Did you know that your brain is responsible for your marketing decisions more than your will? It’s true! And it’s because you’re constantly bombarded with messages from the same brands, helping to keep those brands top-of-mind, unconsciously. 

How visible a brand is to a potential customer as they are making a decision about purchasing is known as brand salience. Brand salience is a psychological phenomenon that aids in a customer’s purchasing choice based on a perception formed in the brain over time. The number and quality of brand engagements determine brand salience.

But brand salience isn’t the same as brand recognition. Salience is considerably more potent, and it’s something you’ll want to master if you want to improve your brand and sales.

What is Saliency in Marketing?

When consumers are making purchasing decisions, brand salience is a marketing indicator that informs you how well they identify, notice, or think about your brand. Brands achieve high brand salience by utilizing distinct brand assets that attract attention and leave a good impression on their target audience. This implies your marketing materials should encourage a narrative and give your brand a sense of purpose. This might include video, and at least 60% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, as they capture the attention of the customers easily.

When you communicate your principles, you set your brand apart from the competition and raise brand awareness. Consider the emotional effect of your assets when creating campaigns that can enhance brand salience. Your campaigns should be relevant, real, and reflect your company’s beliefs while also differentiating your organization from your competition.

All of this will assist the customers to form a connection with your brand and remember it when it’s time to buy something. 

Brand salience ensures that customers consider your brand as the first answer to their needs and wants when making a buying choice.

Is Brand Salience the same as Brand Awareness?

Your audience doesn’t have to be interested in buying from you or even know what you have to offer to be aware of your brand (although ideally, both would be a goal later on). 

When building brand awareness, you’re attempting to ensure that potential customers are aware of you. Although simply being aware of a brand’s existence may not appear to be significant, brand awareness is the cornerstone of all future marketing initiatives. Your audience will be unable to engage and learn more about what you have to offer until you first raise brand recognition.

Brand salience, on the other hand, ensures that your audience is not only aware of you but also views you as their solution. And though they’re not ready to buy from you yet, you remain visible to those potential customers again and again until they are ready to buy.

Building brand awareness before revenue is, in our opinion, the ultimate aim of marketing. It delves into the consumer’s mindset. In a nutshell, brand salience is the degree to which your brand is thought about or considered by a consumer while they are in the market to buy anything. 

The unsung hero of hesitant shoppers worldwide is brand salience. Salience is a term used in cognitive psychology to describe what is most conspicuous or noticed. The phrase describes how strong stimuli such as bright lights, loud noises, vivid colors, and fast motion grab our attention. For marketers, salience refers to how much a consumer thinks about or notices your brand when they’re in the market to buy something.

In short, brand awareness is developed via repetition, whereas brand salience is developed through content. It is not enough to develop a slogan and sing it over and again on the radio and television. Yes, it will raise brand recognition, but it is continued, consistent content that will cause the customer to think about your brand when getting ready to make a purchase. 

To create content, make sure your brand uses a variety of cues, that your advertisements have a meaningful message, that you tell a story that your audience can connect to, and that your brand has a concrete picture that can be recognized on the shelf.

Why is Brand Salience important?

While branding may appear to be an obscure notion, it is one of the most crucial aspects of any marketing plan. Consistently displaying a brand across all channels may boost revenue by up to 23%. Furthermore, brands that create and publish content consistently are 3.5 times more likely to have good brand exposure than companies that are inconsistently presented. In fact, 82% of investors say that brand awareness is a key influence in their investing selections. Consistent branding, on the other hand, leads to greater brand recognition, which may help you attract investors and generate income for your company. Needless to say, branding is critical to the success of your company.

A brand’s degree of awareness may increase from time to time as a result of promotional efforts or product news, but salience is generated via a constant supply of value.

How do you measure Brand Salience?

The idea of brand salience is fairly abstract and isn’t a mathematical metric that can be simply calculated. So brands try a different approach to measure it, using surveys and focus groups. It’s important to ask your consumers what they think of you, what they identify with your brand if they recollect your brand when making a buying choice, and what difference they find in your product or service.

You can design a poll for customers to see if they remember or notice your brand in comparison to your competitors. Then, to discover how high your brand is thought of, you can ask whether it is merely thought about or desired after.

To determine brand salience, provide survey respondents a randomized set of visuals, messages, and qualities and ask them to identify the brands they connect with each. It might be anything as simple as “when promoting a video, I think of this social media” or “I know I can increase revenue from here.”

Brand Salience Model

Kevin Keller, a professor of marketing at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, created a brand salience model that is now widely used in digital marketing. Keller outlines a pyramid of building areas to pay attention to while aiming to improve your brand’s salience in the graphic below.

The model above focuses on developing an identity that people remember in order to increase deep, broad brand recognition. Salience is at the base of the pyramid, which you can boost by clearly identifying your brand, connecting with your audience on a regular basis, and leveraging creative assets to create a story.

Then you give your brand a purpose and authenticity to set it apart from the competitors. Next, you utilize regular communications to elicit positive, approachable responses from your consumers. Eventually, you develop a relationship and an emotional connection with your audience to create loyalty.

You can raise brand awareness, boost income, and even attract investors using this strategy. Despite the fact that this isn’t the most straightforward measure to track, evidence shows that focusing on branding can help your brand become a household name among your customers.

Conclusion

Marketers face an essential but frequently overlooked challenge: brand salience. Brand recognition is something that companies strive for all the time. Brand salience, on the other hand, should be given just as much, if not more, attention in the quest for distinction.

What it all boils down to is emotion-driven purchase behavior. In fact, it’s no secret that humans are driven by feelings.  And customers rely on mental shortcuts, making purchasing decisions based on what they have in their heads. As a result, they will select a more recognizable brand that has invoked strong feelings for them.

In short, it behooves you to think about brand salience instead of solely relying on brand awareness.