Understanding Brand Recall and How It Boosts Product Selling
Brands are everywhere in the world around us, from the food we eat to the media we consume. Getting people to notice your brand is only the first step in a sea of logos, slogans, and corporate imagery.
Enduring business success comes from achieving staying power in the minds of consumers. That’s what separates the giants from the little leagues. With this in mind, let’s look at how brand recall can boost your product-selling potential.
What Is Brand Recall?
Creating brand recall is an essential aspect of your brand awareness strategy. After all, what is demand generation worth if you can’t sustain it?
Brand recall is when somebody thinks of your brand or its specific products, either independently or in response to a prompt. It’s pretty simple. The more prone somebody is to remember your brand, the more likely they are to patronize it if they experience a relevant need.
There are many instances where brand recall can occur, but it generally falls into one of two categories: aided or unaided. The most effective brand elements are those that can achieve both.
Aided Brand Recall
Aided brand recall is when you think of a brand in response to a prompt. This might be an ad online, a slogan on a billboard, or even a passerby humming a familiar tune. For example, someone hums the McDonald’s jingle, which makes you remember the “I’m lovin’ it” slogan from their ad campaigns.
This is the most basic form of brand recall because it relies on direct prompting to work. However, that doesn’t make it easy. Aided recall should still be quick, if not instant. Your brand materials have to be distinctive, yet tonally consistent with the standards of your target market. Becoming iconic is a bit of a balancing act.
Unaided Brand Recall
Unaided brand recall is the sign you’ve truly become a household name. It’s when somebody recalls your brand without further awareness efforts on your part.
Someone in the market for a nice watch might immediately think of a Rolex. If you’re hungry and don’t want to cook, you might default to your preferred food delivery service like Just Eat or Grubhub. Generating unaided recall is about combining iconic branding with high-quality service.
How Brand Recall Benefits Your Business
Recall plays an important role in sustaining strong brand awareness. That much is clear based on what it is and how it works. That said, when done right, how does it impact your business?
Let’s look at the main benefits of implementing brand recall strategies.
Increased Sales Revenue and Market Share
The brand recall doesn’t directly affect the likelihood of conversion, but it does increase the potential for sales. Greater customer awareness means more people will at least consider your business to fulfill their needs.
The truly massive brands achieve their huge market shares by becoming the most ubiquitous examples of their types. For instance, when people say “Google” in place of “search”, or immediately think of eBay when they want to sell something.
McDonald’s is, once again, a great example. It’s not exactly high-quality stuff, and yet it’s among the most successful fast-food chains in the world with the highest US brand awareness in 2023. This is due to years of successful branded marketing, from their iconic yellow-on-red color scheme to their ever-popular Happy Meal toys.
Brand Equity and Customer Loyalty
Brand equity is your brand’s value based on customer perceptions of quality and trustworthiness. In other words, it’s a measure of how much consumer goodwill you’ve generated through branded marketing and effective customer service.
Brand equity is essential for retaining customer loyalty. It takes time to build, but achieving consumer recall can help to get you there. However, it can also be erased in an instant, which is why you need brand health monitoring strategies. Understanding the current health of your brand helps to establish your marketing priorities, like which aspects of your business to promote.
Distinction and Competitiveness
People experience a barrage of branded media every day. It takes being memorable to achieve consistent success. Brand recall is what separates major brands from a sea of generic options. It’s why businesses put so much care into things like logos and color schemes.
The more time people spend thinking about your brand, the less they’re thinking of your competitors. Recall helps to strengthen your brand’s marketing niche, ensuring that you appeal to your target B2B or consumer demographics.
Measuring Brand Recall
Whether you’re using brand recall for consumer or B2B lead generation, you still need cold, hard data. Here are some of the most useful sources and metrics for determining the effectiveness of your recall initiatives.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is based on the question of whether someone would recommend your company, product, or service to someone else. Participants rate their likelihood from 0 (would not recommend) to 10 (would recommend). They’re then grouped into three categories:
- Promotors: People who would enthusiastically promote your brand, meaning they’re more likely to recall it (9-10 points).
- Passives: Those who do not feel strongly about your brand (7-8 points).
- Detractors: People with a negative impression of your brand. If they do recall it, this may be for the wrong reasons (6 or less).
You work out your score as an overall percentage, with promoters being one point, passives being zero, and detractors being minus one. Let’s say you had 70 of 100 promoters, 30 passives, and 20 detractors, your NPS would be 50%.
Customer Surveys and Interviews
Besides NPS, there are many survey tools and question formats you can use to learn about brand awareness and customer perceptions. You can interview people in the street, survey them through email marketing, or even collect insights during the sales process itself.
One useful technique is to conduct an awareness survey away from your business premises. You start by asking participants which brands they recognize out of you and a selection of competitors. Then, drill down by asking which brands they prefer and why.
SEO Data and Web Traffic
These days, marketing and sales journeys take place largely online. As such, online traffic is a goldmine of data for quantifying awareness and recall. SEO tools like Google Analytics can show how many people are searching for your business.
Then, there’s the web data from your company’s website, social media, and ad campaigns. Page views, click-through rates, and reviews provide vital metrics for your brand’s visibility and staying power.
How to Enhance Your Brand’s Recall Potential
To round things off, let’s go over some basic strategies for generating brand recall. These are important steps for ensuring you approach things in a focused, calculated way.
Establish your brand profile
Your brand profile is a distillation of how you’re pitching yourself to customers. It should cover:
- Your brand’s values
- A mission statement
- Target market demographics
It should also include a list of your brand’s core selling points, such as the things your products or services do best, and what differentiates them from competitors. Using these selling points as principles for customer service helps to ensure continued customer loyalty.
Research your target market
There are plenty of ways to research your target market, like the survey tools mentioned above. You can also use social media to keep up with the latest trends. It’s important to collect data on both confirmed and potential customers for true depth of insight. Of course, as you collect data, it’s best to centralize it on your CDP.
What is a CDP? It stands for Customer Data Platform. It uses customer data for lead generation, but its insights can also relate to recall. For instance, how many returning customers you have, or reported levels of satisfaction.
Create ad campaigns and content
Until you can generate unaided recall, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind. That’s why the next step in your brand recall strategy is to get seen. The right ad campaign can help lodge your brand in people’s minds. For example, those Old Spice commercials from several years back became viral videos of their time.
Speaking of viral videos, many businesses go beyond basic advertising by producing topical content. These include videos, articles, think-pieces, reviews, and so on – essentially, things people will share and discuss far beyond your initial efforts.
Engage customers via social media
It’s essential to choose the best social media platforms for your brand. Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are some of the most profitable marketing spaces online because millions of people are active on them every day.
Different market demographics may favor different platforms, so it’s important to go where your people are. For instance, a clothing brand aimed at teens and young adults might focus on TikTok or Instagram.
With so many people sharing and commenting on your branded social media content, the right kinds of posts can generate brand awareness and opportunities for discussion.
Ensure continued service quality
The most consistent way to boost brand recall and customer loyalty is to deliver great products or services consistently. If a business loses its attention to detail as it expands, you might find it alienates your original customer base. Long-term, positive brand recall is about living up to the reputation you cultivate.
Brand Recall Maintains Business Success
The business world is one of fervent competition. Companies rise and fall so fast it feels like watching time-lapse footage of a forest growing. The brands that endure are those which leave a lasting impression in the minds of consumers.
Brand recall helps companies stay relevant in an ever-changing landscape. For any consumer need, there are any number of brands offering solutions. So, when people think about solutions to their pain points, you want your brand to be the first thing they think of.