MISTAKE #67: You over-estimate initial awareness and trial

Do you know how hard it is to get noticed?  More specifically, how hard it is to get noticed by the people you want to notice you?

No, you probably don’t know.  That is why you’re so optimistic that your new product will be successful despite little or no marketing support.

You probably expect your product to land right in front of your shopper's face and they'll have no rational option other than to buy it. 

It is this blissful ignorance that gets so many new products to market.  In many ways, this is a good thing because it keeps great people motivated and great ideas moving forward. 

But failures to accomplish foundational building blocks like driving quality awareness can be catastrophic when reality catches up.

MAKING REALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS

Part of our Omni-assessment includes studying category dynamics like brand awareness and trial.

And it is often eye-opening for clients to see how few brands have actually attained relatively high awareness or trial.

Ask a typical client and they’ll probably say they hope to have crazy high numbers like 50% awareness or 35% trial.  At least those are common numbers I hear.

While there are a lot of different techniques to measure awareness or trial, and actual results are very category-specific, we’ve done enough studies to offer some general watch-outs for those of you who don’t think driving awareness is one of the most important and hardest tasks you face.

SEVEN “TRUTHS” ABOUT BRAND AWARENESS

Many categories have a few dominant brands before awareness and trial drops off a cliff:  Heavily advertised categories might have 3 or 4 brands with awareness above 60%, which quickly drops to 20% awareness for the fifth brand.  This typically reflects the separation between brands that invest in marketing and those that don’t.

A small share of brands ever achieve awareness above 30%:  I rarely see a category that has more than a half dozen brands or 1 in 4 with awareness above 30%. 

The more brands a category has, the less awareness each one will capture:  In a category with 10 brands, the average shopper might recall 3 of them (30% average awareness) while the recall in a category with 30 brands might be 7 brands (23% average awareness).  Increasing fragmentation makes it more difficult to get noticed.

Few brands are able to convert more than half of awareness into the trial:  This conversion rate (trial divided by awareness) tends to be higher for brands that earn awareness above 90% and those that have very low awareness.  This likely represents the comfort of going with a widely recognized brand and the greater appeal or devotion niche brands earn with their unique value propositions.  It also is a warning for brands that end up in the big middle…with an awareness that is better than a lot of other brands, but a poorer conversion of that awareness into the trial.

Regional brands are VERY regional:  While it should be obvious, companies tend to forget that a regional brand can earn 80+% awareness in its home market and 2% awareness in other markets.  Looking at the average awareness across markets is not only very misleading but typically meaningless.  More importantly, a national brand launch needs to consider the potential challenge it will face when going up against multiple recognized local favorites already competing in the same market niche.

Awareness tends to dip after launch activities fade:  If you look at the awareness of a brand over the first year, it might grow aggressively early on only to start dipping.  This reflects the recency bias and imperfect memory shoppers have.  And it supports the need to maintain marketing programs over longer time frames.  Spending heavily for a few months only to shut off funding is rarely a formula for success.

Low awareness is not necessarily bad:  I’ve studied a surprising number of niche brands that have awareness in the low single digits, but an excellent trial.  I’ve also seen some of these brands spend lots of money hoping to expand their market.  More than once, significant increases in awareness were compromised by a severe lag in trial and loyalty.  A brand with 9% awareness and 4% trial might grow to 27% awareness, but only 8% trial.  Awareness tripled but the trial only doubled.  While this increased absolute sales, it did so with less and less efficiency.  This is why buying a Super Bowl ad isn't a no-brainer solution to growing sales.

Awareness is one of the first building blocks to a successful product launch.  Make sure you have realistic expectations for your category and know what you need to or want to accomplish with awareness and how that will translate to trial to ensure the long-term success of your product.