How to Run a Brand Awareness Survey in Six Steps

A brand awareness survey asks a defined group of people whether they know your brand, what they remember about it and what they link it to. You run one in six steps: set the question, choose who to ask, write the questions, collect enough answers, read the results against something, and decide what changes.

Awareness is the first thing a brand has to earn and the easiest to guess at. Followers, impressions and website visits all hint at it, but none of them asks a buyer anything.

A brand awareness survey does, which is why it gives you a number you can defend when you judge marketing campaigns and the wider marketing efforts behind them.

Measuring brand awareness helps businesses understand where their brand stands and what market position it holds. Brand awareness refers to how many people in your target group would pick you out from other brands, and the mental space you take up in consumers’ minds.

This guide shows how to measure brand awareness: the method, a bank of brand awareness survey questions you can copy, the brand awareness metrics to report, and sample sizes worked out so you know when you have enough responses.

A brand awareness survey measures recall, recognition and what people link to your name

Three things sit under the phrase. Each needs its own questions, because a person can know a name without being able to produce it from memory.

Brand recall is whether someone can name you without help. Asked “Which businesses come to mind for [category]?”, do they write your name? When they do, and you are first on the list, that is top of mind awareness. Researchers also call it unaided recall, and it is the strongest signal.

Brand recognition is whether someone knows you when they see your name on a list. This is aided awareness. It is easier to earn than recall, so the gap between the two tells you how much work your name still has to do.

Brand associations are the words and ideas people attach to you once they know you. They show brand perception: whether you are seen as reliable, expensive, local or the specialist.

Strong brand awareness means consumers remember your brand name and your key messages, and think of you as a first brand in the product or service category. Awareness, recall, recognition and consumer perception together give a more complete picture than any single score.

The survey is not the same thing as brand tracking, which is the habit of repeating measures over time. One survey is a snapshot. Repeated on a schedule, it becomes one of the brand tracking surveys that show a trend.

Run the survey in six steps

Each step ends with an output you keep. If a step has no output, it is not finished.

1. Write down the one decision the survey will inform

Start with the decision, not the questionnaire. “Are we known?” is too loose. “Should we spend next quarter’s budget on reaching new buyers or on convincing the ones who already know us?” is a decision.

Pick one. A survey that tries to answer everything ends up with long, tired respondents and answers nobody acts on.

Three decisions come up most often. Whether a launch or campaign changed awareness. Whether you are better known than a named competitor in one segment. Whether awareness is the problem at all, or whether people know you and still choose someone else.

Output: one sentence beginning “We will use this survey to decide whether to…”

2. Choose the target audience and how you will reach them

Your target audience is the people who could buy from you, not the people who already do. Surveying existing customers alone, or only current customers on your list, flatters you. Loyal customers know you, or they would not have bought.

Define the group in one line, such as “owners of businesses with 10 to 50 staff in Gaborone”, and ask a screening question at the start so that only target consumers carry on. Say who your intended audience is before you pick a tool.

Then choose channels. Your own email list reaches existing customers and contacts. Your social media followers already know you. To reach potential customers who have never heard of you, you need an outside group: a paid survey panel, a partner’s list, an industry association or a short intercept survey at an event.

Record where each answer came from, and say so if your sample is only your own followers.

Output: a one-line audience definition, a screening question and a list of channels.

3. Write the questions in the order people think

Order matters more than most writers expect. Ask unaided recall questions first, before any brand names appear on the screen. Once a person has seen a list of names, you can no longer test what they remembered unprompted.

The sequence that works:

1. Unaided recall: an open question about the category.
2. Aided awareness: a list of brands, yours included, among real competitors.
3. Familiarity: how familiar people are with each brand they recognised.
4. Associations and perception: what they link to you.
5. Consideration and loyalty: would they buy, and would they recommend. Brand loyalty and customer satisfaction questions belong here, not at the start.
6. Sources: where they first heard of you.
7. Classification: a few questions about the respondent.

Good brand survey questions are short, neutral and quick to answer. Overwhelming respondents is the quickest way to lose them, and completion rates fall as a survey grows. Aim for ten to fifteen questions, and use multiple choice wherever you can so the quantitative data is easy to compare.

Output: a questionnaire in that order, tested on three people who are not on your team.

4. Decide how many responses you need, then collect them

The answer depends on how precise you need to be, not on how big your market is. The table in the next section gives the numbers.

Run the survey for a fixed window, one to three weeks, and send one reminder. When you conduct brand awareness surveys, use an ordinary survey tool or one of the third party platforms that can screen for your audience. Any that supports skip logic, a screening question and randomised answer order will do.

Randomising the order of the brand list matters. People tend to pick names near the top, and a fixed order would hand that advantage to whichever brand you listed first.

Check as responses arrive. Remove those who finish in a few seconds or give the same answer to every question.

Output: a clean set of responses from your defined audience, with the date range and number recorded.

5. Read the results against something

A score alone tells you little. Say 28 per cent of your audience recognise your name. Is that good? That depends on who else they recognised, and what the figure was last time.

Work out four numbers:

• Unaided recall: the share who named you without help.
• Aided awareness: the share who recognised you from a list.
• The gap between them: aided awareness minus unaided recall shows how many people know you but do not think of you first.
• The same figures for two or three named competitors.

Then read the open answers for brand associations. Group them: reliable, premium, local, cheap, not sure. Count each group. Words you did not choose to be known for are the most useful finding, because they turn a score into actionable insights.

Output: one table of awareness figures, yours against other brands, and a short list of the associations people gave.

6. Turn the finding into a decision and set the date for the next survey

Go back to the sentence from step 1 and answer it. If recognition is high and recall is low, the name is familiar but not first. Building brand awareness at that point means repetition in the places your buyers look.

If awareness is high and consideration is low, reach is not the problem, and more of it will not help. Established businesses often find themselves here. Awareness sits at the start of the customer journey; the survey shows where people stop.

Write the decision, who owns it and the date you will survey again. Repeating the same questions to the same kind of audience, once or twice a year, turns a survey into a trend line.

Output: a decision, an owner and a date.

Sample sizes: how many responses make the number trustworthy

A survey result carries a margin of error. The standard formula, at 95 per cent confidence and a 50 per cent split (the most cautious assumption), is n = 1.96 squared times 0.25 divided by the margin squared. Adjusted for a small population, it gives these figures:

These are calculations, not survey findings. Read the first row like this: with 385 valid responses from a large audience, a result of 40 per cent could really be anywhere from about 35 to 45 per cent.

For most owners, 100 to 200 responses from the right people is a workable start. It will not detect small changes, but it will show whether awareness is closer to 10 per cent or 40.

Two cautions. These formulas assume a random sample, and an email list or social following is rarely random. Treat the margin as a floor, not a promise. And if you want to split results by segment, such as by city or company size, each segment needs enough responses of its own.

A question bank for the questionnaire

Copy these brand awareness questions and change the bracketed words. Each carries the type of answer to use.

Unaided recall (open text)

• When you think of [category], which brands or businesses come to mind? List up to three.
• Which [category] provider would you consider first?

Aided awareness (multiple choice, randomised, include a “none of these” option)

• Which of these have you heard of? Select all that apply.
• Include one fictitious name. Anyone who says they know it is guessing, and you can remove them.

Familiarity (single choice)

• How familiar are you with [Brand]? Never heard of it, heard the name only, know a little, know it well, or have used it.

Associations and perception (choose up to three)

• Which of these words best describe [Brand]? Reliable, expensive, modern, local, specialist, friendly, not sure.
• What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear [Brand]? (open text)

Consideration and loyalty (scale)

• How likely are you to consider [Brand] the next time you need [category]? Very unlikely to very likely.
• How likely are you to recommend [Brand] to a colleague? Zero to ten.

Source (multiple choice)

• Where did you first hear about [Brand]? Search, social media, a referral, an event, an advert, other.

Classification (single choice)

• Your role, the size of your business and your sector. Ask these last, and keep them to what you need.

The first three groups alone make a working brand awareness questionnaire. The rest adds depth about brand perception and customer loyalty.

A worked case: how the State of Botswana Branding survey made its choices

Brandesis is running its own survey as this article is published, which makes it a useful example of the choices in the steps above.

The State of Botswana Branding asks owners, managing directors and marketing leads in Botswana what they spend on brand and what they regret. It is not a brand awareness survey, but it shows the design decisions in one place.

It is anonymous: no name, email or phone number is collected with the answers. It has 21 questions in six sections, and the page says it takes about fifteen minutes. It closes on Monday 30 November, with the report due in December.

Money questions use bands rather than blanks, for example “P25,000 to P100,000”, because a band is easier to answer than an exact figure.

No results have been published at the time of writing, so there are no findings to report. What you can borrow now is the structure: a defined audience, short sections, banded answers and an honest note on how long it takes.

A survey earns its cost when it sits beside your other signals

A survey is a snapshot of belief, and it gives valuable insights for marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. Pair it with signals you already have.

Branded search volume, the number of searches that include your business name, shows whether interest is moving. Search engines, direct visits and enquiries show whether it turns into action. The survey explains why, because it captures customer perceptions and the customer experience behind the numbers.

For the link between awareness and price, read brand equity: why it decides what you can charge.

To place the survey inside the wider job of running a brand, see what is brand management. For the other ways to measure it, how to measure the ROI of brand awareness campaigns covers traffic, mentions and search.

Brandesis brand strategy work starts from positioning, which is what a survey tests. Without a clear position, a low awareness score has no meaning, because you do not know what people should be recalling.

The free Brand Strategy Blueprint ebook and workbook sets out the position, voice and decisions you would measure against. If you would like the next idea each Wednesday, join the Ground Truth newsletter.

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