Is brand awareness a vanity metric?

By Douglas Cook

Then and now, how time changes things…

Is brand awareness a vanity metric?A colleague posed this question the other day.

My response of 3 years ago, as an FMCG marketer would have been: absolutely not. Sure it’s difficult to prove the direct relationship between an increase in awareness and corresponding increase in sales, but there’s enough historical data to suggest an indirect link between the two that is worthy of continued investment. My response of now, as a growth marketer in an Internet Economy business, is: probably.

Here’s the counterargument

The relationship between awareness and sales was never direct. It tends to start pretty close at the point of product launch with the only people knowing you being the ones that have actually purchased, diverging over time as your product came into the consideration of a wider, less loyal group.

Sean Ellis has previously written on how awareness building at a start-up stage is a waste of resource, which makes sense based on the aforementioned awareness/sales relationship. However, at Skyscanner, despite being some way from this start-up stage, our awareness/sales relationship seems to be quite different from what you’d expect to see. We don’t invest heavily, or regularly, in brand awareness studies, but when we have, the results are curious.

In one of our EMEA markets, we’ve done a few studies in recent years that have highlighted a noticeable disconnect between our awareness and traffic figures, compared to the relationship you’d expect; the likes of Hitwise and Similarweb show us in the top 3 of all travel players in the market in terms of traffic. Yet when we look at our position in terms of brand awareness, we’re much lower down the list. Similar studies in other markets have shown comparable data.

Awareness vs. Sales

So given this dynamic, it’s pretty difficult to work out the link between awareness and sales for us, even compared to some of the indirect relationships others see. It could be argued a business like ours never outgrow the supposed start-up stage. If so, why does awareness still seem like some sort of holy grail which you must get to at some point in the life cycle? If we are focused on the AARRR model for business measurement, then why does awareness even figure in any discussion, ever?

Sure, over time the metrics will shift slightly as any business looks to scale, but if you have been so obsessive about driving metrics that are directly actionable through all stages of growth so far, then why would you suddenly look to pivot so severely to brand awareness activity and measurement?

Not only does it lack action but it’s expensive to track properly, requiring an entirely different measurement model from the one used to date. Granted, with greater scale it will require different tactics, and hopefully higher budgets, but these should still be focused on driving similar AARRR metrics as before.

To date I’ve never seen brand awareness on a list of vanity metrics alongside the likes of UMVs or page likes, but perhaps it should be? If not, where should it sit in the list of important metrics for a growth marketer?

About the author

My name is Douglas Cook and I am Product Owner for the Growth Factory squad in EMEA here at Skyscanner. Our squad helps to develop and implement the processes, tools and techniques that are helping take us from a more traditional marketing to growth orientated business. Having started life as a “traditional” marketer I’ve loved being part of the Growth transformation, not just because of the impact on the business but also the development of my own skills and expertise over this time, which epitomises what makes Skyscanner such a great place to grow and learn.