What is brand salience and how Public Relations enforce it?

Every business, today, is trying to become a brand that people instantly recall and prefer whenever it comes to buy a particular product. For instance, if you have to buy a pretty casual skirt, the first brand that would come to your mind would be “Zara” or “Forever21”. So, you would go to any of these stores and buy the dress driving revenue for the brand. Such is the power of brand salience.

Understanding Brand Salience

Brand salience is usually the term we use for brand’s propensity to be recalled whenever something related to it crosses the consumer’s mind. Similar to brand awareness, consumers remember the brand, know it completely (or partially), and can easily recall when prompted. But, the effect of brand recall is what makes brand salience different from brand awareness. In simple words, brand awareness determines how many consumers remember or know the brand either for positive (or negative) reasons. And brand salience is all about how many consumers know, recall, and prefer a particular brand over the rest. To what extent consumers likely to purchase products of a particular brand is what brand salience finds out.

The author of “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” Byron Sharp, puts rightly the concern of brands as “creating memorable and consistent brand assets that trigger an instinctive response when they’re seen or heard at critical purchase moments—in other words, they should focus on brand salience.”

How to create brand salience?

Such brand salience can be efficiently enforced through public relations because public relations practitioners create, enhance, and consistently improve brand’s image amongst pals using media. Since no arena is left untouched by the media, consumers are always profoundly immersed in media and technology. Public relations companies reach the right audience who are in the process of making a buying decision and influence their behavior using the positive attributes of the brand.

Here’s how:

1.    Positions brand in a competitive market

Public relations agencies position a brand and its products on the minds of target consumers. How a brand wants to portray itself in the eyes of consumers, in which category of products or services a brand wants to be strongly identified, what makes the brand distinct and worth recalling etc., is all that public relations manage operating on earned media. Newspaper articles, press releases, and brand profiles are the primary modes of operation which helps establish brand salience.

2.    Build relationships with customers

PR bridges the gap between a brand, consumers, and journalists. The PR strategies mainly focus on communicating well with the global audience in local ways so that the brand values, ideas, and ethics can be highlighted. When consumers know the complete inside-story of the brand for all good reasons, they remember, recall and favor the brand. Therefore, PR acts as a relationship-builder for the brands working with the goal of achieving brand salience.

3.    Create Brand Awareness

For brand salience enforcement, PR does not rely on marketing strategies. Instead, they make people aware of the brand, first by building the brand’s image and message through earned media. For this, they make a brand image meaningful and deliver the brand message impressively to win the trust of the audience or consumers that brand is bringing innovation and benefits to their lives. It ultimately results in brand salience.