Building Brand Awareness To Improve Profitability and Loyalty with The Help of Branded Merchandise.

Why are businesses and consumers alike willing to pay more for brand names?

Simply, a brand adds value. Brands simplify choice, promise a particular quality level, reduce risk and/or engender trust

That is why it is essential that all businesses try and create their own brand in their niche markets and increase their brand awareness amongst their target markets.

Brand awareness has a prominent role in consumer decision-making for 3 reasons:

1. It is important the consumer thinks of the brand when they think about the product/ service category.

2. Consumers have been shown to only buy familiar and well-established brands.

3. Brand awareness influences the formation and strength of the brand image.

Raising brand awareness increases the likelihood that the brand will be considered with a handful of other brands for purchase. Marketing strategies are designed to enhance brand awareness and establish favourable, unique and strong brand associations to encourage consumers to buy the product or service.

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is a term bandied about, but what is Brand awareness? Brand awareness relates to the likelihood that a particular brand name will come to mind and the ease at which it does so. This concept has two strands, brand recognition – the extent to which a consumer can correctly identify a particular product or service just by viewing the product or service’s logo, tagline, packaging, advertising campaign or other cues, and brand recall – the capacity customers have to remember brand names with little prompting.

Thus brand awareness is strongly associated with brand familiarity. The greater the brand familiarity, through repeated exposure, should lead to an increased ability to recognise and recall the brand. The strategy to achieve such an outcome is clear. Anything that causes the consumer to experience or be exposed to the brand has the potential to increase awareness and familiarity.

Building Brand Awareness.

Marketing communications afford a flexible means of shaping consumer perceptions. But in recent times, emotional branding has emerged as a highly influential tool for marketing. Emotional branding is a customer-centric, relational and story-driven approach to forging deep and lasting bonds between a brand and consumers.

Brand linkages can be formed when branding strategies use narratives and tactics that demonstrate an empathetic understanding of customers’ aspirations and circumstances and generate a warm feeling of community.

Increasingly, companies are searching for ways to create strong emotional brand connections, as such connections lead to higher levels of loyalty and, ultimately improved financial performance. This relational, community, participatory and emotive view of consumer brand relationships is a core of market differentiation and sustainable competitive advantage.

How Can I build Brand Awareness?

The theory of the benefits of building brand awareness is irrefutable, but what steps can you take to build brand awareness?

Build a customer experience that makes your customer feel part of the team: This allows customers to feel valued and it can also help with the development of new products/services that better suit your customers needs. The more engaged your customer is a more significant role they can play in viral marketing activity by providing referrals and spreading the word about your brand.

Build a brand identity that resonates with your customers: This can be done through content marketing, through social media, blogs or permission-based e-mails. By understanding your customer’s concerns, aspirations and inspirations and offering solutions you can add value beyond your product and help create an emotional bond to your brand. Think of ways you can educate, inform and entertain. This shouldn’t be about making sales directly. Instead, this is a relationship-building and brand-awareness practice that creates more opportunities for audiences to get to know your brand.

Tell a brand story: Use narrative to showcase your brand story through, for example, customer experiences or by marking key milestones in your growth. Consumers like familiar and established brands, and telling your story helps customers form bonds with the brand.

Contribute to you community: Many customers engage with brands via online channels such as social media. By responding to customers’ comments, it allows for conversations to develop and your audience to develop a relationship with the brand.

Promotional Gifts For Brand Awareness.

As previously stated anything that causes the consumer to experience or be exposed to the brand has the potential to increase awareness.

Companies with the most success in brand awareness campaigns seek to utilise both online and offline channels to drive marketing performance by integrating various channels and touch points to create a seamless service experience.

For instance, branded mugs can be used as a reminder of your brand while your customers enjoy that well-earned coffee. You can use other promotional products to encourage your customers to visit your content or share images of themselves with your branded products. Such promotional items will endeavour to keep your brand at the front of your customer’s thoughts and create familiarity.

Gift-giving is an effective way to strengthen and enhance brand relationships and evoke an emotive response. The more you can encourage emotional brand connections, the stronger the bond between customer and brand and instilling a sense of loyalty. In a digital world it is hard to stand out from the crowd, but with printed mugs and other promotional products you can take your brand awareness campaign to the next level.

Printed Mugs from Prince William Pottery.

Prince William Pottery has a range of mugs and printing technologies to create the perfect mug for your branded mugs. Please contact us; we will be happy to help you create a promotional mug to help achieve your brand aspirations.