At its core, brand awareness is the degree to which consumers can recognize or recall your brand, and it plays a pivotal role in influencing their purchasing decisions.
We’ve previously explored how to measure your brand awareness, but none of this matters if you don’t understand how it affects your bottom line.
After all, what’s the point of everyone knowing your brand’s name if it doesn’t translate into sales?
The good news is that brand awareness does impact sales—which means it’s worth investing your time into building and maintaining it.
Let’s take a deeper look into the relationship between brand awareness and consumer buying behavior, and how you can harness it to increase your sales.
To grow sales, you need to grow penetration
When it comes to growing your business, there are four main strategies—but not all are equally sustainable or impactful in the long term:
- Penetration: Getting more people to buy.
- Price: Encouraging buyers to pay more.
- Frequency: Making current customers buy more often.
- Loyalty: Retaining more customers than before.
While all of these strategies may sound good in theory, in reality, only a strategy to grow penetration offers a truly sustainable way to grow your business. The reason is that the other methods often depend on or are limited by penetration itself.
Take frequency, for example—most customers are light buyers, meaning they only purchase your product once a year or even less. It’s tough to get people to buy more often when only a small group of customers are frequent buyers.
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Loyalty faces a similar challenge: it’s inherently tied to penetration. Smaller brands with lower penetration tend to lose a much higher percentage of customers, making loyalty harder to build.
But when your penetration grows, loyalty tends to follow naturally, making it a more effective strategy only once you’ve built a solid foundation.
What is penetration?
Penetration is the percentage of people in a market (like soft drinks or chocolates) who buy a brand at least once in a specific time frame, such as a quarter or a year.
For example, if 30% of category buyers (soft drink buyers) have chosen your brand, your market penetration is 30%. Growing penetration focuses on reaching new buyers rather than relying on loyalty from existing customers.
But how do you grow your penetration? The answer is simple: start by building your brand awareness.
To grow penetration, you need to grow awareness
Let’s say you’re a small brand with about 2% penetration, and you want to grow to 10% penetration. Research shows that to achieve this, your brand awareness should grow to about 35%—or 3.5 times higher than your target penetration.
In other words, to effectively grow your market share, your brand awareness must be significantly greater than the percentage of the market you’re currently reaching with your product.
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It’s important to remember that this growth from awareness to penetration/sales doesn’t happen overnight. You can typically expect to see results within 6 to 18 months, depending on the market.
This delay happens because most people (95% in most categories) don’t shop frequently. Even after a campaign increases awareness, many potential buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase right away. That’s why it can take a while for your sales to catch up.
Case study: Hedepy
To illustrate the impact of brand awareness on sales, let’s look at our client Hedepy—one of the fastest-growing online therapy platforms in Europe.
Despite their initial growth, Hedepy reached a plateau in 2023. Until then, they had been relying exclusively on performance marketing strategies, which caused them to hit a ceiling—most of the people actively searching for online therapy had already used their services.
To break through this barrier, they decided to launch their first TV brand-building campaign.
The campaign began in the spring, and within just three months, they doubled their brand awareness—from 13% to 26%. Shortly after, they saw a 50% increase in sales, marking the end of their growth stagnation.
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On top of that, they achieved a positive ROI within six months, which allowed them to fully recover their investment.
This is a fantastic example of how effective brand-building strategies can impact your growth in the long run.
How to measure the ROI of brand building
Breakthroughs in marketing science and tools that measure subconscious behavior are transforming how we measure brand ROI.
Historically, a primary reason for high CMO turnover amongst consumer brands has been the delayed impact of brand building.
Because of the lag time between branding efforts and sales results, many CMOs are left without the chance to prove their strategies before they move on.
Tools like Behavio are changing that. With brand tracking, CMOs can monitor brand growth in real time and make smarter, faster decisions.
Subconscious brand metrics like Mental Market Share even predict future market share months before sales results appear, giving brands a crucial head start in proving the value of their efforts.
Final thoughts
Brand awareness is more than a vanity metric; it’s the cornerstone of sustainable business growth.
When people know, trust, and think highly of your brand, it naturally becomes their first choice–that trust and familiarity don’t just improve sales—they set the stage for long-term loyalty and market penetration.
With brand tracking tools like Behavio, you can predict future market share, make data-driven decisions, and prove the ROI of your brand building efforts–book a demo to find out how.
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