Brand awareness taps into our cognitive evolutionary traits to influence our buying habits. Find out how and why it works.
Marketing
From freeway billboards to soccer team jerseys to Formula 1 racecars and more, the average person sees an estimated 4,000–10,000 ads (and, by extension, brands) per day.
Brand awareness is one of the main pillars of any good marketing strategy. On the surface, it’s a pretty simple concept: the more people that see your logo, content or engage with your brand, the more likely they ultimately are to buy from you. However, good brand awareness does far more than get your name out there it taps into our lingering “cave person” instincts to establish an unconscious emotional connection to your brand and ultimately drive more people to purchase your products.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through this seemingly simple concept and dive deeper into its roots in social psychology to explain how and why it works.
To See the Power of a Brand
Here’s a quick exercise: How many of these logos do you recognize?
Some of them? All of them? None?
Even without any words, chances are that most of us out there can recognize many, if not all, of these logos. What’s more, just by looking at each logo, you can probably remember something about each one how you feel about it, what they sell, who their target audience is, etc.
Why is this?
Aside from the fact that these are some of the most popular companies out there today, they’ve all done a great job of putting their name and logo everywhere they possibly can. Their logos also tap into various psychological principles that make them instantly recognizable and trigger unconscious emotional responses that can influence our buying habits.
Social Psychology in Action
Marketing and social psychology are tightly intertwined. Here are the main principles that impact how we view a brand:
Mere Exposure Effect
The mere exposure effect is the primary principle behind brand awareness. It states that people tend to gravitate toward familiar things. This effect is linked to pattern recognition a skill humans evolved for survival.
Think of early humans needing to remember which berries were edible, what animals were dangerous, or where their food was stored. Recognizing patterns quickly was key to staying alive.
So today, this instinct shows up in how we respond to branding. The more times people see your brand, the more comfortable they feel with it which often translates into a purchase.
It’s estimated that it takes 5–7 impressions before consumers recognize a brand. Consistency is key. But beware of overexposure the optimal exposure range is around 10–20 before the benefit tapers off or even becomes annoying.
Heuristics
Heuristics are mental shortcuts our brains use to make fast decisions. They focus on the most relevant information in any situation.
In branding, this means people can make split-second judgments about your brand based on your logo or ad design often within 200 milliseconds, or less than the time it takes to blink.
A great brand doesn’t need text. It visually communicates safety, quality, relevance, or excitement within milliseconds. That’s the power of clean, recognizable branding.
Conclusion
Building a strong brand awareness strategy means leveraging human psychology. Focus on simple, visually recognizable branding, and stay consistent across platforms. Repetition builds trust, and trust builds preference.
Want a fun way to test your brand presence? Try a lighthearted tech stacking game like “ABM TechTris” and see how easily your brand stacks up in people’s minds.
