What's the difference between brand recognition vs. brand awareness? It's a question that we get all the time and the answer might actually surprise you. As an industry-leading brand management software provider, we work closely with multi-location brands that have achieved increased brand recognition and awareness.
In the distributed environment, these challenges tend to start with local execution. You see, without corporate-franchisees alignment, local marketing tends to get a bit haywire. Unfortunately, marketing inconsistencies, off-brand messaging, and other local marketing mishaps will negatively impact the customer experience.
So what does this all mean for your brand? What's the difference between brand recognition vs. brand awareness? What can your brand do to maximize its marketing effectiveness in pursuit of increased brand recognition and awareness?
The Differences Between Brand Recognition vs. Brand Awareness
The good news is that satisfying your thirst for brand recognition and brand awareness doesn't require a million-dollar investment. Here, we're going to tell you everything you need to know about brand recognition and brand awareness, and how you can get the best of both in less time and with less money.
What is Brand Recognition?
Definition: A customer's ability to identify your brand from its visual symbols, messaging or products.
How to Build Brand Recognition: To build great brand recognition across the distributed network, you need to think strategically about the foundational elements of your brand. Start by asking yourself a few of these questions:
- What is it that you want your brand to be known for?
- What is it that makes your brand unique?
- What are the distinct characteristics of your brand narrative?
- What does your brand marketing look and feel like?
In most cases, brand recognition starts by creating a brand audit, detailed buyer personas, and a style guide. Additionally, speak to your local affiliates, franchisees, and dealers about the importance of brand recognition. The fact is, increased brand recognition requires local buy-in. To orchestrate high-value digital and print marketing across the distributed network, many industry-leading multi-location brands choose to invest in brand management software.
What is Brand Awareness?
Definition: A customer's knowledge about brand factors including reputation, cultures, values, quality, features, and specifications.
How to Build Brand Awareness: On the surface, building strong brand awareness starts by targeting specific audiences, delivering the absolute best customer experiences, and looking for opportunities to enhance brand recall.
Similar to brand recognition, building brand awareness requires corporate-local alignment. In many ways, consistency is the key to increasing awareness. In this scenario, brand management tools can maximize your chances for marketing consistency across the distributed environment. It's as simple as "locking" mission-critical elements inside the brand creative while simultaneously giving franchisees and affiliates the ability to add local customizations.
Bonus: 6 Ways to Measure Brand Equity and How to Build It [Updated 2021]
Build Brand Recognition and Awareness With CampaignDrive
While brand recognition and awareness aren't exactly the same, building a strategy that pairs them both together is an ideal way to give your multi-location marketing and communication the lift it needs to attract high-value prospects and customers.
However, before building this kind of multi-location marketing strategy, you need to think about the tools needed to put the strategy into action. Unfortunately, finding the right tool can be especially challenging in the distributed environment.
That's where we come in.
We understand the complexity of multi-location marketing and support complex brands with a single SaaS platform purpose-built for system administrators, designers, and local users. This single platform enables brands to deploy creative across the distributed network. In this way, affiliates and franchisees have all the marketing resources needed to activate the brand locally. To get started, we recommend trying a free software demo.
