As a brand manager or marketer, you should always be thinking about the strength of your brand and working to make it widely recognized within your target audience — and, not to mention, perceived in a positive way. But this is no easy feat.
Indeed, branding campaigns have to juggle a range of different priorities, all while staying memorable and snappy enough that they break through the noise and stay top-of-mind. For established brands, who can count on consumers knowing who they are and what they do, there’s a little less pressure on them to get this right all of the time.
But for growing brands with less recognition, this can be an uphill struggle. We all know how important first impressions are — so, when you’re introducing your brand to consumers, you’ll want to make sure they remember you for the right reasons.
The Problem: Brand Awareness Is Only Half The Battle
At this stage in your brand’s development, your campaigns need to build a strong foundation establishing who you are, what you do, and what sets you apart from the competition.
Brand tracking can help you with this challenge by allowing you to build your brand strategy on data-driven insights. But how can you be certain that your campaigns are sticking? You might have spent the majority of your advertising budget covering cities in billboards and targeting every social media platform with eye-catching video ads — but if all consumers remember is your brand name and nothing else, you’re in serious trouble.
Brand awareness is ultimately only half the battle. In order to succeed, you’ll need to ensure that your relationship with consumers goes a little deeper than just recognition.
Really, what brands need is a tool that not only tracks whether their campaigns are gaining traction and raising awareness but also gauges whether consumers actually understand what sector a given brand operates in.
Well, you’re in luck…
Because Latana has the solution.
Introducing our Latest KPI: Brand Understanding
Brand understanding is a trackable KPI that allows you to measure how well your target audience actually understands what your brand does.
By tracking brand understanding, you can move one step beyond simple recognition and find out what percentage of those consumers who recognized your brand name and logo also correctly identified the industry or sector your brand operates in.
Here’s an example of what our survey questions will look like:
In this example, users have to correctly identify what industry Brand A operates in and are presented with a list of possible options to choose from. Our data collection process utilizes a broad range of different methods to ensure accuracy and remove biases from the final results. You can find out more about Latana's data quality processes here.
Once the data has been collected, brand understanding will be visible on your brand tracking dashboard, where you’ll be able to track your progress over time.
With these data insights, you can measure the effectiveness of campaigns and iterate different creatives or brand messages to find out which ones are building more than just name recognition with your target audience.
Just as you would with any other campaign, insights like these can be used to decide how and where you invest your marketing budget, rather than shooting blindly in the dark.
Why Is It Important To Track Brand Understanding?
Brand understanding is a vital KPI to track because it provides a degree of context to how your brand awareness is growing and can allow you to gauge the quality of that growth. By allowing you to track whether a specific target audience understands what your brand does, you can identify whether your brand positioning is working.
Using this KPI, you may discover that your awareness is growing strongly but your target consumers aren’t correctly aligning you with the right category. With these insights, you can then alter your brand messaging to put more emphasis on your offering and industry, in order to bridge this gap in understanding. You can then track whether the changes you’ve made to your strategy have positively influenced brand understanding — and re-invest your ad-spend accordingly.
By working to improve this KPI, you’re essentially developing your target audience one step further towards a deeper relationship with your brand, increasing the chances that they consider your offering in their purchase decisions.
While established brands like Nike, McDonald’s, or Coca-Cola don’t need to worry about brand understanding as much — for new brands, building strong brand understanding is an essential step in creating a solid foundation for the future growth of your brand.
Final Thoughts
One day, your focus will shift to something more nuanced — like tracking how your brand is perceived by consumers, whether they align your identity with quality, sustainability, or affordability, for example.
But brands need to learn to walk before they can run.
So, for those brands that still have relatively low awareness — that are still growing and trying to break through the noise to reach relevant consumers — brand understanding is one of the most important KPIs to track in order to find out whether your current strategy is ticking all the boxes and setting your brand up for the future.
