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Awareness
& Recall
By Michael Alan Hamlin
November 1, 2004
Branding is about awareness and
recall. What's the difference? To understand the answer to that
question, think about the brand name Xerox. Xerox invented the document
duplication industry. As a result, Xerox became synonymous with
copying documents. So synonymous, if fact, that Xerox became a verb.
An executive didn't tell his assistant to go copy a document or
to get him or her a copy of something. Instead, the executive would
say, "Please xerox this." Or, "Get me a xerox of
this."
Not surprisingly, everyone who worked
in an office knew the Xerox brand. And for many years, whenever
an executive thought about investing in a machine that would duplicate
office documents, invariably Xerox was the first - if not the only
- company that came to mind. This story illustrates the difference
between recall and awareness. Put simply, awareness refers to broad
knowledge of the existence of the brand. Recall, on the other hand,
refers to the mental process of remembering a brand when a specific
investment opportunity is contemplated.
Awareness and recall require constant
attention to keep a brand top-of-mind, and to keep positive perceptions
associated with it. Xerox failed to do this after several years
at the top of its industry. The company caught what is frequently
called "Big Company Disease." The symptoms are probably
familiar to you. Employees become arrogant. Competitors' products
gradually become more advanced than those of the diseased company
because the diseased company assumes no other company can touch
its market position. But in fact that's what happens, and gradually
prospective customers recall other brands first when they contemplate
an investment.
Because Xerox created the document
duplication industry, it assumed that it would always own the industry.
Other companies had other ideas. Companies with names like Canon,
Ricoh, and Panasonic, for instance. The first copy machines these
companies produced were clunky and certainly inelegant compared
to the sleek Xerox machines of the day. But that soon changed. The
upstarts surged forward with new technologies and designs. Xerox
changed, too. Technology lagged, designs aged, and quality suffered.
Still, Xerox executives were surprised
when it finally dawned on them that when executives contemplated
an investment in a document duplicating machine, they thought first
of Canon, Ricoh, and Panasonic. Increasingly, prospective and former
customers didn't even contemplate Xerox because the brand had become
associated with some very negative qualities, especially poor quality
and frequent breakdowns. The Xerox brand was still known. But it
wasn't recalled when it counted: when other companies thought about
investing in what used to be called Xerox machines, but increasingly
were being referred to as copy machines. The Xerox brand had entered
the brand graveyard.
The brand graveyard is that place
where a brand has broad awareness, but poor recall. The lesson here
is that it's not enough to make potential customers aware of your
brand. It's important to make the brand top-of-mind when it's buying
time. To achieve top-of-mind recall, companies must regularly and
meaningfully communicate a compelling value proposition that typically
is based on assets such product quality, cost, and customer service
and responsiveness.
Creating recall is facilitated by
developing a communication program that targets a product or service's
key demographic profile. To put this another way, broad awareness
of a brand may be good for a CEO's ego, but it may not be worth
the communications budget required to regularly and meaningfully
communicate to a very broad audience, most of whom are unlikely
to ever buy the company's product or service.
A better communications investment
is a campaign that speaks to the people who are the most important
- meaning strategic and profitable - customers. To understand how
this works, think about BMW. Compared to companies like GM, Toyota,
and Ford, BMW is a very small company. Its communications budget
is likewise much smaller than the communications budgets of its
much larger competitors. This means that if BMW tries to communicate
with everyone its larger competitors do, it will lose the battle
because it doesn't have the financial resources necessary to do
so.
So instead, BMW communicates to people
who are likely to buy BMW automobiles. Demographically, that's young
to early middle-aged professionals with substantial levels of expendable
income. Its message of excitement, quality, and European styling
appeals to successful up-and-coming executives who make salaries
at the high end of their age bracket. The communication channels
BMW leverages also reflect this focus: the Internet, business magazines,
and expensive lifestyle publications.
Creating a successful brand is not
just a matter of making your brand well known. It's making it well
known in a meaningful way among the people who are most likely to
buy it.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing director
of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on Asian economies
and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian Places,
of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is currently
at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Asian
Professionals into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2004 Michael Alan Hamlin. All Rights
Reserved.
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