5.1 Brand Awareness: Depth and Breadth
By definition, a brand is the kind, grade, or make of a product or service, as indicated by a stamp, trademark, or the like.1 In marketing, the concept of ‘brand’ stretches well beyond this narrow definition, though – it encompasses all of the ways that the consumer market perceives some particular type of product or service.
A brand’s breadth refers to the range of usage scenarios that consumers associate with the brand and its products.
When a brand has limited breadth, consumers associate it very narrowly with a specific type of product or service. When we think of Colgate, we think of toothpaste – not frozen dinners.2 When we think of Harley Davidson, we think of motorcycles – not perfumes and colognes. When we think of Intel, we think of computer chips – not potato chips. The list could go on and on.
When a brand has limited breadth, company initiatives to launch new products under that brand name (sometimes referred to as brand extensions) can be doomed to fail. However, limited breadth is not an entirely bad thing! If consumers associate your brand with a particular product so strongly that they cannot even conceive of it being used for other purposes, that means that the brand is uniquely powerful in this primary area. The vast majority of brands will never achieve this.
An example of such a brand is Clorox. Clorox, a multinational, consumer packaged goods conglomerate based in Oakland, CA, is strongly associated with bleach in the minds of many consumers. Clorox owns many different types of products, branded in many different types of ways. The image below shows just a sample of those products:
Looking at the labels on these products, you can see that Clorox retains its original brand name for bleach (the product featured second from the left, and second from the right, on the picture above). It also keeps the Clorox name for its disinfectant wipes, maintaining the association in the mind of consumers with the power to clean. This type of brand extension is akin to Gillette offering shaving cream in addition to its famous razors, or Energizer selling extension cords and power strips, which are easy to associate with its signature item, batteries.
With most of the other products, though, Clorox retains some other name (typically, the product’s original name, prior to its acquisition by the Clorox Corporation). Why does Clorox retain the “Burt’s Bees” brand, rather than use its own parent company name on the chapstick? Why is the “Hidden Valley” salad dressing not the “Clorox” salad dressing? In both of these cases, Clorox knows that its sales would plummet if it labeled the products with its parent company name. Even if customers were repeatedly assured that the company’s salad dressing and chapstick were completely free of bleach, the association between “Clorox” and “bleach” is just too strong to overcome.
Depth of brand awareness refers to how easily customers can remember or recognize a brand. Depth can be assessed through customer surveys and focus groups. For instance, a marketer could say “soda” and ask customers to think of as many brands as they could within a limited timeframe, such as 30 seconds. Repeating this activity many times, with many different consumers, would reveal how much more powerful brands such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Sprite are, relative to others like Royal Crown Cola, Tab, or Mr. Pibb.
1 https://www.dictionary.com/browse/brand
2 Chi, Clifford. “13 of the Most (& Least) Successful Brand Extensions to Inspire Your Own, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/brand-extensions