Being known is a pretty good problem to have. Brands spend enormous amounts of time and money building recognition, recall and prominence. And rightly so, if nobody knows you exist, you’ve got a fairly fundamental brand problem. But there’s another question we think organisations should ask alongside ‘Do people know us?’ – ‘What do they think they know about us?‘.
Brand awareness and brand understanding aren’t the same thing. People can recognise your name, your logo, even your advertising, while having a surprisingly outdated or incomplete idea of what you actually do or why you do it.
When your reputation gets stuck in the past
We see this particularly with established organisations. Over the years, sometimes decades, they’ve built great recognition around a particular product, service or role. Meanwhile the organisation itself has evolved – new services have appeared, audiences have changed, capabilities have expanded or the strategy has moved on.
The brand that people carry around in their heads hasn’t necessarily moved with it. It can be particularly stark in the charity sector. An organisation can have fantastic name recognition while far fewer people can accurately explain who it helps, what it does today or where their money actually goes. But it also happens in B2B too – a business known for one specialist service expands into a much broader offer, yet prospective customers continue putting it in the same box.
That’s the strange thing about strong awareness if not managed properly your history can become an asset and a constraint at exactly the same time.
Recognition gets you noticed, but meaning gives people a reason to choose you
This is where the distinction starts to have commercial consequences. Kantar‘s brand research looks beyond whether brands are also meaningful and different. Its data suggests the strongest brands can achieve nine times higher volume share, are four times more likely to grow value share and command twice the price of weaker brands.
That doesn’t mean awareness isn’t important, it just means being easily remembered works much harder when something useful comes to mind with the name.
There’s evidence around pricing too. Analysis found brand-driven consumers paid 38% more for brands they perceived as meaningfully different than brands they didn’t. Even price-driven shoppers paid a 14% premium.
For us, that’s where brand understanding becomes much more interesting than a communications metric. It can affect whether someone considers you, what they’re prepared to pay, whether talent wants to work for you, whether donors understand the impact of their money or whether a customer thinks you’re relevant to a problem they didn’t realise you could solve.
Awareness gets you into someone’s head but understanding determines what they find when they get there.
So how does the gap happen?
Usually, nobody deliberately creates it. The business evolves faster than the brand does.
A new service gets added here or an acquisition happens there; the audience expands or the strategy changes. Everyone inside the organisation understands the journey because they’ve lived through it. Outside the building, nobody got the memo.
The result is often a brand trying to communicate its current ambition through a story built for an earlier version of the organisation. And simply saying more doesn’t necessarily solve it.
In fact, one of the warning signs we look for is a brand trying to explain itself through increasingly long lists of services, capabilities and propositions. More information isn’t always more understanding. Often it just means there’s no longer a clear organising idea holding everything together.
Your visual identity can hide the problem
There’s another reason an understanding gap can go unnoticed – a distinctive brand can continue doing a brilliant job of being recognised. People know the colour, they recognise the logo and they remember the name.
So awareness tracking looks healthy, but distinctive assets are essentially signposts. Yes, they help people recognise who is talking but the brand still needs to build the right associations with that recognition.
This is why a rebrand shouldn’t automatically mean throwing familiar assets away. If an organisation has spent years building recognition, there can be enormous value in keeping the parts people know while changing what those assets are helping people understand.
Sometimes evolution is considerably more powerful than revolution.
Don’t just measure whether people know you
If you’re researching your brand, awareness should be the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it. Alongside prompted and unprompted awareness, we’d want to understand the associations sitting behind those numbers.
What do people think you do? What are you known for? Who do they think you’re for? What makes you different? When would they consider you? What words or ideas come to mind first? And, crucially, how different are those answers from the ones your leadership team would give? (Side note: We set this as what we call ‘homework’ at the start of every rebrand project.)
That last comparison can be uncomfortable. It’s also incredibly useful, because the biggest brand problem might not be that people haven’t heard of you, it might be that they’ve heard of a version of you that no longer exists.
Closing the gap isn’t about shouting louder
If awareness is high but understanding is low, spending more money repeating the same story isn’t necessarily going to fix it. You need to decide what you want to be understood for. That means finding a clear organising idea for the brand or what we call an ‘ownable proposition‘, deciding which associations matter most and then expressing them consistently through positioning, identity, campaigns, content, digital experience and the everyday interactions people have with the organisation.
Research suggests and brands with strong ‘meaningful difference’ were twice as likely to remain among its most valuable global brands 20 years later.
So perhaps the more useful brand health check isn’t simply: “Have people heard of us?” It’s: “Do people know us for the things we need to be known for and why we do them?“
The difference between those two questions can tell you an awful lot about what your brand needs to do next.
If your brand is well known (or not) but you’re not sure it’s well understood, we’d love to help you find out why and close the gap.
