Top of mind doesn’t mean top of consideration. Here’s why that matters for regulated brands.
We all want to feel good about making decisions, and we all want to feel we’ve made good decisions. Agreed?
So, why do prospects end up making decisions that seem utterly baffling to you, but good to them?
Picture the scene….Your brand awareness surveys are reporting your best ever results. Prospects know your name and what you stand for. You’ve engaged with them well and delivered a brilliant solution to their challenge. You believe you’ve done everything right.
But, in that crucial decision-making moment, despite all your hard work, and after doing all their research, and after engaging deeply with your brand, the prospect chooses….someone else.
What the….?!
Whether you’re a growing challenger bank, a specialist investment manager, a large law firm, or a fintech with a stunningly innovative proposition, it can (and will) happen to you. The prospect reverts to the familiar, to the brand you thought you were doing so much better than. You might start to wonder whether brand awareness is actually a vanity metric.
This is the Salience Gap.
It’s the empty void between “I’ve heard of you” and “You are the only one I trust to solve this.” And in regulated sectors, where trust and authority are often the entire currency, this gap isn’t just a marketing problem, it’s a fundamental business risk.
The Myth: Awareness = Salience
Brand Marketing 101 refresher: Awareness and Salience are not the same thing.
Awareness is passive. It’s a shallow, rational fact. “Yes, I know that firm’s name.”
Salience is active. It’s a deep, emotional shortcut. “When I think ‘secure place to earn interest on my company’s spare cash’ I think of them. I trust them.”
Awareness gets you on the longlist. Salience gets you on the shortlist, or better, the list with only one name: your own.
The challenge is that many marketing strategies assume that piling up short-term, rational awareness-driving activities will, over time, add up to long-term salience.
This is a myth.
The research is unambiguous: long-term brand effects are generated in a very different way from short-term ones. You cannot simply accumulate a series of short-term clicks, leads, or “persuasion” messages and expect to build a powerful, salient brand.
How does the salience gap open up?
As with many marketing challenges, there is never a single event that cracks open the salience gap. Rather it develops over time, and is often influenced by one of three things:
- Market Drift: The market’s needs and expectations have quietly shifted, but your positioning and media presence haven’t. You’re still showing up where your customers were, not where they are, in the broadest possible sense.
- Accidental Inaction: You’ve been successful. But, you’ve taken your foot off the brand-building pedal to focus on other priorities. Meanwhile, your competitors have been strategically building their salience.
- Strategic Misalignment: The business has been – or has become – focused on short-term, rational, performance-based marketing. You’ve become excellent at capturing immediate demand but have accidentally stopped building the brand that creates and protectsfuture demand. When marketing focus drifts to immediate ROI, losing track of salience is all too-easily easily done.
Why regulated brands are most at risk
To help understand the salience risk for regulated brands, it’s helpful to consider a broad and simplified model of the foundational factors that go into decision making.
Firstly, the specific proposition on offer has to align perfectly with the prospects immediate needs and situation at the time. We’ll call this the ‘rational’ justification.
Secondly the prospect has to trust the brand, believe it understands them and their deeper needs, and feel the brand is highly relevant to their position and situation. We’ll call this the ‘emotional’ justification.
Of course there are a myriad other micro-complexities that go into decision-making. That said, very often they come back to one of the two justifications. “I didn’t like their sales presentation” could well be a trust or understanding (aka an emotional) issue, as could “their interest rates are market-leading but there’s just something about them that puts me off.”
In a regulated situation, where compliance is key, it’s very easy to be drawn into rational justifications – rates, features and facts – when trying to persuade a prospect. We need to go far further than that, and behave far more strategically, building up trust over time through carefully considered brand marketing.
This is why long-term brand-building, built on careful emotional underpinning, is so powerful. It doesn’t just make people aware of you; it makes them feel good about you, and makes them trust you, building cognitive ease when the decision-making moment comes. This emotional connection is what makes you the first, and perhaps only, choice when a need arises.
Brand-building isn’t vanity – it’s your most valuable commercial asset
Research carried out by Les Binet and Peter Field for the IPA (See ‘The Long and the Short of It‘) , is clear: brand-building is the primary driver of long-term profit.
How? By reducing price sensitivity.
In regulated sectors, this is the ultimate goal. It’s the difference between competing on price (hello inevitable race to the bottom) and competing on authority in a race you can own. A salient brand can command a premium because it has already done the hard work of building trust.
This is where we can move from an unquantified “brand strategy” to hard media investment numbers. As readers familiar with Messrs Binet and Field will know, their data shows the optimal, most efficient, and most profitable media budget split for a business is, on average, around 60% brand-building and 40% activation.
Many B2B brands might be surprised to find they are sitting at 10% / 90% respectively, or even 0% / 100%, if performance channels are dominant. This is the very definition of strategic misalignment, and the clock is ticking for your brand’s salience. Aside – now is the time to ask your team what your split looks like!
How do we close the gap?
From our perspective, closing the salience gap isn’t necessarily about spending more. Rather, it’s about spending more wisely via a unified media and measurement strategy.
We focus on several core questions when we tackle the challenge:
- Where in the media world does our audience live, work and play? We need to understand where our audience spends their time, and we need to understand the channels, publications and brands they interact with, consume information from, subscribe to and value. Understanding their work and personal habits allows us to understand the full media landscape through which we can reach them.
- Where in the media world are we currently showing up, and how? We need to understand how well our current media strategy supports our brand. Are we (as we’ve discussed above) stuck in a rational loop, allocating our media investment to features and benefits? Are performance metrics revered above all, and are we consequently missing out on emotional connections? Or – are we doing some work in the emotional space, building some of the underpinning trust we need, but need to go further to achieve the necessary breakthrough?
- Which media platforms will deliver the positioning, authority and alignment we need vs those that won’t, or which no longer give us what we need? In the regulated sector, trust needs to be front and centre in any media plan. For example, TV and OOH offer enormous reach and are proven trust-builders, and present myriad options for reaching audiences. We need to think about positioning and authority – which publications and platforms can we stand on the shoulders of, in order to reach and connect with our audiences? A classic approach of less is more, particularly in a highly digitised, programmatic world, might be the best way to build enduring, emotional relationships with the profitable customers of the future. Above all, this approach needs to be unified, so that brand and performance media are seamlessly integrated and interlinked.
- What are all the measurements we can take to ascertain the reach and relevance of the brand? To be truly effective in driving brand salience and long-term benefit, we need to go beyond standard metrics like Click-Through Rate, Time-on-Site and so on. We need to look at all of the short and medium-term indicators of long-term performance. In other words, we need to measure all the ways in which your audiences interact with, receive, seek out and explore your brand, so we can build a unified understanding of the impact of your media investment and where we should direct our attention and emphasis. We also need to explore commercial metrics – enquiries and leads generated, quality of leads generated, conversion rate of leads to business, and revenue generated. These are – ultimately – the true measures of success.
In conclusion
Awareness is a vanity metric if it doesn’t come with salience. Being known is not the same as being chosen. In the high-stakes, high-trust regulated world, you cannot afford to be overlooked in the critical decision-making moment.
Salience must be earned, and it must be maintained with care, attention, and strategic investment. It is the single most powerful driver of sustainable, profitable growth.
If you are finding that your brand is top of mind but not top of consideration, that is the clearest sign of a Salience Gap. It’s time to reorient your media investment strategy so it is truly building your most valuable asset.
Our answer – Unified Media. We bring together brand, performance, measurement, data and teams to deliver a truly integrated approach. Everything connects to deliver awareness, salience and measurable growth.
