Brand awareness is the degree to which a target audience recognizes, recalls, and associates meaning with a brand. It is measured through unaided recall ("what software comes to mind for managing customer email?"), aided recognition ("have you heard of Customer.io?"), and category-specific top-of-mind surveys, and treated as the top-of-funnel input to every other marketing metric. It is one of the few marketing outputs that compounds without ongoing spend once it's built, and one of the easiest to under-invest in because the ROI doesn't show up in next quarter's dashboard.
The standard measurement frame separates three levels: unaided awareness (the buyer names you when asked the category question, the strongest signal), aid...