How to build brand awareness?

Brand Awareness: The Overlooked Powerhouse of Marketing

Brand awareness often gets sidelined in marketing conversations, seen as a low-value metric compared to more conversion-driven goals. Many marketers dismiss it as a mere stepping stone in the funnel or a vanity KPI. But in reality, brand awareness is not just about recognition—it’s about memory, and it underpins the entire effectiveness of marketing efforts. Maintaining a website that reflects current B2B web design trends will strengthen your brand’s online image and support your overall brand awareness efforts.

The True Role of Brand Awareness

When we talk about brand awareness, we typically reduce it to “Do people recognize our brand?” While recognition is an early indicator of brand marketing success, the deeper and more strategic value of brand awareness lies in memory-building.

For a brand to be successful, it must not only be recognized but also recalled when it matters most. This means planting memories in consumers’ minds, associating the brand with relevant situations, and making it easier for people to access those memories at decision-making moments. Without this foundational work, all subsequent marketing efforts—demand generation, lead nurturing, and conversion—operate on shaky ground.

Brand Marketing is Memory Engineering

Brand marketing isn’t just about making people feel something about your brand—it’s about making them remember it. The ultimate goal is to ensure that when a need arises, your brand is top of mind.

To achieve this, three critical elements must be in place:

1. Situational Focus: Clearly defining the scenarios in which your brand should be recalled. Are you the go-to brand for quick, reliable software solutions? Or the first choice for sustainable fashion? Identifying these moments ensures your brand is anchored in consumer decision-making.
2. Creativity for Memory Generation: Not all marketing leaves an impression. The best campaigns create strong, memorable moments through distinctive storytelling, humor, emotional resonance, or visual uniqueness.
3. Distinctive Brand Assets: Logos, colors, taglines, sounds, and even brand characters serve as memory shortcuts. The most effective brands build and reinforce these assets across every touchpoint, ensuring brand cohesion and recall.

The Misconception of Vanity Metrics

Brand awareness is often dismissed as an abstract or immeasurable effort, leading some to deprioritize it in favor of direct-response tactics. However, just because brand awareness doesn’t always provide immediate, trackable ROI doesn’t mean it lacks value. If anything, its impact is vast and long-term—enabling all downstream marketing efforts to succeed.

Of course, there are cases of poorly executed or unfocused marketing efforts that claim to build brand awareness but lack strategic direction. But this does not undermine the importance of the discipline itself. The failure of bad marketing is not a failure of brand awareness as a concept—it’s a failure of execution.

Brand Awareness is the Foundation

Conversions don’t happen in a vacuum. Behind every purchase decision is a network of prior exposures, subconscious memories, and brand associations. Without a strong foundation of awareness, even the most aggressive performance marketing efforts will struggle to yield sustainable success.

Marketers who dismiss brand awareness do so at their own peril. The brands that dominate their industries are not just the ones with the best products or the most aggressive sales teams—they are the ones that have invested in being remembered when it matters most. And that is anything but a vanity metric.

Why Brand Awareness Is the First Marketing Problem to Solve

Contrary to popular belief, buyers rarely make decisions based solely on features, pricing, or the immediate strength of the offer. In most B2B categories—especially those involving complex, high-stakes decisions—the evaluation process doesn’t start at the point of conversion. It begins much earlier, in the buyer’s mental shortlist of known brands.

This shortlist acts as a mental filter, guiding what solutions even get considered. And unless your brand is already on this list, even the most compelling offer might never get noticed—let alone evaluated.

The more complex, expensive, or risky the purchase decision, the more critical it is for your brand to be in that early mental set. Which means that being known precedes being chosen.

The Misguided Focus on Conversion-First Strategy

Many companies approach marketing backwards. They begin with the conversion and try to reverse-engineer the buyer journey: “What messages or proof points will get someone to fill out a form or request a demo?”

While this approach serves sales enablement, it fails to address the market growth challenge. It might help close deals that are already inbound—but it does little to increase how many buyers are even considering you in the first place.

This is why brand awareness is not a fluffy metric—it is the foundation of demand creation and long-term market share growth.

Breaking In from the Outside

All brands begin their journey from the outside—unknown, unconsidered, and untrusted. Initially, every company has to earn its way into the buyer's mental model. But at some point, a shift needs to occur:

Instead of playing only inside the funnel—optimizing conversion paths, tweaking CTAs, or personalizing nurture emails—the strategy must pivot outward.

That shift marks the inflection point: when a brand starts treating awareness and mental availability as the core levers of growth.

It requires a clear understanding of:

• How your market actually buys
• The way buying decisions are formed and filtered
• The inertia of existing brand preferences
• The sheer difficulty of entering the consideration set

This Is a Brand Challenge, Not Just a Performance One

At this growth stage, what’s needed is not just better targeting or sharper sales decks—it’s a brand marketing approach that is intentionally designed to:

• Grow spontaneous recall
• Increase mental availability
• Build positive associations with key buying moments
• Measure share of mind (not just share of wallet)

Owning and growing market share requires being known, being remembered, and being trusted—before the buying cycle even begins.

Why This Matters

If you're not investing in brand, you’re always competing from a weak position—scrambling to get invited to the table, fighting objections, and relying on logic to overcome emotional preference.

You might find more deals to enter, but you're always entering them late, as the outsider.

The real opportunity lies in flipping that dynamic: becoming the brand that sets the terms, not reacts to them. The brand that gets called first. The brand that's already trusted—before the buyer even knows exactly what they need.

Fame First, Sales Second: Why Brand Awareness is the First Step to Growth

Ever try to buy something you’ve never heard of?

Exactly. You didn’t.

In a world overloaded with choice, attention is the real currency. Before loyalty, before trust, before conversion — there’s recognition. People can’t buy from a brand they don’t know exists. Which is why, long before your audience becomes a customer, they need to become aware of you.

Branding isn’t just about selling. It’s about being seen, being talked about, and more importantly, being remembered.

A brand doesn’t exist solely to serve its customers — it exists to create conversations, provoke reactions, and build familiarity. You’re not just competing on price or product anymore. You’re competing for mindshare. And if your brand doesn’t show up boldly, it risks fading into the background noise of the market.

This is where creativity steps in. Its role is not to explain, but to evoke. To stir something in people before they’ve even thought about making a purchase. A sharp visual. A witty phrase. A powerful belief. A distinctive tone. That’s what lingers.

In branding, whispering doesn’t work. You have to broadcast your truth — with courage, clarity and conviction. The goal is simple: become known for something, to someone. Because when people know you, they’re more likely to talk about you. And when they talk, others listen.

That’s how brands grow: through fame. And fame isn't vanity — it's velocity.

So before you chase conversions, chase conversations.

What brand got your attention, long before it earned your money?
Chances are, it didn’t wait quietly in the corner. Neither should you.

B2b Brand Awareness Is Not Just Advertising

When we talk about brand awareness, most marketers’ minds immediately go to advertising. More media spend, more impressions, more recall. But that’s only a sliver of the story.

No one buys a brand they don’t know exists. The real question is: how do people come to know that a brand exists at all?

The answer is: there are five pathways to brand awareness—and only one of them involves advertising.

The Five Pathways to Awareness

1. Advertising

The most obvious route. Paid campaigns put your brand in front of people, creating the chance for memory formation. But advertising alone cannot guarantee sustained awareness, especially if other exposure channels are weak.

2. Word-of-Mouth (WoM)

Dark social—conversations among friends, colleagues, communities—remains one of the most powerful ways people discover brands. Trust in recommendations is disproportionately higher than in ads, and memories formed here often last longer.

3. Exposure via the Purchase Process

When a buyer comes into the market, they’re exposed to a set of brands presented during their research or at the point of sale. Each exposure reinforces or refreshes brand memories, but only if the brand actually makes it into that subset of consideration.

4. Incidental Exposure

This is when people see a brand “in the wild”: a Lexus NX driving down the street, a colleague carrying a Yeti bottle, or spotting a Dyson at a friend’s home. These moments are subtle but powerful—they make the brand real, familiar, and memorable without any ad spend.

5. Prior Direct Product Usage

The strongest form of awareness. Having lived experience with a brand cements it into memory far more reliably than any ad. Once someone has used the product, that awareness becomes nearly permanent—even if they don’t buy again.

The Market Share Constraint

Here’s the catch: all five pathways are limited by your existing share of market (SoM).

Take Aston Martin in the US. Its SoM is tiny compared to Toyota or Lexus. That means:

• Fewer cars on the road → fewer incidental exposures.
• Fewer owners → less chance of WoM.
• Lower probability of being presented during a standard car purchase journey.
• Fewer past users → smaller base of direct product experience.

Advertising suffers from the same constraint. A small market share means limited revenue, which limits the marketing budget, which in turn caps reach.

Put simply: your maximum effective reach is tethered to your existing SoM.

Why This Matters

1. High-Share Brands Have a Flywheel Effect
   The bigger your share, the more incidental exposure, WoM, and product usage you benefit from—without additional spend. Awareness compounds.
2. Small Brands Face an Uphill Battle
   If you hold 1% SoM, expect only about 1% of your ICP to be actively aware of you when they come in-market. Without breakthrough strategies or patient, long-term investment, it’s near impossible to change this quickly.
3. Awareness Growth Is Slow
   Significant shifts in market share—and therefore awareness—rarely happen overnight. They often take years, sometimes decades.

Lessons for Marketers

• Advertising Is Necessary but Insufficient
  You need it, but it won’t solve everything. It can’t overcome weak distribution, low visibility, or a poor product experience.
• Invest in Multiple Pathways
  Boost WoM through community building. Increase incidental exposure through strong distribution and visibility. Drive repeat usage through product excellence.
• Play the Long Game
  Market share shifts slowly. Brands that win understand the patience required and invest steadily across all five pathways, not just in paid media.

Final Thought

Brand awareness isn’t built solely in ad dashboards—it’s built in markets, streets, conversations, and lived experiences.
If you want your brand to grow, recognize the constraints of market share and build strategies that compound across all five awareness pathways.

Beyond Brand Awareness: Building Emotional Relevance That Wins

Brand awareness alone is strategically bankrupt in B2B markets—a brand can be universally known yet systematically invisible when purchase decisions occur. The critical distinction that research from Wynter and AdQuotient have documented is that while 72% of B2B marketers pursue awareness objectives and 63% chase demand generation, the actual conversion mechanism operates through what researchers call "shortlist consideration," where 92% of B2B buyers establish their initial evaluation set before ever contacting vendors, and subsequently stick to that shortlist with remarkable rigidity. This creates a brutal competitive dynamic: brands achieving exceptional awareness can remain irrelevant if they fail to establish emotional resonance during the formative moment when buyers construct their shortlist, precisely the stage at which rational product features matter less than perceived fit, trustworthiness, and alignment with buyer values. Research from Kantar demonstrates that the gap between awareness focus (72%) and consideration focus (58%) explains why so many B2B brands are known but not bought—being famous delivers nothing if you are not on the shortlist. The difference between awareness and relevance manifests in measurable business outcomes: B2B brands with high awareness but low consideration experience lead-to-opportunity conversion rates of only 14%, while brands simultaneously building awareness and emotional relevance achieve opportunity conversion rates of 28%—exactly double. Furthermore, awareness-only strategies fail to drive pricing power: low-awareness brands realize only 2% price premiums, while high-awareness brands combined with emotional relevance achieve 11% price premiums, a fivefold differential that compounds across customer portfolios. The strategic imperative proves unmistakable: emotional relevance—not awareness—determines whether a brand becomes a finalist in B2B purchase decisions. Awareness makes recognition possible; relevance makes preference inevitable. The shift from measuring awareness metrics to measuring relevance, consideration, and emotional connection separates B2B leaders from perpetual challengers competing on visibility rather than viability.​

Emotional relevance operates through a fundamentally different psychological mechanism than brand awareness, engaging subconscious decision-making processes that transcend rational analysis and product comparison. Harvard Business School research quantifies this mechanism with striking precision: approximately 95% of purchasing decisions occur subconsciously, with emotional factors exercising greater influence in B2B than B2C precisely because B2B purchases involve multiple stakeholders with divergent motivations and risk profiles that must be simultaneously addressed through emotional resonance rather than singular rational arguments. The emotional drivers influencing B2B purchasing decisions include trust (foundation for complex B2B relationships), confidence (reduction of perceived risk in large financial commitments), alignment with values (sense of shared purpose and culture fit), excitement (belief that a solution will improve buyer competence or organizational outcomes), and affinity (preference to work with vendors perceived as partners rather than transactional suppliers). Research from CEB's Marketing Leadership Council reveals that B2B customers often experience stronger emotional connections with vendors than consumers report toward their favorite brands—7 of 9 B2B brands studied exceeded 50% emotional connection metrics, with these emotional bonds directly driving purchase intent, willingness to pay price premiums, and customer advocacy. Google research quantifies the commercial consequence: B2B purchasers are nearly 50% more likely to buy when perceiving personal value or emotional alignment, and crucially, when perceiving emotional fit, they are eight times more likely to pay premium pricing, translating emotional relevance directly into margin expansion. The mechanism operates through stakeholder-specific emotional targeting: procurement professionals require reassurance about cost certainty and risk minimization; engineering teams need confidence that solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably; CFOs demand alignment with organizational ROI requirements and risk tolerance; while executive sponsors require validation that the decision enhances competitive positioning or operational excellence. Brands attempting to address these divergent motivations through feature-centric messaging fail because they do not acknowledge the emotional drivers underlying each stakeholder's concerns—rather, emotional relevance strategies that recognize procurement seeks security, engineering seeks reliability, finance seeks justification, and leadership seeks validation simultaneously address all stakeholder needs through authentically grounded narratives that make buyers feel understood.​

The financial advantage created through emotional relevance extends far beyond improved conversion rates into sustainable competitive moats that competitors cannot rapidly replicate through feature matching or price competition. Customer lifetime value represents the primary mechanism through which emotional relevance creates compounding business returns. Emotionally connected customers generate 306% higher lifetime value compared to functionally satisfied customers, precisely because emotional bonds create switching reluctance that transcends rational cost-benefit analysis. In manufacturing, where customer relationships often span decades and involve integration into operational systems, emotional relevance to reliability and partnership builds institutional loyalty that functions as a practical switching cost: changing suppliers requires operational redesign, employee retraining, and risk acceptance that emotionally neutral vendors cannot mitigate. In fintech and SaaS markets, where customer churn represents the critical profitability constraint, emotional relevance directly addresses the root causes of churn: customers who feel understood, valued, and recognized as individuals rather than database entries exhibit churn rates substantially below industry averages, with one research study finding that communities of emotionally connected fintech users exhibited 19% higher retention compared to isolated users. Emotional relevance also creates pricing power protection during market downturns and competitive disruption: brands with strong emotional bonds to customers can maintain pricing or achieve premium pricing because customers assess risk differently when vendors are emotionally trusted, reducing switching likelihood despite lower-cost alternatives. The mechanism extends to operational efficiency: emotionally relevant brands experience lower customer acquisition costs through improved referral generation, higher conversion rates from awareness (because emotional relevance activates consideration), and improved retention that reduces replacement acquisition burden. Research from System1 analyzing B2B advertising across software, services, payments, and banking sectors found that emotionally resonant creative campaigns generated emotional engagement scores directly correlating with brand value increases of 33% year-on-year, with emotional connection simultaneously improving both brand strength metrics and accelerating purchase decisions. The compounding effect across these mechanisms is substantial: a B2B company achieving emotional relevance with equivalent market share awareness simultaneously realizes 25% lower customer acquisition costs, 20-30% improved conversion rates, 15-25% enhanced customer retention, and 8x price premium realization—outcomes that multiply across customer base expansion and market cycles to create defensible competitive advantages precisely because emotional relevance cannot be rapidly purchased through budget increases; it must be authentically earned through consistent demonstration of understanding, values alignment, and commitment to customer success.​

Building emotional relevance requires fundamental shifts in how B2B organizations structure their understanding of buyer psychology, moving from demographic segmentation toward emotional segmentation grounded in stakeholder motivations, fears, aspirations, and subconscious decision drivers. The first requirement is stakeholder emotional mapping that replaces simplistic buyer persona development with nuanced understanding of emotional drivers at each decision node: rather than describing "procurement manager, 40-50 years old, manufacturing company," emotional mapping asks what keeps procurement managers awake at night (budget approval pressure, risk of wrong choice, career implications of poor decisions), what validates their intelligence and judgment (transparent vendor communication, documented risk mitigation, alignment with organizational strategy), and what creates psychological comfort when making complex choices (vendor credibility signals, third-party validation, peer reference access). The second requirement is emotional relevance messaging that directly addresses these subconscious drivers through authentic brand narratives rather than feature lists: manufacturing brands emphasizing reliability and partnership build emotional resonance through case studies showcasing long-term operational success rather than product specifications; fintech companies emphasizing transparency and empowerment build relevance through founder stories and customer success narratives rather than technology infrastructure descriptions; logistics companies emphasizing dependability build relevance through delivery consistency documentation and customer partnership stories rather than route network descriptions. The third requirement is multi-stakeholder content architecture recognizing that different decision participants require different emotional messaging: engineering teams need technical depth demonstrating reliability; procurement needs cost certainty and risk documentation; finance needs ROI clarity and implementation timeline transparency; while executives need strategic alignment and competitive advantage articulation. A single awareness campaign cannot simultaneously address these divergent emotional needs; rather, emotionally relevant strategies deploy stakeholder-specific content recognizing that a VP of Operations requires different emotional reassurance than a procurement specialist, even when both influence the same purchase decision. The fourth requirement is emotional metrics measurement shifting from awareness indicators (brand recall, top-of-mind awareness, reach metrics) toward emotional connection indicators (Net Promoter Score, customer effort score, emotional connection surveys, stakeholder perception studies, consideration metrics, shortlist inclusion tracking). Organizations measuring awareness while neglecting emotional relevance metrics are literally flying blind—they observe that brand campaigns receive high impressions while failing to understand whether those impressions build emotional connection that influences purchase decisions. The fifth requirement is consistency across touchpoints in emotional messaging: aerospace companies must deliver the same emotional signals—trust, expertise, reliability—across sales interactions, case studies, thought leadership content, customer support, and employee communication; fintech companies must reinforce transparency and customer-centricity across product experience, regulatory communication, customer education, and community engagement; logistics providers must reinforce dependability and partnership across operational delivery, customer communication, innovation announcements, and crisis response. Inconsistency erodes emotional relevance because sophisticated B2B buyers quickly recognize the gap between marketed values and demonstrated values, and perceived inauthenticity destroys emotional connection more thoroughly than absence of emotional positioning. The strategic conclusion is clear: B2B organizations systematically building emotional relevance through stakeholder-specific emotional messaging, consistent communication across touchpoints, and rigorous measurement of emotional connection rather than mere awareness transform themselves from visibility competitors into preference competitors—a distinction that manifests in shortened sales cycles, improved conversion rates, premium pricing realization, enhanced customer retention, and ultimately, defensible competitive advantages in volatile markets where feature parity and price transparency eliminate traditional differentiation sources.​

Measuring and optimizing emotional relevance requires integrating qualitative intelligence about buyer emotions with quantitative business outcome tracking, creating feedback loops that systematically increase emotional impact over time. The primary measurement framework encompasses four integrated pillars: awareness and reach metrics (tracking which buyers know about your brand) remain foundational but insufficient, requiring complementation by emotional connection metrics including emotional resonance surveys asking buyers how they feel about your brand, Net Promoter Score measuring likelihood of recommendation based on emotional loyalty, brand perception studies tracking emotional attributes (trust, reliability, innovation, customer-centricity), and consideration metrics documenting whether your brand appears in shortlists when buyers evaluate solutions; behavioral indicators that reveal whether emotional relevance translates to action, including proposal win rates (emotional relevance should improve conversion), pricing premium realization (emotional brands command 8x higher pricing), customer retention rates and churn analysis (emotional bonds reduce switching), and customer lifetime value expansion (emotionally connected customers increase spend and cross-purchase); and finally business impact metrics directly connecting emotional relevance to financial outcomes including revenue growth, market share capture, customer acquisition cost reduction, and profit margin expansion. The critical distinction between awareness-only measurement and emotionally intelligent measurement manifests in practice: awareness-focused organizations optimize for impressions, clicks, reach, and top-of-mind recall, metrics that can improve while business outcomes deteriorate; emotionally intelligent organizations optimize for consideration metrics, emotional connection scores, stakeholder perception shifts, and business outcome improvements, recognizing that vanity metrics predicting nothing about purchase decisions create strategic blind spots. Wynter research documenting the awareness-to-consideration gap specifically identifies that many B2B brands achieve exceptional awareness metrics while remaining unknown during actual purchasing processes because they failed to build emotional relevance during the awareness period—a distinction quantified through direct buyer surveys asking whether shortlisted vendors were previously known, with consideration metrics directly predicting actual purchase likelihood in ways awareness metrics do not. The operationalization requires shifting budget allocation and performance incentives from impression-counting toward emotional-relevance-building: rather than optimizing campaigns for cost-per-impression or cost-per-click, shift optimization toward cost-per-emotionally-engaged-prospect or cost-per-consideration-set inclusion; rather than measuring team performance through lead volume generated, measure team performance through emotional perception improvements and business outcome correlation to emotional relevance investment. Microsoft exemplifies this integrated measurement approach, simultaneously tracking traditional awareness metrics while measuring emotional connection through brand perception studies, consideration metrics through shortlist research, behavioral indicators through proposal win rate tracking, and business impact through market share and revenue analysis—revealing that its 33% year-on-year brand value growth in 2025 directly correlates to simultaneous improvements across all four measurement pillars, with emotional relevance serving as the connecting mechanism between awareness investment and business outcome realization. Organizations moving beyond brand awareness toward emotional relevance necessarily adopt this integrated measurement discipline because they recognize that relevance, not visibility, determines whether awareness translates to preference, preference translates to purchase, and purchase translates to loyalty and expansion opportunities that sustain competitive advantage through market cycles.