In this blog we are going to spell out the importance of Brand Recognition and what goes into making that happen. Brand recognition is the ability of your customers, prospects and consumers to identify a brand based on the brand’s visual elements, such as your logos, your color palette, the typography you are utilizing, and how all of your brand elements come together within your design.
The utilization of these visual elements will signify how well a brand’s identity resonates and is remembered by your customers, targeted prospects, partners and the general business community. Creating strong brand recognition is critical in claiming a brand’s presence in the competitive marketplace and differentiating yourselves and your brand from competitors.
What is Brand Recognition and why is it so important?
Brand recognition focuses on visual elements as well as auditory cues that trigger a response helping your customers and targets identify your brand without needing its name. For instance, the Amazon Arrow on your packages, website, trucks and planes, you instantly know that symbol and you recognize it as Amazon. Same for stylized T that we recognize online, on cars and trucks, this has become the largest manufacturer in the EV vehicle space, i.e. Tesla.
This type of recognition fosters trust and encourages consumers and your targets to choose a brand repeatedly based on familiarity and recognition, thus why it is so important for your brand to work hard to imprint this on the brains of your customers and targets, it leads to increased leads, sales and revenue.
How Brand Recognition Works
Brand recognition relies heavily on clear, consistent and strategic use of branding visual elements, that they see over and over again.. Brand elements such as your logo, your tagline, packaging design, your advertising and social media accounts and their posts play a role in creating a brand identity that sticks in the ideal target’s mind, it works both for consumer and business to business companies.
Companies often elect to work with a brand strategy agency or seek branding company services to ensure their brand visual identity aligns with their mission and values that will help them achieve their desired outcomes.
Building and Maintaining Brand Recognition
1. Well Defined Brand Strategy
- Understand who you are, how you are different and what you stand for.
- Know and really understand how your customers and prospects are and what they want and desire.
- Spell out how you communicate your brand differentiators, value points and value proposition and brand story.
- Developed your brand’s logo, color palette, visual brand assets and content components.
- Develop a brand architecture document that spells out what your brand looks like, reads like through your content and copy as well as the brand experience is supposed to be.
- Train your staff on how to effectively implement your brand through all the various channels and what that should look like to ensure brand recognition.
2. Be Consistent in your Brand Design
Repeated exposure to consistent logos, colors, and themes enhances recall. So it’s imperative that you are consistent in the utilization of your brand design elements so your targets and customers can build upon your brand impressions and build a solid brand recognition with your company and brand.
3. Emotional Connections
In order to create brand familiarity with your brand, you are going to have to develop brand visuals that evoke emotion and tell a story that connects and engages with your targets so your brand is memorable. Companies like Hallmark have mastered this through nostalgic and heartwarming stories and advertisements.
4. Partnering with Experts
When building your brand to connect with your ideal target customers it really helps to engage a top notch brand building agency or even a pitch deck experts that help brands craft and create compelling narratives supported by strong visual brand designs that connect and compel.
5. Innovative Marketing
A key component to building your brand recognition is utilizing an integrated approach to getting your marketing across multiple channels such as digital, social, outbound campaigns and traditional advertising platforms. Using an integrated approach to your marketing like this allows you greater visibility and reach to build your brand and engage, connect and compel your targets.
Brand Awareness vs Brand Recognition
Let’s run through the different types of brand familiarity and what makes them different and why brands work so hard and spend so much much money to get you to become familiar with their brand.
Brand Awareness: More of a lighter brand familiarity, they may be aware of your logo and brand but not all the different aspects of your brand, like your products or services or what you stand for and your company’s values.
Brand Recognition: Brand awareness is when a customer or prospect recognizes your brand, visual elements logo, product, color, etc. or your tagline, slogan, jingle or other audio elements that they may become familiar with.
Brand awareness can be considered a step along the way to build a customer or prospect’s familiarity with your brand and build up to them being able to recognize your brand with brand awareness. Because of this, brand awareness is more valuable, and it takes time to build up and become recognizable and then have customers and prospects more likely to make purchasing decisions regarding your company and brand.
Let’s run through the the Benefits of having a High Brand Recognition:
- Customer and Prospect Recognition: Having a brand that is built and familiar and recognized with your customers and prospects is an essential step to driving sales which is foundational to a brand’s success.
- Consumer Trust: Familiarity eventually turns into brand awareness and brand awareness into brand recognition and recognition turns into trust. These efforts help customers and prospects become more likely to choose your brand over your competitors, giving you the competitive advantage you work so hard to build up.
- Customer Loyalty: Strong brand recognition helps to create a sense of familiarity and reliability, leading customers to make repeat purchases and encourage those they know to buy your product or services. The combination of these greatly helps your brands long term success.
- Competitive Advantage: A well positioned and recognized brand helps you to stand out in a crowded marketplace and your hard earned brand recognition turns into more sales, revenue and profits for your company. You will need to be pro-active and stay vigilant to maintain your competitive advantage.
- Lower cost of customer acquisition: Another huge benefit of a well recognized brand makes your marketing and advertising costs go further and significantly decreases your customer acquisition costs. This helps stretch your marketing and advertising budget and significantly helps your bottom line results.
- Market Expansion: Having high brand recognition makes it much easier for your entry into new markets and geographies, and since visual brand elements are already familiar to your target customers, this makes it much quicker and efficient.
How to Measure Brand Recognition
Market Sedimate: One of the first things you can and should do is to measure market sediment and how you stack up in the competitive landscape, as well as what your target prospects and customers think and feel about your brand recognition. You can also get feedback from online forums and your visual and other brand assets and elements, utilizing this feedback can be valuable.
Surveys: A fairly straight forward and cost effective way to measure your brand visual elements and recognition is to develop an on-line survey. We can send it to vetted prospects and customers to see what they feel about your visual elements as well as get their feedback on your brand recognition.
Focus Groups: Another way to get quality feedback is to develop focus groups and develop questions you want to ask prospects and consumers if they recognize the brand based on its logo or color scheme as well as how they feel about your brand as a whole.
Social Media Analytics: Another great medium is utilizing social media to track mentions, shares, and interactions involving brand visuals. You can develop some online questions and get the feedback you are seeking regarding your brand elements and recognition.
Ad Word Metrics: A great way to measure your brand sediment is to track analyzing click-through rates on visually branded ads. You can also test your different visual elements, colors, images, headlines, tagline etc. You can use this feedback to hone and refine your brand assets and impact.
Brand Recognition Examples: Here are some great example case studies, such as Nike’s clean black and white background with the swoosh. Also, Target’s circle(s) logo and red and white color scheme, these visual examples demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging visual elements to anchor your brand.
Conclusion
The impact of your brand visual elements on your brand recognition cannot be overstated. Making sure you have clear, concise, consistent, strategic design paired with emotional and impactful storytelling can elevate a brand from obscurity to a notional and global brand. By working with a branding company or a brand strategy agency, your businesses can craft and develop compelling visual elements and identities that resonate emotionally with your audiences, creating long-lasting impressions that engage and compel and create sustainable growth.
