Brand awareness is up and sales are flat. Find the leak

Why is brand awareness up but sales flat?

Awareness is only the first step. Buyers also have to think of you when they need the category, consider you and prefer you over the alternatives.

Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute argues that what drives buying is mental availability: the probability that a buyer will notice, recognise or think of your brand in a buying situation. In Sharp’s words, that “is much more than awareness”.

So awareness can climb while sales stay put, because the new awareness doesn’t carry through to the later stages. The awareness number can’t tell you which stage is failing.

How do you find where buyers drop out?

Turn each funnel stage into a conversion rate and set it beside your closest rival’s. A brand funnel usually measures aided awareness, unaided awareness, consideration, usage and preference. Divide unaided awareness by aided (how much recognition turns into recall), consideration by aided awareness (how many of the people who know you would consider you) and preference by consideration (how many of those would choose you first). The stage where you lose far more buyers than your rivals is your leak.

Ratios also make the comparison fair. A market leader beats you on every raw number because it is bigger; ratios show whether you convert the buyers you reach as well as it does.

The stages carry different weight. McKinsey’s 2009 study of how consumers make purchase decisions found that brands in the initial consideration set can be up to three times more likely to be purchased than brands outside it.

A worked example

Illustrative numbers, not real data. We made them up to show the arithmetic; no brand or survey produced them.

Stage	Your brand	Your conversion	Rival	Rival conversion
Aided awareness	82%		64%
Unaided awareness	41%	50% of aided	29%	45% of aided
Consideration	33%	40% of aided	23%	36% of aided
Preference	8%	24% of considerers	12%	52% of considerers

Read the levels and you win three rows out of four. You lead on aided awareness by 18 points, and a report that opens with that number looks like good news.

Read the conversion columns and the leak shows. More of the people who know you recall you unprompted (50% against 45%) and would consider you (40% against 36%). But fewer than a quarter of the people who would consider you choose you first; the rival gets more than half. That is a “considered but not preferred” leak.

The table also shows what more awareness spend would buy. At these rates, ten more points of aided awareness turn into about one point of preference (10 × 40% × 24%). The rival would get nearly two (10 × 36% × 52%). Until the preference gap closes, each point of awareness you pay for is worth about half as much to you as to your rival.

What are the four funnel leaks, and how do you fix each?

Each leak sits between two stages and needs its own fix:

• Recognised but not remembered. High aided awareness, low unaided: people know you when they see you but don’t think of you on their own. Build distinctive assets and link your brand to the moments people buy in your category. Lindsay Rapacchi of Clear Channel UK describes these category entry points as “the cues category buyers use to access their memories in a buying situation” (Marketing Week).
• Known but not considered. People know you, and you don’t make the shortlist. In our view this is usually a relevance problem: buyers don’t see you as right for them. Compare the words buyers use for you with the words they use for the brands they do consider.
• Considered but not preferred. You’re on the shortlist and lose the final choice. This is the leak in the example, and the fix is a clear difference that’s worth paying for. Kantar found that being seen as meaningfully different accounts for 94% of a brand’s pricing power.
• Preferred but not bought. Buyers like you and still buy something else. Check that you are stocked, and priced to compete, where they buy.

In a 2022 Contagious interview (archived January 2023), Jenni Romaniuk of Ehrenberg-Bass measures a distinctive asset’s strength by its fame (the share of category buyers it brings your brand to mind for) and its uniqueness (how much you own it alone). For a South African example, see the neon song lyric Bootlegger puts in every store, in what it takes to build a coffee brand.

How do you run a leak check?

The leak check is five steps you can repeat every month: measure, convert, compare, fix and re-measure.

1. Measure the same funnel for everyone. Same survey, same category buyers, same month, for you and your closest rivals. Ask unaided awareness before aided, so the brand list doesn’t prompt the answers you are measuring.
2. Turn levels into conversion. Divide each stage by its base, as in the example. Check recall first: if aided awareness rose and unaided didn’t, the new awareness is recognition only.
3. Compare each ratio with your rivals. The stage where you trail by the widest margin, and by more than the margin of error on both numbers, is your leak.
4. Match the leak to its fix. Use the fixes above, one leak at a time, so you can tell which change worked.
5. Re-measure and watch the ratio at the leak. After your next campaign or change, judge the fix by that ratio, because the awareness number can rise while the leak stays open. Once it closes, the next-widest gap is your new leak.

Where does Wink fit, and where doesn’t it?

Wink, the brand tracking platform, shows where buyers drop out between stages. It can’t tell you whether you’re on the shelf.

It surveys real category buyers every month in South Africa, the US, the UK and Australia, and reports your funnel next to up to five competitors, with the margin of error on every number. The survey asks unaided awareness before aided, then consideration of each brand the respondent knows, usage, and preference among the brands they would consider, plus the words buyers use for each brand they know. That covers steps one to three of the leak check, and the imagery you need for a consideration leak.

The fourth leak is mostly outside what a survey can see. Wink can show that buyers prefer you more often than they use you, but not which stores were out of stock, where distribution is thin or what the shelf price was. Those answers come from sales and retail data, such as distributor reports and retail audits.

A tracker has a 12-month minimum term. If you need one diagnosis before a single decision, a one-off survey of category buyers will do. A tracker is worth it when you need to see whether the fix worked.

Before you approve the next round of awareness spend, run steps two and three on your latest funnel numbers. If you don’t have rival numbers measured the same way, book a demo to see a funnel reported next to up to five competitors. If the board wants the case for brand spend first, start with investing in your brand.