The power of brand recognition
Understanding how mere recognition impacts your brand and business
Brand recognition is one of five contributors to brand value that Referent considers during a rebranding or brand optimization project. This guide will help you understand several important ideas around brand recognition including:
What brand recognition is (and isn’t)
How brand recognition contributes to brand value
How to measure and protect recognition
How to optimize your brand for recognition
By the end, you’ll think differently about the powerful effect recognition has on customer behavior. And when you need to refresh, reposition, or reimagine your brand, you’ll be better able to manage and protect recognition.
The “Hey I know you” effect
It’s easy to confuse brand recognition with brand awareness. Fortunately, people relate to brands with the same psychological toolkit we evolved to relate to other people. So thinking about social interactions can be a helpful shortcut to intuiting how recognition works. Looking through that lens, here’s how I think about brand awareness and brand recognition:
Brand Awareness is like seeing an acquaintance or friend. You know a bit about them. You even think about them when they’re not around.
Brand Recognition is like seeing someone in a crowd and saying, “Hey I know you!” You then recall their name and strike up a conversation.
Brand recognition is the lowest threshold of brand awareness. That may not sound very useful, but it is, especially for small-to-medium businesses that are not household names. Without enormous marketing budgets to brute force your way to broad brand awareness, recognition may be the form of awareness that contributes the most to the value and power of your brand.
Our brains trust what they recognize
With recognition, your brand stands out from the competition in the same way that a familiar face stands out in a room full of strangers. Even if you know barely anything about the familiar person, when faced with the choice of who to strike up a conversation with first, you are significantly more likely to approach them than a total stranger.
And that effect is why brand recognition contributes to brand value—it drives engagement and begins the path to purchase. Recognition by itself isn’t enough to make strong connections with consumers, but without recognition, those connections are impossible.
To understand why the “hey, I know you” effect is so powerful, we need look no further than our own brains. This effect actually has a name: the mere-exposure effect. First proposed by social psychologist Robert Zajonc, it is the tendency to prefer things merely because they are familiar. Not because they’re better. Or have more features. Just pure, instinctive familiarity.
This preference for the familiar is likely our brain’s shortcut to avoiding risk without thinking too hard. The tests used to demonstrate the mere-exposure effect showed that a totally novel, unfamiliar stimulus provoked a fear/avoidance response in mammals. Call this the “Who the heck are you?” response, if you like. This response diminished with each subsequent exposure. It seems familiarity tells our brains, “This one is safer.”
Most of the time, we trust our brain’s opinion and go with the familiar.
Measuring brand recognition
Entrepreneurs are busy and don’t always love fielding tests. It takes time and money and sometimes tells you what you already know. I get that. But this one is important. Measuring brand recognition provides two main benefits:
It helps you prioritize efforts by revealing whether recognition is a relative strength of your brand or a growth opportunity.
It tells you the exact brand identity elements that recognition is tied to, giving critical guidance to future brand transformation
Without measuring recognition, it’s easy to focus efforts in the wrong place and even easier to unknowingly break the fragile threads of recognition that tie your audience to your brand.
In the simplest form, a brand recognition test could involve showing several logos within a category to a consumer and asking them to identify which brands they recognize. This would reveal how strongly you are recognized, but it wouldn’t demonstrate which elements are recognized due to the fact that a logo combines your name, a design, and a color palette into a single stimulus.
Instead, it’s much more informative to test each element separately. For example:
First test unaided recall (awareness), then
Your name in simple, black type
Your logo in black and white
Your logo in color
Etc…
The results from such a survey can inform a creative brief with critical information about what to change and what to retain. When rebranding, protecting recognition should be a key consideration.
Protecting brand recognition
Many brands replace dated, recognized identities with attractive, unrecognized identities and are shocked when sales nose-dive. Even if the new identity is better than the old one—even if consumers said they prefer it over the old identity—they may not follow through and buy it simply because they don’t recognize it in a real-world scenario.
This is one of many examples where asking consumers what they prefer can be misleading.
Recognition is crucial in categories like consumer packaged goods, where instant visual recognition is the primary tool shoppers use to get your brand into their cart. But it’s just as emotionally relevant in high-trust, big-ticket categories where sudden, disjointed change can signal instability.
Reach, frequency, recognizability
When marketers think about building awareness and recognition, they typically focus on reach and frequency—showing the brand to more people, more times.
Impressions do build recognition, but they’re only half the picture.
The other half is about how recognizable the content being shown is—in particular, how recognizable the brand is since this is the place where recognition will reside after a campaign has run its course.
I believe a significant gap exists between brands that are not very recognizable and brands that are; they are not created equal. That gap significantly influences how effective each impression is at building recognition.
When rebranding, Referent looks for opportunities to optimize how recognizable a brand is. This can be achieved in two ways:
Increase the number of brand assets that are recognizable
Increase the recognizability of each asset
Building recognition beyond logos
For the first way, it’s helpful to remember that people identify brands in many different ways beyond just names and logos.
Here are some examples of brand assets that have the potential to be recognizable, along with brands that have done a good job leveraging them:
Color palette | Dunkin’ | Orange and pink
Tagline | McDonald’s | I’m Lovin’ It
Tone of voice | Dove | Supportive, authentic
Product design | Apple | Minimal, aluminum
Photography style | Patagonia | Journalistic, adventurous
Architecture & Interiors | Chipotle | Material selection, variety
Sound | Netflix | “Tadum”
Jingle | State Farm | “Like a good neighbor…”
Uniform | Brazil National Football Team | Yellow, green and blue
Package shape | Coca-cola | Contour bottle
The world’s most powerful brands leverage not just one or two, but nearly all of these elements as opportunities to be recognized. Think about Apple and go through that list again. Even the Mac startup sound is a registered trademark.
It didn’t have to make a sound. But it does, and for those who recognize it, it says, “Apple.”
Each newly recognized element creates a thread of trust between your brand and your audience. In most cases, these elements already exist, but they are more or less generic. These missed opportunities are literally leaving brand value on the table.
Making brand assets sticky
The second way to optimize your brand for recognition is to make each identity element more recognizable. Since recognizability is the ability to recall having seen (or heard) an identity element before, a highly recognizable brand asset has these traits:
Noticeable: it is different enough to command our attention
Memorable: some aspect—an idea, a shape, a color—can be recalled later
Distinctive: it isn’t easily confused with other elements
Each of these traits, in turn, can be improved through a well-informed creative process. For example, an identity element will be more noticeable when it is more novel. So when designing or evolving a logo, it’s a good idea to emphasize its unique qualities and simplify the rest.
As a side note, there is a tension between the creative goals of noticeability, which increases with novelty, and trust, which decreases with novelty. I’ve termed this tension the “novelty sweet spot” and it will be the subject of a future article. For now, it’s important to point out that identity elements should feel a little too novel upon first exposure, as this novelty will wane on subsequent exposures and we don’t want it to function like a gum that loses its flavor after a couple chews.
Memorability is influenced in many ways, but one of the primary drivers of memorability is simplicity. Why? Because a simple logo, jingle, or color palette is less expensive to store in memory, so our brains are happy to hang on to them. This is one reason that I strongly emphasize beginning logo designs as simple sketches. If the essence can be conveyed in a simple sketch, the idea is likely simple enough for an audience to remember later.
Making an asset distinctive is closely related to making it noticeable, and it is often in tension with simplicity. A key insight here is that distinctive-ness usually arises from some combination of creative choices, not just one. A square is not distinctive. The color green is not distinctive. But H&R Block’s green square is. This insight allows us to thread the needle and create brand identity elements that are simple and distinctive.
Putting recognition to work
Let’s summarize what we’ve covered:
Brand recognition is when someone sees your brand and says, “Hey, I know you!”
Recognition is especially important for small-to-medium businesses
The mere-exposure effect means that our brains prefer things just because they recognize them
People are far more likely to buy what they recognize
This preference is a risk-mitigation strategy
Measuring brand recognition is critical for setting priorities
Protecting hard-won recognition should be a key goal during rebranding
Marketing is more effective when the brand being marketed is more recognizable
Recognizability can be optimized by creating more recognizable identity elements
It can also be optimized by making each identity element more sticky
With these tools in your toolkit, you’re better positioned to manage recognition of your own brand. But, as mentioned at the start of this article, recognition is one of five contributors to brand value. The second, relevance, will be addressed in a future article.
By Aaron Tovi
10/25/24
