In today’s data-driven business environment, marketeers track everything from website traffic and conversion rates to customer acquisition costs and sales performance. Yet surprisingly, many vision companies still fail to measure one of the most important drivers of long-term growth: brand awareness.
Brand awareness reflects how familiar a target audience is with a company’s name, products, or services. It influences customer trust, purchase decisions, pricing power, and ultimately revenue. Despite its importance, most companies in the machine vision industry either don’t measure it at all or do so inconsistently. Why is that and what can you do to stop ignoring your most important marketing KPI?
Leadership doesn't understand the strategic value
In many organizations, brand awareness is viewed as a “marketing metric” rather than a business metric. When leadership teams reduce branding to logos, colors, and advertising campaigns, they may underestimate its impact on customer behavior and business performance.
Strong brand awareness deliver much more business advantages:
- Lower customer acquisition costs: Selling your product to people who already know you is much easier.
- Higher trust and credibility: This is essential in an industry like machine vision where the cost of failure is extremely high.
- Higher added value: Customers are more willing to pay a premium for a brand they know and trust.
- Higher attractivity for talents: A strong brand helps attract the best employees to drive the company’s growth.
Companies that fail to connect awareness with these outcomes often see little reason to measure it systematically. Yet a strong brand can be one of the main assets valued by investors in mergers and acquisitions, which proves how essential it is to overall business performance.
"If sales are fine, we're fine"
One of the main reasons companies neglect brand awareness is that they focus heavily on short-term financial metrics. Sales revenue, leads generated, and conversion rates are tangible and easy to report. Brand awareness, on the other hand, feels less immediate and often appears disconnected from day-to-day business outcomes.
Executives often ask:
- How many deals did we close?
- How many leads did marketing generate?
- What was our return on advertising spend?
…rather than asking:
- How many potential customers know we exist?
- Does our target audience perceive us the way we want?
- Are we more memorable than our competitors?
This short-term focus can create a blind spot. By the time sales begin to decline, awareness may have already weakened months or even years earlier.
Over the last decade, marketing has become increasingly focused on performance metrics.
Platforms such as Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, and other digital channels provide immediate visibility into clicks, leads, and conversions. This is a big progress, as marketing ROI had always been difficult to measure. But the downside is that it has encouraged many organizations to prioritize activities that show direct short-term returns. This is particularly true for smaller businesses with limited marketing budget, which is the vast majority of machine vision companies.
As a consequence, investment in brand measurement often falls behind. Many business leaders assume that brand awareness is subjective and impossible to quantify accurately. Measuring it often requires dedicated market research. Because these methods appear complex and/or expensive, companies postpone measurement efforts indefinitely.
The problem is that performance marketing captures demand that already exists. Brand-building activities help create future demand. Without measuring awareness, companies may optimize for today’s results while undermining tomorrow’s growth.
In our industrial, B2B market, organizations tend to assume that brand awareness is primarily a concern for consumer brands.
The logic is simple: if buying decisions are based on technical product capabilities and sales conversations, awareness seems less important. However, research consistently shows that buyers tend to favor suppliers they already know and trust before even entering a purchasing process.
In fact, by the time many prospects engage with a sales representative, they have already formed opinions about potential vendors – consciously or unconsciously. In an industry where investments condition product quality and safety for years, trust is essential to be even considered. Companies that are unknown to the market often face an uphill battle, regardless of how strong their technical solutions may be.
Many machine vision companies with limited marketing expertise tend to confuse customer satisfaction with brand awareness. They conduct surveys with their existing customer base and assume this reflects the opinion of the market on the brand.
Yet brand awareness is not about experience, it is about perception. We all have strong opinions on brands that we have never purchased that are subjective and may not correspond to reality. For example, we may think a brand is more expensive than it actually is or has a poorer quality than it actually delivers.
Assuming your customers are representative of the market is a deadly bias. If others don’t buy from you, there must be reasons for that, and brand perception might be one of them. I have already seen strong divergences between customer satisfaction and brand awareness in the past that were eye-opening to management.
Brand awareness is often overlooked because it seems difficult to measure, lacks clear ownership, and does not always produce immediate financial results. Yet it plays a critical role in shaping customer preference, market positioning, and long-term business growth.
Without measurement, companies cannot answer fundamental questions:
- Is our brand becoming stronger or weaker?
- Are our marketing investments improving visibility?
- How do we compare to competitors?
- Are we reaching the right audiences?
- Is awareness translating into business growth?
Organizations that ignore these questions are effectively managing one of their most valuable assets without a dashboard.
What is commonly called brand awareness is actually not just brand awareness but brand awareness and brand image (aka brand perception).
- Brand awareness measures whether your target audiences knows your brand at all. It is usually broken down into:
- Unaided brand awareness (open question): “Which machine vision camera brands do you know?”. Brands named as answer to this question have the strongest awareness (top-of-mind awareness)
- Aided brand awareness (multiple choice): “Which of the following machine vision software brands do you know”? Respondents must pick brands they know from a list, some of them may not have come to their mind spontaneously.
Both aided and unaided brand awareness only measure if the audience knows a brand, regardless of whether their opinion is good or bad.
- Brand perception measures the opinion, good or bad, of the audience about a brand.
- The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular method to measure the popularity of a brand. It consists in asking respondents how likely they are to recommend the brand to a friend on a scale from 1 to 10. However, this question only gives a general positive or negative appreciation.
- Attribute ratings help provide more specific intelligence on brand perception. Respondents are asked to rate a brand on different attributes – for example innovative technology, product quality, customer service, etc. This is extremely valuable information, as it allows to measure if the perception of the market corresponds to the brand positioning. It also helps identify strengths and weaknesses compared to competition.
Thes KPIs are extremely valuable to marketeers, but they are difficult to collect. They require dedicated surveys submitted to a large audience that goes beyond the existing customer list. With its understanding of machine vision technology and its network in the industry, Vision Markets can help you craft your surveys, run them and analyze the results.
Companies that don’t have the resources for ad-hoc brand awareness research can use other KPIs to evaluate their brand awareness. Strictly speaking, these KPIs are not brand awareness metrics but they can at least give an indication of trends.
- Number of new leads vs. recurring leads. How many of your incoming requests for quotation are coming from new customers compared to existing customers? If this metric is high and increasing, this shows that you are successful at making new people aware of your offering.
- Number of new website visitors and social media followers. This information is easily accessible in web and social media analytics. They show how successful you are at increasing your audience and making new people aware of your offering.
- Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP). Your position in search engine results for your target keywords depends on various parameters such as your domain authority, the number of links from relevant websites to yours, etc. If your position is high, it means that your website domain – and hence your brand – has a high relevance, authority and popularity.
- Branded search volume. Branded searches are search engine queries including your brand name – for example Allied Vision, MVTec, Tamron, etc. Such searches are made by people who obviously know your name but have not yet memorized or bookmarked your website URL. Therefore, they can be an indicator of your ability to attract new prospects. You can use tools like Google Ads, Moz, or Ubersuggest to track the number of such searches in Google to see if they progress or decline.
All of the tricks above are easy first steps to somehow measure your brand awareness with little to no investment. However, they are just workarounds. The absolute values have little relevance, what matters is rather how the figures evolve over time and how they compare to your competitors. But while they might give a hint on the strength of your brand, they can’t replace an actual brand awareness survey and don’t provide any qualitative information on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of your brand.