Your brand is essentially how you want to convey your company to the public, and how people associate with your company. It’s important to make sure that consumers are aware of exactly what your brand is. Even if your brand is small and may not quite reach the eponym status of Pepsi or Kleenex, there are ways to make sure that people understand who you are and what you do. However, it’s first important to make the differentiation between consumer recognition of your brand and consumer awareness.
Brand recognition is how easily a consumer can recognize your brand based on visual indicators like logo, color scheme, etc. For example, if you are driving through a town and you see green and white on a gas station in the distance, you can automatically associate that with BP. Brand recognition is very important for your brand image; however, brand awareness takes this a full step further.
Brand awareness is the consumer’s ability to recall not just the business’s name when seeing its visual indicators, but also the general feelings associated with the business, its products and services, and other experiential details. For example, when you see that green and white and recognize BP, your brand awareness would have you associate the gas station brand with a certain experience you had there. If you found a really good deal on gas at BP compared to Shell down the road, you would have a positive brand association with their company. When a business can dictate a certain level of awareness, its marketing and advertising mean something to its audience. They bring out certain feelings and emotions in the viewer.
It should be the goal of every business to first create a brand that is easily recognized by customers, and then turn that recognition into awareness through effective marketing and advertising campaigns.
Sources:
https://simplicable.com/new/brand-recognition-vs-brand-awareness
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/10/brand-awareness