Awareness is often foremost among goals for brands, but without meaningful connections to Category Entry Points, the metric can end up meaning fairly little, as well as contributing to a blunt strategy.
Driving brand awareness is a priority for almost every business. For brands starting out, awareness will almost always be one of the first and foremost goals, with the idea that getting more customers to know your name will drive success.
The same is true even of very established brands, which will aim to maintain a consistent level of awareness, tracking this closely as an indicator of brand health.
There is no doubt that driving awareness is an important goal for any brand. But awareness in isolation can provide only a limited picture of brand health. Prospective customers having heard of your brand does not mean they are inclined to purchase you. Improving awareness is just a given, and putting blunt objectives like “drive awareness” in a brief to an agency, is as pointless as putting an objective like “drive sales” in a brief. Blunt objectives will lead to a blunt strategy, and ultimately blunt activation.
Indeed, focusing on metrics like “Prompted Awareness” alone or too much can also be a fool’s errand. “Prompted Awareness” is essentially “Historical Awareness” rebranded with a more appealing title.
If a brand is well-known but lacks salience, worst case, it could flounder; best case, it is highly inefficient with its marketing investment. Awareness-focused fame isn’t enough to drive commercial success. What is more important is the ability to come to mind at the right moments. Being memorable is crucial, but your brand coming to mind in the right context is what will drive sales.
There are plenty of examples of brands that have had strong levels of awareness but have struggled to drive sales. For example, retailer Gap was extremely well-known in the UK when it exited the market in 2021, but its brand image failed to maintain relevance with customers.
Looking at an example in a very different sector, Skype was much better known than video calling rival Zoom prior to the pandemic in 2020, yet the latter brand managed to become the go-to choice for these kinds of calls.
Indeed, if pure awareness were the panacea for brand health that it is sometimes made out to be, then there would be no room to drive growth for smaller, challenger brands.
Relevance at the right times
For a brand seeking to challenge a category leader, seeking pure awareness is not the most effective way to drive growth. Driving mass-level awareness requires scale and budget. Two things that most challenger brands will lack compared to the giants in their category.
Instead, driving mental availability in the right moments and for the right variables can make better use of budgets and allow smaller brands to outperform their rivals in particular moments.
An example of a brand that has been able to leverage its Category Entry Points to go toe-to-toe with much bigger rivals is Gymshark. Founded in a garage in 2012, the brand has been ultra-focused on driving salience with gym-goers since its conception.
In the athleisure space, it faces giants like Nike and Adidas, yet a focus on driving association with the gym and weight-lifting has enabled it to go toe-to-toe with much bigger rivals.
In a recent campaign, ‘We Do Gym’ reaffirmed its commitment to a specific Category Entry Point. The creative leans on specific moments, such as the pain after “leg day” or the inconvenience of lining up a hair-washing schedule with gym trips. In fact, Gymshark has declared, “We don’t do everything good, we do one thing great.” That thing being the gym.
This is hardly a niche audience. Indeed, according to a report from UKActive, a trade body representing fitness operators, 11.5 million people in the UK are active gym members. Gymshark hasn’t pursued broad-brushstroke awareness through its marketing and has instead focused on driving relevance to the gym (and other relevant CEP variables), which has allowed it to win against rivals with much bigger budgets.
Indeed, this is an example of tension amongst some marketing theory, especially in relation to media targeting. While aiming to reach everyone in the potential market, sounds great, in practice it’s incredibly difficult; just ask 99% of Brand Managers! Most brands, in most markets, will need to make some decisions on where best to put their media dollars to reach a more relevant target audience. Unless you have the media budget to reach a very high percentage of the population (e.g. 80%+) at a decent frequency, some targeting will help focus towards those that are more in line with your CEPs, positioning etc. The key is not to over-target to the point where media costs (e.g., Cost per Thousand Reached, especially) become so high that you lose out on efficiencies. Another factor making this so difficult is a more digital-centric media plan. Digital advertising promised so much when it came to more precise targeting, but more often than not, it just caused higher CPMs & CPRs, where going broader might have allowed you to hit the same people you were targeting anyway!
And this isn’t to say that by being focused on certain CEPs you are limiting growth potential. There will always be a natural spill-over, in terms of driving salience, into adjacent CEPs for any campaign or activity focused on a specific CEP. However, focus is essential in any strategy, and prioritisation guardrails will ultimately help create a better brief that leads to more impactful work. In addition to this, it’s about prioritising where you want to win based on your brand stage & maturity. Gymshark, in its home market of the U.K., is a more mature brand (i.e. bigger budgets, more distribution) and can now easily broaden the CEPs as it scales further. Ultimately, big brands are big because they are salient for a broader spectrum of CEPs. If a brand is entering a new market, however, it will need to cut its cloth and focus on a smaller set of CEPs initially, and step-load these over time.
Over-reliance on awareness
For challenger brands, attempting to rival big brands solely on awareness is folly. Equally, for huge brands, it’s not enough to rest on your laurels and assume extremely high awareness will drive success.
One brand that has been working hard to reinforce its relevance to Category Entry Points in recent times is McDonald’s. The brand is, clearly, one of the best known in the world, but it had articulated that it was losing share to smaller rivals.
The fast-food giant’s leadership told investors in recent results calls that it has been losing market share to rivals it “should be beating” in the UK. In particular, the business highlighted the breakfast occasion and value as two areas where it had been losing out.
Despite having extremely high levels of awareness, the need for McDonald’s to continue being top-of-mind for consumers seeking breakfast-on-the-go, and those looking for an affordable and filling meal, is critical.
The brand has sought to reaffirm its salience in the breakfast occasion through its recent ‘Breakfast, done properly’ campaign, which depicted shots of the menu without logos. This leans on the items themselves as distinctive assets and seeks to highlight the “iconicity” of McDonald’s menu.
As well as reinforcing its association with the biggest occasions through advertising, McDonald’s has also leaned on promotional deals in recent times to ensure that it comes to mind when customers are thinking about getting a cheap but filling meal. In 2024, it introduced a £5 saver meal deal, which offers four food items for the price of £5. This deal has been a focal point for much advertising from the brand.
Rather than simply seeking to top up its already extremely high awareness, McDonald’s clearly aims to drive salience by leveraging particular entry points in its marketing. The brand recognises pure awareness is not enough and that continuing to come to mind in the right moments will drive success.
From awareness to Category Entry Points
Long-running and successful advertising platforms are highly sought after. These are very valuable for any brand to have, and consistently reinforcing them can build fame for the platform and the brand.
But there is a risk that, when not executed well, these platforms can become somewhat generic. Effective in building awareness but not necessarily linked to any relevant purchase situations.
The most effective use of these kinds of long-running platforms is to use them both to drive awareness and to build creative linked to Category Entry Points. Driving these two metrics of success is something that optician Specsavers has managed to drive in tandem with its long-running “Should’ve Gone to Specsavers” platform.
This has been up and running for over two decades now. It draws on humorous mistakes brought about by poor eyesight. Inherently, from the get-go, it had some obvious links to the category. The endline of “Should’ve Gone to Specsavers” is now extremely famous among customers, and it would be easy for the optician brand to purely use it as an awareness-driving exercise (albeit one with broad category links).
Instead, it cleverly uses the platform to link to key Category Entry Points. For example, in one well-known ad, a boy inadvertently smashes up the shiny-looking family car after getting his toy car remote mixed up with the garage door operating remote. The ad ends with a Specsavers offer for children, where they get two pairs of glasses free at the opticians.
First and foremost, this ad is funny and builds on a platform established by the brand over many years. It also links to a Category Entry Point, reinforcing Specsavers’ mental availability, not just as an optician, but also in relation to children’s glasses and eyesight.
This layered approach, which utilises a consistent creative platform while anchoring it in specific buying moments, is the most effective approach for brands, whether big or small, challenger or category leader.
It’s not about eschewing awareness altogether; instead, it’s about driving relevant awareness to specific moments. Just because a consumer is aware of a brand does not mean it is coming to mind in the right moments.
Aiming to build awareness without relying on Category Entry Points is a path to limited relevance and potentially wasted budget. Regardless of category or brand size, brands that drive the most success aren’t just well-known; they’re known for something, at the right time.
Building awareness is still vital, but only when paired with relevance to Category Entry Points does it truly drive growth.
