The Science Behind Brand Awareness and Recall

Entrepreneurs and Marketers use brand awareness and brand recall all the time.

In this blog, I have attempted to dissect these two concepts from the perspective of how the human mind works.

It is critical to understand this so that you can confidently craft a successful brand strategy because everything you try to do in brand management has its relevance to the workings of the human mind.

Before that let's get into the basics;

What is Brand Awareness?

This is indeed about creating a presence for your brand in the minds of customers, even when they are not actively considering a purchase.

It's about making your brand familiar, so when they do think about a product or service within your category, your brand comes to mind.

But, what the heck is Brand Recall?

Brand recall happens during the purchase decision process.

It's when customers can readily remember and associate your brand with the category or need they are currently trying to fulfill.

This mental connection can significantly influence their choice at the point of purchase.

Imagine you run a small artisanal ice cream shop called "Sunny Scoops" in a charming seaside town.

To create brand awareness, you consistently give ads about mouthwatering your unique ice cream flavors like "Seashell Swirl" and "Sunset Sorbet," on the regional television channel.

You sponsor beach clean-up events and give out free mini-scoops to passersby during off-season weekends.

Now, let's say it's a scorching summer day, and a family is strolling along the boardwalk, craving ice cream.

They reach the ice cream parlor row, where there are several options.

Suddenly, the mom exclaims, "I remember 'Sunny Scoops'! I saw their amazing 'Seashell Swirl' flavor ad recently.

In this scenario, brand recall is at play.

The family had encountered your brand, "Sunny Scoops," already and the memory of your unique ice cream flavor has resurfaced at the perfect moment.

So, brand awareness made your ice cream brand familiar to potential customers, and brand recall helped seal the deal when they were making a purchasing decision.

Now let's get deeper and understand the science behind brand awareness and recall.

Dr. Endel Tulving, a prominent memory researcher, proposed the idea of two distinct memory systems: episodic memory (remembering specific events) and semantic memory (remembering facts and concepts).

Brand awareness operates in the semantic memory realm. It's akin to your brain storing a vast directory of general knowledge.

Brand recall aligns with the concept of "recall memory."

Renowned cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork describes recall as the act of retrieving information from memory without external cues.

When consumers recall a brand, they are retrieving it from the depths of their semantic memory based on internal triggers, such as a need, desire, or context.

When consumers recall a brand during a purchase decision, they reconstruct their mental representation of the brand, drawing upon their stored knowledge and experiences. This reconstruction influences their buying choices.

Brand recall is like solving a mental puzzle, where the pieces are fragments of brand-related information stored in memory.

The more effectively a brand positions itself in consumers' minds, the easier it is for them to put these puzzle pieces together and choose that brand over others when making a purchase.

That's precisely the reason why great brands focus on the right brand architecture and identity that sticks in consumers' minds easily and also invest in the brand awareness campaigns consistently.

In a nutshell, brand awareness taps into the recognition aspect of memory, making your brand familiar, while brand recall leverages the recall aspect, enabling consumers to retrieve and connect the dots of your brand's attributes when they're ready to make a decision.

Understanding these memory concepts can help businesses craft effective marketing strategies to influence consumer behavior.

But there is one thing even more important than brand awareness and recall: Brand Relevance.

I will discuss it in the coming days.

A quick update - I am gearing up for the launch of my third book, 'Mindful Marketing.

It is a collection of all the marketing cartoons that have been released in the last two years.

More annoucements soon on this.

https://www.rajeshsrinivasan.com/