How impactful is a brand logo in questions about brand awareness?

By Stephanie Clapham , Director of Research at Latana

Have you experienced unrealistic brand data that doesn't match your expectations and is hard to tie to your sales metrics? It could be because many brand surveys use outdated survey designs that don't align with how modern consumers respond, leading to skewed data.

We wanted to explore this further and dig into an area of survey design that is commonly overlooked: does the absence of logos in brand recall or brand perception questions harm the respondent’s ability to answer, and therefore the resulting data??

Do brand questions without a logo prompt suffer from respondent oversight in brand recall?

Commonly, brand logos are neglected from brand survey questions. Using brand names only allows more space for longer lists of brands to be displayed side by side in one single question, which lends to greater efficiency in the survey. But does this come with the drawback of placing more cognitive strain on the respondents being asked to recall them? Including brand logos in the question describes the brand more in its entirety which could lead to more accurate responses and better data.

We found that including brand logos could increase brand recall accuracy by up to 20%

Logos, as visual symbols, are more recognizable and memorable than brand names alone, and so could provide a crucial aid to respondents in recalling brands more effectively. People are exposed to logos far more frequently than brand names alone in the real world, as it's the most effective way of identifying a brand in advertising, packaging and digital media. It is estimated that consumers are exposed to anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 ads a day ! So it would make sense for the survey to mirror real-world interactions when it comes to brand recall too.?

To explore this, we ran our own surveys to test the impact a logo can have on a respondent’s ability to recall various brands. We interviewed 2,000 people in the US across two randomly attributed surveys; in one we asked respondents to select all the brands they knew in a list of brand names only, while in the other we asked about the same brands but with both the brand name and logo present.?

The hypothesis was that the inclusion of logos into the survey question would have a positive impact on the respondent’s ability to recall recognition of the brand. We found to be true - aided awareness levels were consistently higher and more reflective of reality when asked in a format using a logo prompt alongside the brand name. Even household names like Amazon suffer a drop of 8% in awareness, from 83% aware with the logo and 76% without it. For less prominent brands the effect can be quite drastic! For instance, New Balance saw awareness fall by 20% when the logo wasn’t shown, dropping from 64% with the logo to just 44% without it.

Interestingly, logos could also be used as a reliable anchor to measure rebranding impact. As shown in the data above, the only brand to have witnessed a reverse trend in the data was ‘X’ (Twitter). We measured the impact of the logo on recall just three months after X’s logo rebrand in April 2023. Both versions of the survey used the Twitter brand name but one survey included the new ‘X’ logo. The version with the brand name alone saw awareness of 72%, while the version with the new logo saw awareness of 66%, a 5% drop that can be attributed to respondent’s confusion and unfamiliarity with the new branding.

Latana’s mobile-optimised question design

At Latana, we’ve put the respondent experience at the forefront of our survey design. We believe that if the respondent is provided with a cognitively light question - that is, as easy to understand and answer as possible - then the resulting data will show more accuracy and honesty, just as we found in the research explored earlier.

This is especially relevant for brand awareness measurement, where logos are key to prompting accurate recall. Missteps in capturing recall can ripple through other crucial metrics like brand consideration and perception, skewing the overall picture of brand health.?

Final Thoughts

Logos are the visual link between a brand and the consumer’s most frequent interaction with it. We found that including them as a prompt in survey questions will significantly strengthen a respondent’s ability to recall a brand more accurately. To ensure that our brand recall data is genuine and trustworthy, we optimised our survey design to include logos in all of our brand questions. We believe this approach offers a further step towards data that can be trusted and a solid foundation for making informed marketing decisions.?