Brand Recall

Brand recall relates to consumers ability to identify the brand under a variety of circumstances. With brand recall, consumers must retrieve the actual brand element from memory when given some related probe and cue.

Thus, brand recall is more demanding memory task than brand recognition because consumers are not just given a brand element and asked to identify or discriminate it as one they had not already seen.

Different measures of brand recall are possible depending on the type of cues provided to consumers. Unaided recall on the basis of “all brands” provided as a cue is likely to identify only the very strongest brand. Aided recall uses various types of cues to help consumer recall.

One possible sequence of aided recall might use progressively narrowly defined cues—such as product class, product category, and product type labels—to provide insight into the organisation of consumers’ brand knowledge structure. For example, if recall of the Porsche 944–– a high performance German sports car–– in non-German market was of interest, the recall probes could begin with “all cars” and move to more and more narrowly defined categories such as “sports cars,” “foreign cars,” or even “high performance German sports cars.”

Other types of cues may be employed to measure brand recall. For example, consumers could be probed on the basis of products attribute (e.g., “when you think of chocolate, which brand come to mind?”) or usage goals (e.g., “if were thinking of having healthy snakes, which brand come to mind?”). often, to capture the brand recall, it may be important to examine the context of the purchase decision or consumption usage situation.

The more that brand have strong associations to this consideration, the more likely it is that they will be recalled when they are given those situational cues. Combined, measures of recall based on product attribute or category cues as well as situational or usage cues given an indication of breadth of recall.

Besides being judged as correctly recalled, Brand recall can be further distinguished according to order, as well as latency or speed of recall. In many cases, people will recognize a brand when it is show to them and will recall it if they are given a sufficient number of cues.

Thus, potential recallability is high. The bigger issue is the salience of the brand –– do consumers think of the brand under the right circumstances, when they could be either buying or using the product? How quickly do they think of the brand? It is automatically or easily recalled? Is it the first brand recall?