The meeting room at the back of the Ubi warehouse smells faintly of refrigerant. Marcus has run his air-conditioning servicing company for fourteen years: forty technicians, a fleet of white vans with a blue snowflake on the side, and the kind of certainty that comes from building something with your own hands.

He leans back. “Honestly, we don’t need awareness. Everyone knows us.”

Priya, the consultant he hired for reasons he is already beginning to question, writes “everyone” on her pad and draws a circle round it.

“Good,” she says. “Let’s start there.”

She starts with the definition she gives every client. Brand awareness is the degree to which the people who might buy from you can recognise your brand when they see it and, more valuably, recall it unprompted at the moment they need what you sell.

Everyone who, exactly?

Marcus: Our customers know us. Half our work comes from referrals. At trade fairs, people walk up and say, “Oh, you’re the snowflake vans.”

Priya: Your customers know you. That’s not awareness. That’s a client list.

Marcus: And the trade fairs?

Priya: The people who walk up to your booth are the ones who already recognise you. The ones who don’t, walk past. You never meet them, so they never get counted.

She lets that sit for a second.

Every founder has this blind spot. You spend your days among people who know you: customers, suppliers, staff, the uncle at the coffee shop who has watched your vans come and go for a decade.

Of course it feels as if everyone knows you. Your sample is rigged. You rigged it.

Marcus: So who should I be counting?

Priya: Strangers who might need you one day. Not fans. Not friends. Strangers.

What’s the difference between aided and unaided awareness?

Priya: There are two very different questions you can ask a stranger. Question one: I show you a photo of your van alongside four competitors and ask which ones you’ve seen before. That’s aided awareness, sometimes called recognition.

Marcus: Easy. I’d do well.

Priya: Question two: “Your aircon is leaking at eleven at night. Who do you call?” No pictures, no prompts. I just wait. That’s unaided awareness, or recall.

Marcus: Ah.

Priya: Exactly. Recognition is easy. Recall is brutal. Most people can name only a handful of brands in any category, and for something they rarely think about, one or two at best.

Priya: The first name out of someone’s mouth is called top-of-mind awareness. That’s the one that gets the phone call.

Recognition still earns its keep in some markets, Priya explains. Wherever buyers choose from a visible list (a supermarket shelf, a page of search results, a food-delivery app), familiarity does much of the deciding. For cheap, frequent purchases, people reach for the name they know and stop looking, even when a better product sits beside it.

Recall matters most where the buyer starts from a blank page. Emergencies. Professional services. Anything nobody browses for.

Priya: So which are you?

Marcus: Blank page. Nobody window-shops for aircon servicing.

Priya: Then recognition is your vanity number. Recall is the one that pays the salaries.

Known is not the same as thought of

Marcus: But if people recognise the van, surely they’ll think of us when something breaks?

Priya: Not necessarily. Being known and being thought of are different things. The trade calls the second one mental availability: the likelihood that your brand comes to mind in the real buying moments, not in a survey.

She draws a few boxes on the pad.

Priya: Think about the doors people walk through into your category: the leak at eleven at night, the keys to a new flat, the annual servicing before Chinese New Year, a strange smell from the bedroom unit, a landlord demanding proof of servicing at the end of a lease.

Priya: Each is a different door. Your brand might hang on one and be missing from the rest.

Marcus: We’re probably the “new flat” people. Lots of renovation referrals.

Priya: Then that’s the door you own. The leak at midnight probably belongs to whoever has the most memorable hotline number.

Old Spice is the textbook case of a brand with awareness to spare and a filing problem. It had been around since 1937, and by 2008 one of its own slogans joked that if your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist. Everyone knew it. Nobody young reached for it.

In February 2010 Wieden+Kennedy released “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, starring Isaiah Mustafa, an ad pitched squarely at the partners of the men who would wear it. It won the Grand Prix for film at Cannes that June. A follow-up saw the team shoot 186 short video replies to fans and celebrities in about two and a half days.

Marcus: So people knew Old Spice. It just wasn’t on their list.

Priya: It was in the wrong drawer. The campaign didn’t introduce the brand. It moved it.

Is brand awareness the same as brand preference?

Marcus: Fine. So we need more people to hear of us. Bigger ads, more vans, done.

Priya: Awareness gets you into the room. It doesn’t win the argument.

She tells him about Quibi, the short-form streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and run by Meg Whitman. It raised US$1.75 billion, launched in April 2020 and closed on 1 December the same year, having fallen far short of its subscriber projections. Famous founders and deep pockets can buy attention. Not a reason to stay.

Compare Dollar Shave Club. In March 2012 the razor-subscription start-up posted a launch video starring its co-founder, Michael Dubin, who later said it cost US$4,500 to make. Around 12,000 orders arrived within 48 hours. Four years later Unilever bought the company for a reported US$1 billion.

Marcus: What did the cheap video have that the billion dollars didn’t?

Priya: It did two jobs at once. It was impossible to forget, and it gave you a reason to act: decent blades by post, from people who seemed like fun. Awareness without a reason is expensive trivia.

There is a darker version too. Some brands are famous for the wrong thing. If the first thing strangers link to your name is a bad review or a missed appointment, high awareness simply spreads the problem faster.

Marcus: Cheerful.

Priya: You’re paying me to be honest, not cheerful.

So how did the small ones get famous?

Marcus: Those are companies with real budgets. I’m a forty-technician outfit in Ubi.

Priya: Then look at Irvins.

Irvin Gunawan opened a seafood restaurant on Jalan Leban in 2009, known for its salted egg crab. In 2014 he started coating potato chips and fish skin in the same sauce and serving them as a side dish. Diners asked to take them home, so he bagged them.

In 2016 pop-ups at Raffles Place drew long queues, and the first shop opened at VivoCity that year. The brand now sells in 15 markets.

Priya: Notice what did the work. The queue was the advertisement. Add a black duck-egg mascot called Irv and the line “Dangerously Addictive”, and you have things a stranger remembers after one glance.

Liquid Death took the same idea somewhere louder. It sells canned water with the slogan “murder your thirst”, and a video ad drew three million views before the product was even on sale. In 2020 it released an album built from hate comments people had posted about it. In March 2024 it was valued at US$1.4 billion.

Liquid Death set its hate comments to music, and made canned water unmistakable.

Marcus: I’m not putting heavy metal on my vans.

Priya: Nobody’s asking you to. Copy the principle, not the costume. They made the most generic product on earth impossible to confuse with anything else.

Can you be famous without shouting?

Marcus: And if shouting isn’t an option? A lot of my contracts are with clinics and condo managing agents. They don’t want a heavy-metal aircon man.

Priya: Then be clever, or be patient. Both work.

In China, where conservative attitudes make frank talk about sex awkward, Durex kept its marketing indirect and light-hearted and ran almost all of it on social media. By 2018 its Weibo account had 2.65 million followers. When you can’t shout, be witty where people already are.

Even the loud brands are disciplined about it. Shopee, born in Singapore in 2015, pinned its campaigns to memorable calendar dates such as 9.9 and 11.11, so that the date itself does some of the reminding.

For its 2019 9.9 sale it signed Cristiano Ronaldo and filmed him dancing to “Baby Shark”. You may have found it maddening. You also remember it. Probably the date too.

The deepest awareness of all, though, comes from simply staying put. Indomie, made by Indonesia’s Indofood, reached Nigeria through exports in 1988. A local factory followed in 1995, run by Dufil Prima Foods, a joint venture with Singapore’s Tolaram Group. The noodles have been part of Nigerian life for so long that many Nigerians assume Indomie is a local brand.

Indomie has shown up in Nigeria for so long that many assume it is a local brand.

Marcus: That’s the dream, isn’t it? So familiar you’re furniture.

Priya: It takes decades of showing up the same way. Most founders tire of their own look long before customers have even noticed it.

How do you measure brand awareness without a research budget?

Marcus: Right. How do I find out where I actually stand without hiring a research firm?

Priya: Cheaply, and in this order.

• Ask the unaided question first. Put one question to 100 to 200 people in your service area, through a small online panel, residents’ groups or street interviews: “If your aircon broke tonight, which company would you call?” Record the first name and every other name mentioned. Only then show photos for the aided question.
• Don’t open with “Have you heard of us?” For a small firm the answer is mostly no, which teaches you little, and it plants your name before you have tested recall.
• Map the moments. List five to eight buying situations and ask which company comes to mind for each. The gaps show which doors you don’t own yet.
• Watch your branded searches. Google Search Console shows how often people reach your site by searching for your name. If that number climbs while your ad spend stays flat, more people are carrying you around in their heads.
• Ask every new customer how they found you, and log the answer from a fixed list rather than free text, so you can count it.
• Repeat it every six months with identical wording. One reading is a snapshot. The trend is the insight.

Marcus: That’s it?

Priya: That’s the start. Plenty of companies your size have never asked a single stranger anything. You’ll know more in a month than you’ve known in fourteen years.

Marcus looks at the circle round “everyone” for a long moment.

“So the honest answer,” he says, “is that I don’t know who knows us.”

“Correct,” says Priya, closing her pad. “That’s progress.”

Three things Marcus asked on the way out

What are the main types of brand awareness?
The main types are brand recognition (aided awareness), where people identify your brand when prompted; brand recall (unaided awareness), where they name it without prompts; and top-of-mind awareness, where yours is the first brand they mention in the category.

Does brand awareness lead to sales?
Awareness is a precondition for most purchases, but it doesn’t guarantee them. People also need a reason to choose you, and your brand has to come to mind in the specific situations when they need the category.

How can a small business measure brand awareness cheaply?
Ask a sample of potential customers which brands they would choose in your category, first without prompts and then with prompts, and repeat the same questions every six months. Track branded search volume and record how every new customer heard of you.

If “everyone knows us” has been doing a lot of work in your marketing meetings, let’s find out who actually does.