Building Brands Is More Than Building Awareness

AIDA is a seasoned marketing acronym for Awareness (sometimes Attention), Interest, Desire and Action. It represents a sequential cognitive process that consumers normally traverse before making a purchase– more specifically for a high involvement product. Marketing is a process that is intended to shorten the distance between awareness and action – or at least it should be. According to the AIDA formula, consumers must be made aware of your brand/product. Then organizations need to create interest, which will hopefully lead to a desire to purchase the product, and ultimately spur action (sales and ROI).

In the era of brand managers, people with this title or function were principally tasked with, and evaluated on, their ability to build awareness. While the AIDA formula is still a useful model to describe the marketing and sales funnel, the concept of brand managers – and awareness building as its principle function – is in need of fundamental change. Why is this?

First, as just about everybody has concluded, the consumer is in control. With the continuing expansion of social media, this trend is accelerating even more. There isn’t enough money or influence in any corporate marketing budget to “manage the brand.” Consequently, the term (and past function) of brand manager is outdated. As prominent organizations such as Forrester have concluded, the people previously thought of as brand managers, now need to be thought of more as “brand advocates.” In a new report titled, “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach To Brands In The Digital Age,” Forrester emphasizes that these new brand advocates need to focus more on actionable and real-time consumer intelligence to build brand equity than on creating awareness or relying on “impressions” to affect positive results.

The second reason is that while awareness is still necessary to start the whole buying cycle, it isn’t enough to persuade the upper echelons of leadership and management in most large companies to fund the beginning of the cycle without knowing if it is having a tangible and positive effect on sales. Awareness alone is difficult to take to the bank when you are arguing for more marketing resources. Business, prompted by a nasty recession, has become much more attentive to the action end of this AIDA equation. Awareness is no guarantee that the rest of the process will take place. For example, people may be aware of bad drywall from China, but they have no interest or desire to find and purchase it.

Many might argue that the job of marketing, advertising and PR is not only to promote awareness, but also create interest and desire. That is certainly a reasonable expectation, but in an era when consumers are mostly in control of the messaging, it is more difficult for corporate marketing to affect this result exclusively. In addition, interest and desire have the same drawbacks that awareness does: they are difficult to measure in real time. Often awareness research results are presented long after marketing campaigns have concluded – far too late to make changes that would improve current outcomes.

Lastly, brand equity is never built solely or principally through marketing, advertising or awareness. Yes, marketing tools can, and often should, begin the process, but ultimately brand equity is determined by product quality, utility, customer service, innovation, trust, relevance, convenient distribution, value pricing, and listening to the consumer. A central function of the new brand advocate’s role is listening to what consumers are saying, not only verbally, but also with their dollars. According to Forrester, to enjoy success in this role, brand advocates will need real-time metrics that help them interpret marketing actions and quickly fine-tune efforts for even better outcomes.

The AIDA process is still a useful construct. What many are now beginning to realize is that one of the best ways to ensure increasing awareness is to measure actions in real time, gather insights from those results and use the information to create relevant, attention-getting messages that will attract more awareness in the future.