Definitions and explanations
Brand awareness:
Brand awareness is known to be a consumer’s recognition of specific brand. It is one of the important factors for companies to set their market strategies. It directly hits the consumer’s decision to purchase a product or service.
Brand awareness is considered to be one of the significant indicators to make connection between the company and its customers. There are three important levels of brand awareness:
- Top of mind awareness
- Brand recall
- Brand recognition
Creating brand awareness is a key step for successful product promotion as well as stimulating an older product or brand.
Brand positioning:
Brand positioning is considered as the heart of any marketing strategy. It helps dwell in a distinctive or unique place in the mind of your target market/segment concerning the company’s offerings and image. It starts with understanding what your consumer wants, setting your brand capabilities accordingly, what are the positioning strategies used by competitors and, ending with the best positioning statement. Positioning is not just “what you do to a product”, rather “what you do to the mind of the prospect buyer/customer.
Difference between Brand Awareness and Brand Positioning:
The difference between brand awareness and brand positioning has been detailed below:
1. Meaning
Brand awareness refers to the recognition or recalling the brand by the consumers concerning the quality of the product. On the other hand, brand positioning means how you can differentiate your brand from your competitor and how or where it should sit in the mind of the prospective buyers or customers.
2. Effect on sales/growth
Consumers feel easy to buy a name brand product rather than any unfamiliar one. This helps brands to create and maintain high growth and level of sales. Different advertising and marketing strategies can be used to increase brand awareness among consumers that have a direct effect on sales and growth.
Brand positioning is also helpful in generating more sales but with a different strategy where, market leaders shape the thinking of buyers by helping them to evaluate their issues and options, quantifying their pain and giving them solution. In simple words, brand positioning inspires customers to move from the existing challenging situation to an opportunity- filled future.
3. Identification strategy
Brand awareness identification strategy includes jingles, logos etc. for recognizing or recalling the brand. It creates a brand personality which can easily be identified and recognized by the services or products sold by certain brand. This identification strategy is very much important for consumers; they are not willing to buy any product about which they don’t have any awareness or knowledge. Positioning identification strategy specifically deals with identification of the target markets to be served. It claims a position or reputation in the market or markets. Target markets can be segmented on the basis of gender, age, and income, etc. Marketers should identify the target market segments so that they are able to design programs that influence those segments and achieve the desired results.
4. User expectations
Brand awareness lead towards positive reward expectations of user concerning your product and services. It is a valuable addition to the user experience and expectations. Your customer is willing to pay a premium for your product as compared to your competitors just because of the extra value of your product and service is apparent and permanently imprinted to their psyches. Whereas, positioning reaches user expectations by providing the brand’s unique competitive offerings that make the promise convincing. Positioning is essential to manage user expectations of the brand experience.
5 Linked to
Brand awareness is a reputation of the brand that lives in the mind of the customers. They want a brand that can easily be remembered or recognized by them when in need. This could only be possible when the brand have some good reputation in the market. On the other hand, positioning is a category relative to competitor brands position. Customers recognize the brand by keeping in mind the position it has in the market. Brand positioning sits in the mind of the customers when they are able to say, “Oh, that brand belongs to that category”.
Brand awareness versus brand positioning – tabular comparison
A tabular comparison of brand awareness and brand positioning is given below:
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| Meaning | ||||
| Recognition or recalling the brand by consumers | Differentiation of your brand from your competitor | |||
| Effect on sales/growth | ||||
| Different advertising and marketing strategies are helpful to improve brand awareness that leads to growth and an increase in sales. | Market leaders shape the thinking of buyers and target their buying decisions which help increase sales and improve growth. | |||
| Identification strategy | ||||
| Jingles and logos are used to identify or recognize the brand. | Positioning can be identified by the target markets to be served. | |||
| User expectations | ||||
| It is an extra value addition to user experience or expectations. | Positioning reaches user expectations by providing the brand’s unique competitive offerings | |||
| Linked with | ||||
| Brand awareness is linked with the reputation of brand. | Brand positioning is linked to brand category. It sits in the mind of customers when they are able to say, “Oh, that brand belongs to that category”. | |||
Conclusion
Positioning is considered to be one step ahead of brand awareness or branding. Positioning strategies or tactics attract your target market to your business. This experience of your target market with your business gives you a clear idea to determine if you are successful in building a brand awareness or image. Brand awareness and brand positioning both are market strategies to make your brand a household name. These strategies move parallel to get the desired response from your prospect buyer/customer. Generally, marketers focus on positioning first to define the brand image/awareness. Positioning strategies are helpful to lure customers and make them aware of a certain product and their capability to recognize and recall its product service.
