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Top of mind awareness in industrial markets. Why you need to get and keep it!

"Top of mind awareness" is when people in a market have a particular brand on the tip of their tongue and can be described as being aware of it. You need to get and maintain top of mind awareness, nothing else is more important.

Getting and maintaining top of mind awareness is the key requirement for sales and marketing staff for the simple reason that if your target customers have never heard of you they are very unlikely to buy from you.

You need to get and maintain top of mind awareness, nothing else is more important.

You need to try to get to first place in top of mind.

Top of mind awareness means when your potential customer decides to buy your particular product, yours will be one of the names they will think of.

In the consumer market the route to top of mind awareness is usually via traditional advertising, strong product branding coupled with wide availability to regularly reinforce brand awareness at every opportunity.

Where the niche markets of industrial sectors are concerned, there may be targeted advertising opportunities for example in trade magazines and there will likely be public relations opportunities but there are often quite a small number of decision makers for your particular offering so reaching these can be viable by directly targeted direct mail or direct face to face activities.

To get and retain top of mind awareness you have to proactively send messages into the market.

You will almost certainly need regular new things to say as people are not impressed by the same message repeated over months and years.

If you are bent on conducting face to face sales meetings with a small target group of decision makers, having nothing new to say, can be the kiss of death when asking for a repeat appointment.

Companies and their PR people therefore think of all sorts of reasons to create a dripping tap of information in to the market all helping to reinforce the message that you are:

active, energetic, doing good business, developing and launching new products, promoting promising staff, attending an exhibition or trade show, growing your business, extending your premises, launching your new / improved website,

Indeed when embarking on this route to get and maintain top of mind awareness you need to be creative in finding meaningful content for the regular communications you are now committed to.

Research in the passenger car market shows that customers whose vehicles have been the subject of safety recalls increasingly feel that they have been cared for by responsible organisations rather than sold shoddy goods in the first place.

A cynic might say this feel good factor may be the result of an interaction which did not cost the punter money, most interactions with main dealers being characterised by significant loss of the folding stuff.

Some of this research seems to actually suggest that car makers may in fact be recalling cars more than they need to, because of the positive "caring" gloss which rubs off onto them during the process.

It is very hard to predict when your potential customer will actually want to buy your type of product.

Because of this difficulty, your messages must be constant, not so much as to offend, but not to little to allow people to escape some exposure and awareness of you.

If anyone is still in any doubt about the importance of the constant attempt to get and maintain top of mind awareness I will share a sales and marketing nightmare with you, you decide if it is fictional or not!

Sales manager Jim was responsible for an industrial product which sold well to a specific sector and application.

Jim worked to identify all the potential customers in that sector by visiting trade shows, researching commercial libraries and discussing opportunities with distributors.

Jim found there were less than 500 potential customer companies using significant volumes of the products, further:

They were mainly in Europe and the USA
90% of decision makers at these companies spoke English, German, French or Italian
All were currently buying competitor products from a small number of firms.

Having identified his target customers Jim started selling direct to the target companies in one of the geographic areas.

Jim increased awareness among the target customers, discovered shortfalls and weaknesses in competitor products and started to win over the potential customers.

Jim was sure over time some would switch to his improving products.

Because Jim did not start communicating with all the 500 potential target customers, as soon as he had identified them, companies outside the region Jim was operating in remained unaware of his company and their offering.

Jim discovered some years later, that a key competitor had severe technical problems with all its significant customers in one region during this period of time.

The competitors products failed in a very public way and all their customers were effectively up for grabs.

As none of them had heard of Jim's company at that time, none of them contacted Jim to solve their problems.

What a nightmare, loads of potential customers pissed off because of problems with a competitors product but not aware of your own which could have solved their problems.

Fiction? .. you decide!
Could it happen to you? .. you decide!

When your target customers are buying competitor products, it is often only when a competitor makes a mistake, or if you are able to make a significant step forward that you have a chance to get in and take the customer.

If you are at least communicating with all of them, they will know you could solve their problems and will be more likely to turn to you for a potential solution when problems arise.

If they are unaware of you, you could end up like Jim, finding out about the window of opportunity when it has long since been firmly closed.

Getting top of mind awareness is not an option for when you are ready.
You need it now,
you need to work hard to keep it all the time
lest you miss the perhaps short time when your window of opportunity is open.

Author Mark Abraham (mark@sticky-marketing.net) 19th October 2001