- Home
- News & Views
- How readily does your brand come to mind at the moment of purchase?
How readily does your brand come to mind at the moment of purchase?
26 June 2024
Why Salience is essential to growing your brand and keeping it healthy
By Jon Wilkins
In this new six-part series we will be exploring the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand. This series draws on the latest behavioural science and proven brand metrics, as well as our experience of effectively measuring thousands of brands across four decades. Together, these key factors represent the ingredients needed to help shape and grow brands successfully.
Arguably, none is more fundamentally important than your brand’s Salience. Although it’s not the only thing that matters, if your brand is not noticed or thought of, then most other aspects of the brand will be rendered meaningless. For any brand, it can be the ultimate ‘limiting factor’.
People spend very little time thinking about brands
Today we lead busy lives with lots of different priorities that have little or nothing to do with which brands we need to buy. In the modern digital world, we arguably cram even more into our lives than ever before. Each day we are exposed to tens of thousands of stimuli, including hundreds of different advertising messages. Our brains would not cope if we paid active attention to them all. Instead, our brains automatically filter out what doesn’t matter, enabling us to get on with our day to day lives.
Even if someone walks past your store, uses a station with your billboard ad, visits a page displaying your online ad or listens to the radio when your ad is played, it is far from guaranteed that they will notice it or think of your brand.
Salience or Mental Availability is hard to achieve, let alone maintain.
What do we mean by Salience?
Salience shouldn’t be seen as a single ‘measure’ but a broad concept that is more than purely awareness or recognition of the brand. It’s about being thought of and considered:
“The propensity for a brand to be noticed and/ or thought of in the buying situation” [Romaniuk & Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute]
Awareness of a brand is part of the picture but is no guarantee alone that the brand will be mentally available at the moment of purchase. It also needs to come with quality associations (implicit or explicit) that bring it into someone’s limited consideration set.
Why does it matter?
Simply put, brands able to sustain stronger Salience tend to be bigger, more successful and more resilient. In very few cases do consumers stay 100% loyal to a single brand. Instead, they tend to stick to a repertoire of brands in their consideration set; brands they would consider a satisfactory choice depending on the situation and what’s available at the point of purchase.
This isn’t necessarily a conscious decision on their part either. Limiting the number of brands they use makes their life easier. Often it is implicit associations with a brand that keeps it, sub-consciously, in their repertoire. Creating these strong associations with your brand will amplify the benefit whenever it is encountered by someone. They will become even more likely to notice it and consider it.
What can shape it?
Ultimately, there are really only two ways to build and reinforce your brand’s Salience:
-
Presence: maximise the brand’s presence in people’s lives
-
Associations: create distinctive cues that are implicitly associated with your brand and have relevance
Of course, there is no single recipe for success when it comes to building your brand’s Presence, and what works for one brand or sector will not necessarily work for all.
Whilst above-the-line mass-audience advertising may make sense for a brand with widespread physical availability, such as Heinz Tomato Ketchup or McDonald’s restaurants, performance marketing via more targeted digital channels may make more sense for an emerging food box subscription brand or a new fintech brand.
The more a brand can build and constantly refresh its presence via multiple touchpoints and channels that are relevant to the buyer and buying occasion, the more chance it has of creating and reinforcing the good quality, implicit associations that encourage brand consideration.
That means that the type of the touchpoints used, and quality of brand associations made, can be just as important as absolute spend levels. It can be what enables a brand to outperform its competitive alternatives in Share of Mind and ROI terms.
We need to get our measures of Salience right to keep the brand fresh and competitive
For new or emerging brands, ‘Awareness’ is often the first (and sometimes only) aspect of the brand that is tracked initially. It then becomes a staple of most brand tracking surveys, even for long established brands with close to universal awareness levels.
As this article has hopefully made clear, reliance on a single measure of Salience risks providing an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of how mentally available a brand really is.
Prompted awareness measures (whether based on choice from a brand list, or recognition of a brand name or logo) have their place, but really only tell us whether our brand name is recognised. This could be a sensible lead measure in the early stages of life for a new brand, or useful if we want to keep an eye on small or emerging competitors.
Spontaneous awareness (whether first mention or any top of mind brand) is a tougher measure that gives us a much clearer idea of which brands spring to mind and are therefore being kept mentally available. It provides greater discrimination between brands in more established markets where many leading brands may have close to universal awareness already. However, top of mind measures are contingent on how the category is defined. Brand owners should resist the temptation to define their category too narrowly. This may yield a higher awareness figure, but a definition that encompasses the true breadth of competitive alternatives will give a more realistic idea of how big the Salience challenge really is.
To fully understand whether your brand is both noticed and thought of, we of course need to measure Brand Consideration. As with Spontaneous Awareness, category or occasion definition is key here. It should reflect the full breadth of competitive alternatives and not just our brand positioning within the marketplace.
What none of these measures tell us is how actively our brand is building Salience right now. This is where Brand Presence comes in. It tells us which brands are freshest in people’s minds and how strong our competitive Share of Mind is. Crucially, it is also the springboard for understanding what is driving our brand’s presence; is the brand over-reliant on paid-for media or owned assets like its website or retail presence? Is it earning its fair share of advocacy and, if so, what are the key channels driving positive Word of Mouth? How much are other elements of our marketing mix contributing to our overall Presence?
Understanding this level of detail tells us not just how salient our brand is, but what levers we need to pull to build it further.
The bottom line – Salience is fundamentally important, but also intrinsically linked with other success factors.
However innovative, distinctive, ground-breaking, funky or engaging our brand is, its potential will be stunted if it is unable to be noticed and thought of. This is what makes Salience one of the top priorities for any brand. But it is not enough on its own if we want to create sustained brand growth.
In the next few features we will be looking at how other success factors are key to capitalising on a brand’s Salience. We will also explore how these factors can serve to reinforce Salience by improving the brand’s physical availability and strengthening the implicit associations that underpin a brand’s consideration.
Want to grow your brand?
Helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to grow and nurture brands through more effective use of research and insight is what we do. Get in touch via the button below if you would like to start a no-obligation conversation about how we can help you achieve smarter insights that give your brand the edge, or to find out more about our BrandQi™ framework?
Get in touch
Back to News & Views listings