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Brand Awareness Surveys: Definition, Survey Questions & Examples

How to Conduct Brand Awareness Surveys

Every beverage company wants to be the next Coca-Cola. Every search engine wants to be Google. Every online marketplace wants to be Amazon (sorry eBay!).

In today’s competitive market, where some brands sell like crazy and others find it difficult to survive even for a couple of days, how do you measure the success of your brand? Well, brand awareness surveys can hold the right answer. 

“It is natural for you to know about your brand inside-out. But what about your target audience? Do they know you exist? Do they know you have a product/service that can solve their problem?”

Brand awareness survey questions can help you understand how customers perceive your brand, how well they recognize your logo or other branding aspects, and the quality of relationship they share with your company. 

If you are looking to measure your marketing efforts and create beautiful surveys, this blog is for you. We will understand the importance of brand surveys, explore the various types, questions, examples, and finally learn how to conduct brand awareness survey in simple steps. 

Here we go!

What Is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness refers to the extent to which your customers know about your brand and your product or service offerings. It is a direct reflection of how visible or invisible you are to them and whether your brand is the first one to pop in their minds when they think of their problems (for example, buying a new dress or getting their mobile phone repaired). 

You cannot push your product one day and be gone the next. For best results, you need to be consistent in your marketing and branding efforts. 

Now, when you are buying something like a phone cover, you might simply go for the design rather than paying much attention to the brand. But what about your phone? How much does the brand matter to you in this case? 

According to a Statista study. 68% of consumers pay particular attention to the brand when buying electronic goods.

How do you know whether you are hitting the sweet spot that is somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” as far as your branding efforts are concerned? 

For this, all you need to do is conduct a brand awareness survey!

What Is a Brand Survey?

A brand awareness survey helps you gauge how familiar your ideal customers are with your brand as compared to your competitors. If you want, you can expand the playing field, and also include employees, prospects, and stakeholders to analyze their perception of your brand. 

The best part is these surveys can be created and shared online with tools like ProProfs Survey MakerHere is a brand awareness survey example:

Brand awareness survey questionnaire

But how do these surveys help you with brand awareness research? What other benefits do they offer? The next section of this blog answers these questions precisely.

What Are the Benefits of a Brand Awareness Survey for Business?

Many small to mid-size companies don’t have the level of brand presence of something like Apple or Amazon. However, when these popular brands began their journey, just a handful of people knew about them. Among the various brand awareness methods, surveys are preferred due to their various advantages. Let’s discuss some of these benefits right away.

Understand Brand Recognition

A carefully prepared brand awareness survey questionnaire can help you understand how many people recognize your brand. For instance, you can share surveys with the picture of your logo or other branding components and see how many people can identify your company. 

You can even see if customers are able to recognize your competitors better than your own brand. This will mean that people might have heard about your brand, however, they still don’t have enough knowledge to recognize it.

Low Cost

Surveying your target audience does not cost a fortune. With the help of the right survey maker tool, you can easily share brand awareness survey questions. 

If you have a large target audience, interviewing every single person and asking them how much they know about your brand is simply not possible. Imagine the time and money you will have to spend to arrange interviews, interviewers, refreshment meals, and so on. On the contrary, a survey can be prepared in minutes and shared in seconds with the right people.

Share Via Multiple Channels

Online brand awareness surveys can be shared via multiple digital channels. You can share it as a link via email, text message, or live chat. You can even embed the survey on your website and gauge the knowledge or sentiments of customers towards your brand. 

If your brand has an impressive following on social media, you can even share these surveys on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms. A 360-degree approach will help you reach, engage, and survey your target audience in the best possible way. For maximum responses, you can even offer discount coupons or other relevant rewards.

Analyze Brand Awareness Stats

Surveys can present your team with all the data they need to understand your brand’s presence, perception, identity, and other metrics. 

A brand awareness survey report can help you see the number of people who attempted your survey, when they took it, and also the number of people who opened the survey but did not complete it. You can analyze the responses with easy-to-understand graphs, charts, or other visualizations. Now, unlike direct interviews that are known for biases, brand awareness surveys are reliable, unbiased, and great for scientific research.

Types of Brand Awareness Surveys

Although you can use a variety of questions to understand brand awareness, there are broadly two kinds of surveys: unaided and aided brand awareness surveys. Let’s understand both types in detail:

1. Unaided Brand Awareness Survey

Unaided awareness surveys help you measure brand awareness without directly mentioning your brand. In such surveys, questions do not prompt the reader to think about your brand and therefore, you can get unbiased results. These are usually open-ended questions where the response is shared in a comment or text box. Let’s understand this better with examples.

Some top examples of unaided brand awareness survey questions:

  1. What brand comes to mind when you think of leather bags?
  2. Which fashion apparel brands are you familiar with?
  3. Which brand do you prefer when shopping for sports gear?

2. Aided Brand Awareness Survey

Aided awareness surveys measure brand awareness by directly mentioning your brand name to customers. You can use this survey to see whether customers recognize your brand or not. These are usually closed-ended questions, where you mention your company’s name along with other close competitors. 

Examples of aided brand awareness survey questions:

  1. Which of the following fast food restaurants have you heard of? (Select all that apply)
  • Burger King
  • Mc Donald’s
  • (Insert your brand name here)
  • Subway
  • Taco Bell

2. Which brands do you consider when buying fashion apparel? 

  • Tomy Hilfiger
  • Levi Strauss & Co.
  • (Insert your brand name here)
  • Ralph Lauren
  • American Eagle

Brand Awareness Survey Metrics

Before we lay out the survey questions to ask when you conduct a brand awareness survey, let’s look at some valuable brand awareness metrics. These metrics will help you know the truth about your marketing efforts. Here are 7 metrics you need to consider:

  • Brand Recognition

Is your ideal customer able to recognize your brand amongst a list of competitors? Brand recognition is different from brand awareness. While people might be aware your brand exists, they might still not be able to recognize it after seeing your logo or other branding components.

  • Brand Identity

What is your marketing team creating? Does your brand have a strong personality? (strong does not necessarily mean loud). Does your brand have a story that people connect with? How do you want your brand to be perceived?

  • Brand Image

How well customers understand your identity. The lesser the disparity between image and identity, the more successful your marketing and branding efforts are. For business success, you need to create a positive brand image among your audience.

  • Brand Recall

Does your brand spring to customers’ minds when they think of the problem that you provide solutions for? Customers should not forget about your brand, especially, when they are actively looking for the products or services you offer.

  • Brand Trust

How much do customers trust your brand with their time and money? In today’s age, high brand trust = higher customer retention. Well-trusted brands are known for impeccable customer service and are always eager to support customers whenever something goes wrong.

  • Brand Loyalty

Do customers return to your business to buy more? Do they look forward to the next thing you’re creating and selling? Do they promote your brand to their friends and family members even without being asked?

  • Customer Persona

Who is your ideal customer exactly? Maybe you have been misreading them and their buying process. Depending on the same, you might need to alter your ways just so you and your customers can be more aligned.

Brand Awareness Survey Questions

Here are the questions to ask for each parameter. They’ve been optimized for each metric to help you derive the most valuable answers when you conduct brand awareness surveys.

  • Brand Recognition

Here, you will measure aided brand awareness. This means: when prompted with a list of brands that make products in a particular category, how well is the customer able to recognize your brand?

The question: How familiar are you with these brands in the <product category>?
As options, you can offer a Likert scale, ranging from “extremely familiar” to “not at all familiar.

  • Brand Identity

This question can be asked to both your employees and customers.

Questions for employees:

  1. Do you think the brand has a strong narrative? A strong personality? 
  2. How do you want the brand to be perceived by the customer?

Questions for customers: 

  1. XYZ <your company’s name> makes the world a better place. 
  2. XYZ is the perfect company for people like me. 
  3. I can’t imagine a world without XYZ.

For such questions, you can give them options to agree or disagree.

  • Brand Image

When people make a purchase, it is because people like the image that your brand has in their minds. Hence, it is imperative to know which traits of your identity are leading customers to make a purchase and which aren’t.

The question: When you think of <your brand>, what comes to your mind?

You can leave the question open-ended or give a list of brand traits. Pay close attention to how the answers given by your customers differ from the ones who are still at the top of the funnel.

  • Brand Recall

Just as you measured aided brand awareness for brand recognition, you can measure unaided brand awareness for brand recall. This will give you clarity as to whether you have become the go-to brand for your customers. It’s a crucial metric when you conduct brand awareness surveys.

The question: When you think of <your brand’s product category>, which brands come to your mind? Why do you prefer them?

If they say your brand’s name, throw confetti! Your marketing and branding efforts have been successful.

Bonus Read: How to Write Good Customer Survey Questions

  • Brand Trust

Brand trust is another key metric to track when you conduct a brand awareness survey.

The question: 

  1. XYZ always delivers what it promises. 
  2. XYZ is a brand I can always trust unquestioningly.
  3. XYZ company offers reliable support to customers. 

You can use the 5-point Likert scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” to quantify answers.

  • Brand Loyalty

It is challenging to cultivate brand loyalty in today’s customers, where options are aplenty. But it is not impossible. You need to consistently deliver value (monetary, educational, emotional) to gain loyalty from your customers. 

The question:

  1. How likely are you to recommend XYZ to a friend/ relative? (classic NPS question)
  2. Would you return to purchase something else from XYZ?
  3. How many times have you purchased from our brand in the past few months? 
  • Customer Persona

For each of the above questions, you should know complete details about your customers, so that you can serve them better the next time.

The questions:

Basic demographic questions (where your customers live, how old they are, where they work, what they do in their free time, etc.)

  1. In which city are you currently residing?
  2. What is the highest degree or level of education you have completed?
  3. Which languages are you capable of speaking fluently?

Brand-related questions (have prospects purchased anything from your brand previously? What has motivated/ demotivated them?)

  1. How many times do you shop online?
  2. Do you prefer online or offline shopping?
  3. What motivates you to buy our product/services? 

Brand Awareness Survey Templates

Expert-designed templates can make it much easier for entrepreneurs or marketers to conduct their brand awareness research. Let’s look at some brand awareness templates that will help you get started and capture the right information.

Q. 1 How often have you used product XYZ in the past? 

  • Never
  • Rarely
  • Sometimes
  • Frequently
  • Always

Q.2 What is the first brand that pops up in your mind when you think of [PRODUCT NAME/CATEGORY]? 

  • Brand A
  • Brand B
  • [Your Brand]
  • Brand D
  • Brand E

Q3. How likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends or colleagues? 

0-10 NPS  rating scale 

Q4. How familiar are you with our brand [BRAND NAME]?

  • Extremely familiar
  • Very familiar
  • Moderately familiar
  • Slightly familiar
  • Not at all familiar

Q5. What aspects of our company are you attracted to the most? 

  • Easy Availability
  • Overall Design
  • Superior Quality
  • Reliable Features
  • Others

Q6. Do you agree with the following statement: [BRAND NAME] is the perfect company for people like me. 

  • Yes 
  • No

Q7. How has our [PRODUCT/BRAND NAME] made a difference in your life? What problems are you solving? 

*Comment Box*

How to Create Brand Awareness Survey

Conducting a brand awareness survey is very easy. However, before you begin you need to be sure of two things: your goal and who your target audience is. Your goal can be to understand brand recognition, how people perceive your brand, or what aspects they find the most interesting. Similarly, your target audience can be women, teenagers, adults, people residing in a particular city, etc. 

Once you are sure of these aspects, you can use a free survey software such as ProProfs Survey Maker. Let’s understand how to create brand awareness surveys in 3 simple steps: 

Step 1: On your ProProfs Survey Maker Dashboard, click Create a Survey. Then click on the + Create from Scratch button to get started.

Brand awareness templates

Step 2: Now, you’ll arrive in the editor where you can add several elements to your survey like questions, themes, branding, logo, and so on. Choose a relevant question type such as multiple-choice, checkbox, NPS scale, rating scale, etc. Make sure you include both aided as well as unaided brand awareness questions.

Create brand awareness survey

Step 3: Once you are happy with your questions, click Preview to see how the survey will appear to the viewer. Now, click Done. Congratulations, your survey is ready to use! You can easily send this survey to your audience via email, embed it on your website, or share it on social media platforms. Yes, it’s really that simple!

share brand awareness survey

Rise Above Competition With a Brand Awareness Survey

The right questionnaire for brand awareness survey can help you find out what consumers think of your brand, how loyal they feel, and how much they trust you. You need to conduct these surveys from time to time, especially, after marketing campaigns or events to gauge your efforts. 

You can use the brand awareness survey samples mentioned in this blog to get started. Feel free to tweak the questions according to your needs and remember to include both open and closed-ended questions. 

Now, that you know about what a brand awareness survey is, and why it is important, it’s time you start creating it. Doing so will give you in-depth knowledge about where you rank in your customers’ minds and what you can do to improve that position.

Always remember, knowledge is power!

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About the author

Jared is a customer support expert. He has been published in CrazyEgg, Foundr, and CXL. As a customer support executive at ProProfs, he has been instrumental in developing a complete customer support system that more than doubled customer satisfaction. You can connect and engage with Jared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.