The Surprising Gap Between Brand Awareness Aspirations and Reality: Lessons from a Sr. Director of Marketing

Biggest myth, oh man, um. You know, what, what I would say, um, You know, what I, what I would say about, about that is, is right now what's going on is, is I, I promised when I came into this organization, I'll use this as an example, probably could think of a couple of others. You know, I, I came into this organization saying, hey, look, I understand that there are a lot of KPIs here. Uh, but the one I'm going to get up for you, the one I'm going to increase, the one I'm going to show, uh, value, um, in terms of the work I'm doing is on that brand awareness piece. It's getting, getting people to recognize this as a brand and, and that, that is, that is not happening as fast as I wanted to. The, the, the The data is showing that we are moving in the right direction. We're going from the lower left to the upper right on the chart. Um, but particularly as of late, the last couple of years, the rate of growth in that, uh, in those results have been starting to stall out. And so again, that goes back to some of the things that I'm doing to help figure out not only on the creative side, uh, but in messaging and strategy side, but also even on the media side. Hey, what are we doing? Let's re uh examine all of our strategies, no sacred cows. Let's figure out, uh, how we reignite the growth in that space. So, that, that's the, that's the quick and dirty answer to, to that question.

Um, uh, I would say that the, the primary driver for that Delta was a, it's, it's just like with Wall Street, right? They talk about, uh, you know, you beat expectations. Well, was that because you did very well or the expectations were off? And, and I think in this case, um, My expectations, I guess my model if you will, for the speed with which we would be able to get there, uh, was incorrect in that I missed a variable and the variable was exactly what I was talking about before, uh, uh, the notion that the that the That the, uh, we'll say the absence of the mindset that this is a branded category, and uh the ability to, to shift the mind to start thinking about basically a commoditized space as a brand. You know, that takes a lot longer and probably a lot uh uh uh more again, psychological nuggets uh and efforts that we need to be making that we haven't been making to date. And so, uh that is probably the biggest uh miss as far as the data point that I didn't consider seven years ago when I made that statement, uh, at least didn't consider it and put a high enough weighting on that equation.

About, so my, my timeline, uh, was 5 years. I wanted 5 years to get to 30%. That's what I wanted. Uh brand awareness. Yes, uh, uh, to get, to get, uh, from what was, uh, we started out with 4% back in 2014, uh, now at 20%. So I'm 10% short of my goal two years after when I wanted to, to deliver. So, uh, uh, what we decide at

OK. So, so. So I made a call on this two years ago uh by saying, hey, we're not where I wanna be, well, we need to make some changes. Uh, so what we've done, uh, in, in the changes are not only just in terms of test and learn but more permanent changes even, even as it pertains to some of the uh partners that we have, uh, specifically have to do with strategy. So, uh, and by the way, the number I gave you was for General. could also run Hispanic and a good example for the Hispanic side is we completely changed the strategy in terms of who we're targeting and how we're targeting them. A good example would be going from, um, we'll say from 2 or 1st generation to 2nd generation and also going off of Spanish TV to having Spanish language ads on English content, making changes like that, um. Uh, as well as again looking at some of the uh more specific, uh, data points around what we need to be doing from a, a media channel standpoint, how do we leverage PR better, uh, doing a lot of those things to try to get those numbers up. And then, uh, finally, what I would say is making sure that we are completely aligned, uh, not only from what we're doing to how we're testing it, because your sample piece, uh, uh, the sample within How you're testing for these data needs to aligned or really it's the other way around your, your, your uh approach from a strategy and targeting standpoint, media, creative, and so on, needs to align with who you're asking. Uh, and so I think a little bit of that was off as well. We weren't, uh, aligned as much in those two areas, so we needed to tweak, um, uh, what we're doing both on the testing and data side as well as the uh marketing execution side.

If I could change um one thing about what this entire, this whole thing is a, there, there are several subprojects underneath it, but frankly, this whole thing is a is a project. And if it's one thing I could change. It's how our organization is frankly set up. Uh, it's, it's something I, I didn't have any control over. It's something I'm trying to influence now as we move forward, but we are very, uh, siloed, and what does that mean? That means that, uh, we have, uh, a lack of cohesion and, uh, a lack of alignment across different media channels from shopper to uh the digital space, which is also um separate from me, although it's somewhat dotted line. Uh, and the food service space. So, so the biggest issue that I think we've got at a, at a brand level which for us all we do is, is, uh, market. So we don't, we don't sell the product our, our parent sells the product which is our importers. But, uh, uh, when you look at how we're designed, we're designed to have an arm for marketing. In the brand side and marketing and shopper side, digital and food service, and these things are too disparate. Uh, so the consumer sees inconsistency. They, they, they, they can't tie these things together and that is uh suppressing, I think some of the results, positive results we should be seeing from uh a branding standpoint as well.