Why chasing aided awareness can be a futile exercise
In this installment of Unpopular Opinions, I’m taking aim at aided awareness. In many cases, most in fact, I don’t go there to help me understand the dynamics of the market, or to understand much at all.
Instead, I tend to head to unaided awareness, or more keenly, top of mind awareness (TOM), sometimes called “first mention.” It gives a much cleaner read of brand strength. Further investigation can tell you if it is a long-term brand advantage or a short-term bump, but to me, it’s the fastest way to see who is leading the pack on brand memorability and momentum.
Some categories are really focused on top-of-mind awareness. The one that comes first to mind for me (see what I did there?!) are insurance brands and particularly their advertising campaigns. GEICO, Progressive, and Liberty Mutual have some of the most memorable campaigns. There’s no particular season for buying car and house insurance. It’s happening every month, so the main players are marketing all the time.
Insurance is a must-have but boring purchase. You don’t want to think about it until you need it and it’s easy to stay put with your current insurance and not look for a better or cheaper deal. So, the job of the big brands is to grab consumer attention and prompt them to want to make a change. And if they do want to, they’re the first name they think of. In awareness terms, they’re “top of mind.” Hence the extremely memorable advertising characters — the gecko for GEICO, Flo for Progressive, and LiMu for Liberty Mutual — catchphrases, and even a good old-fashioned jingle. They are pulling out all the stops to create top of mind awareness.
In healthcare, aided awareness is often in the ninety percent plus range because healthcare providers are part of the community. People have often grown up with them, lived with them for decades, or may even have been born in them! Unless there is a new entrant, a merger, or an acquisition, names will generally stay the same for decades.
Fixing a hole
For healthcare marketers it’s worth considering top-of-mind awareness first. It is a much better indicator of where energy and momentum are in the market.
How to go about doing it is a different matter. From the insurance examples above, a clear connection to brand, with recognizable brand assets or a branded idea helps. Consistency also helps, though that doesn’t have to mean executional matching luggage. It also helps to keep it simple – no lists please – and focused.
And in the end
The trick is to do it in the right way. There is good reason why GEICO has a gecko – it wouldn’t work so well for a hospital system. Likewise, you want to get the right type of top of mind awareness, not going after just any kind of awareness with futile stunts. But done well, in a branded, meaningful and consistent way, you should be able to see the energy and momentum drive top of mind numbers.
