Brand Awareness

Can you recognize the brand from the following pictures? Can you identify the food product in one go? I am quite sure most of you know these pictures and the brand I am talking about.

Well, that is the impact of the name that they have created in the industry. McDonald’s blurry billboards demonstrate just how instantly recognizable the fast food chain’s offerings are, as this innovative campaign has taken a global approach. The campaign that was titled as ‘Say No More’ featured multiple print and billboard images, all of which feature a blurred image of a popular McDonald’s menu item. “Brand awareness” is a challenge for every company, specially for a new company and marketers look for innovative and out-of-the box strategies to create visibility and awareness.

What exactly is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a marketing term that describes the degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name. Creating brand awareness is a key step in promoting a new product or reviving an older brand. Ideally, awareness of the brand may include the qualities that distinguish the product from its competition. (Investopedia)

The products and services that are popular among the masses are mostly the ones due to brand recognition. For instance, if one remove the labels and packaging of soft drinks bottles, many of them will become indistinguishable. To reach out to the masses, the giants in the industry such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi rely on brand awareness to make their brands famous. Over the years, these companies have employed advertising and marketing strategies that have increased brand awareness among consumers, and that has directly translated into higher sales.

The term and the concept is extensively used by Facebook for its Brand Awareness Advertisement. Though it is a challenging task to predict how many people remember the ad, there are few algorithms for the same.

If we talk about the advertisement field, traditionally, it has been using various “ad recall surveys” to measure whether people remember their ads. Now with big data, machine learning is used for the same. For example: Facebook choose target audience on the basis of:

• Behaviour: measure more than a thousand signals including the existing relationship that someone has with your Page, their likelihood of interacting with the ad and demographic characteristics.
• Polling:  constantly calibrating our predictions by running thousands of polls on a random sample of campaigns each day that ask people if they recall an ad.

Now, with the advent of technology and rise in the smartphone users, social media has become a relevant platform for companies to create brand awareness. As social media allows one to share experiences, opinions and views, brands are anticipating the attitude of online users and creating strategies to reach out to the masses.