What Is Brand Recognition?

Brand recognition is a concept used in advertising and marketing to describe consumers' ability to recognize a brand through visual or auditory cues such as logos, packaging, colors, slogans, or jingles. Companies often conduct 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:market research to assess the effectiveness of their brand re♚cognition strategies. Strong brand recognition can result in higher sales and profit margins, even if competing brands are of equal quality.

How Brand Recognition Works

A brand is a name, logo, word, mark, tagline, or any other identifying characteristic that distinguishes a company's products or services from others on the market. A brand is among the most important assets that a company has because it represents the company and helps keep the company in consumers' minds. The responsibility for overseeing a brand and growing its value over time is often referred to as 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:brand management.

Brands are considered a form of 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:intellectual property and treated for accounting purposes as 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:intangible assets that can be assigned a dollar value. They are normally protected using 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:trademarks.

Companies invest a lot of time and money to build brand recognition so that consumers will recall—and ideally choose—their brand over its competitors. A company's marketing department will often use multiple cues—both audio and visual—to help set their brand apart in the marketplace. Logos like the Nike (NKE) swoosh and the Golden Arches from McDonald's (MCD), and taglines like 𒉰"They're magically delicious" for Lucky Charms cereal and "I'm a big kid now" for Huggies Pull-Ups diapers help further brand recognition.

A study of 597 corporate logos, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that descriptive logos that "clearly communicate the type of product or service a brand is marketing" were generally more effective in promoting brand recognition than nondescriptive ones, which "contain design elements that are not indicative of the type of product or service these brands are selling." As an example of a descriptive logo, the authors cited the Burger King logo, which includes the word "burger" and the top and bottom halves of a hamburger bun. By contrast, the Golden Arches logo long used by McDonald's is a nondescriptive logo (although a highly successful one in terms of worldwide recognition).

To measure brand recognition and the effectiveness of their promotional and 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:marketing campaigns, many companies conduct market research using focus grꦿoups, online surveys, and other techniques.

Building and Maintaining Brand Recognition

Whether they're 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:small businesses or huge 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:corporations, or somewhere in between, companies can do many different things to create and maintain brand recognition. If they're effective, the brand can make itself 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:top of mind with c𓃲onsumers—an opportune place to be when those consumers are ready to bu﷽y. Here are a few ways they can do this:

• Consumers tend to remember brands that reach them on an emotional level, so a company may use a unique, touching, or heartfelt story that lets customers know why it's in business.
• Another way to build and maintain brand recognition is to provide exemplary 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:customer service. Consumers are more likely to recommend and buy products from a company they believe values their patronage.
• In addition to exceeding their customers' expectations, businesses can also help educate them. Being known as an expert in a certain field or being able to relate to customers and how they use the products and services they buy goes a long way in ensuring 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:brand loyalty.
• Small businesses and large companies alike can employ 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:social media to make sure their names, products, and services are in constant circulation. Of course, a company's logo or visual theme should be used in all communications for consistency and to enhance its recognizability.

Brand Recognition vs. Brand Awareness

Brand recognition is different from 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:brand awareness, another common term in the worlds of advertising and marketing. While brand recognition refers to t꧅he visual and audio cues people use to identify a brand, brand awareness is simply the extent to which the public knows that a company and its products or services exist.

As such, brand awareness can be considered a preliminary step on the path to brand recognition. For instance, if people didn't know anything about the Apple (AAPL) brand, they probably wouldn't recognize and associate the fam🌌ous Apple logo with its products.

The Bottom Line

Branding is both an art and a science. Companies that do it successfully, as evidenced by their brand recognition, can enjoy greater sales and profits. But maintaining hi꧟gh brand recognition also requires consistent messaging and constant efforts to keep the brand in front of consumers.