing Brand Awareness

An advertising awareness-based strategy leads to increasing brand awareness and then eventually brand recall as well. This is basically the process where customers can recall your advertisements and associate with your brand and the particular products that you offer with some aspect of their lives. During the early stages of the business the main aim is to increase brand awareness, to do successful market entry and gain consumer attention.

2. Conveying Strong Messages

It is very important that consumers don’t misunderstand your messages or get confused. The more confused or unsure they are about your message and product offerings, greater are the chances of your target market getting falsified. Therefore, conveying a strong and crystal clear message through your advertising campaigns makes your product messages easily understandable and memorable. They relate better and more with your brand and makes it easier for consumers to recognize and differentiate your products from your competitor’s products.

3. Increasing Market Share

Advertising awareness aims to increase a company’s market share by increasing consumer knowledge of their products and services. The company’s ad campaigns aim to overcome the voices of your competitors. Must haves like memorability and simplicity, make consumers relate and recognize your products easily, turning them into loyal customers.

Types of Advertising Awareness

It can be of four types such as:

1. Top of the Mind Choice: The first brand/ advertisement that comes to a person’s mind when a product category is mentioned is the TOMA or top of mind awareness. For example, when asked about cell phones, most people say Apple or Samsung. This constitutes top of the mind awareness

2. Unaided awareness: The brands that people mention without any help when a product category is mentioned comes under unaided awareness. For example, if people mention Samsung right after Apple, then Samsung comes under the unaided awareness group

3. Aided awareness: When the interviewer gives a clue in the form of brand description or an ad of the brand and people are able to mention it, it comes under the aided awareness category

4. Not aware: When people are not able to recall the ad even after being provided clues and descriptions, the consumer is said to be unaware of the brand, its product, or its advertisement.


Formula and working of Advertising Awareness

The formula states that the Advertising awareness measure was built on two parameters; brand salience (how prominent the brand is in someone’s mind) and the difficulty of retrieving the brand in their mind Eg: a brand’s logo is more feasible to bring out brand recognition rather than using a category to bring out brand recall, But the amount of salience for that brand should remain the same regardless of the question. Thus, the salience of the brand is constant and only the difficulty of the awareness measure changes.

Advertising Awareness = Frequency x Impact

The general idea that all awareness is built salience and the cognitive difficulty of retrieving a specific memory based on the cue given to someone is stated around the formula.


Example of Advertising Awareness

Some examples of advertising awareness are as follows. Companies like Johnson and John, Nike, etc., advertise in ways that most people can identify with these brands and feel their unique atmospheres from merely catching a quick glance at their logo or a snippet of their jingle. This is an example of these big established brands. From using eye catching visuals, to investing hugely in advertising in the right places, and developing distinct content helps them build brand. Consistency is the key so that you can strengthen your image in the eyes of your audience with every encounter, be it with your logo or an advertisement.

Hence, this concludes the definition of Advertising Awareness along with its overview.

This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.

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