Brand Awareness Isn’t the Goal — It’s the Starting Line. Here’s How to Turn Attention Into Advocacy.

I began my career in brand strategy and consumer insights, so I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about a bigger question than whether people notice a brand: What does that brand mean to them, and does that meaning influence what they do?

Years ago, while serving as managing director of consumer insights for Teach For America, I saw a vivid illustration of that question at the University of Miami.

I was conducting a focus group with college students in a noisy campus food court. Behind the students hung an eight-foot Teach For America banner, active marketing that we weren’t allowed to remove. When I asked whether they had seen our messaging on campus, they told me they were unaware of it.

The banner was practically hanging over their heads.

Afterward, I walked around campus and watched students moving between buildings with headphones in and eyes fixed on their phones. Posters and banners were everywhere. Physically, the messages were impossible to miss. Experientially, they might as well not have existed.

The moment didn’t change my thinking about brand awareness so much as reinforce something I had spent years examining: awareness matters, but earning it was becoming harder. And with a new generation growing up surrounded by more messages, more screens and more competition for attention, simply being seen would no longer be enough.

The bar was getting higher — not just to capture attention, but to create an emotional response and for a brand to matter.

A person can recognize your logo, see your advertising repeatedly and even click your content while feeling very little toward your company. Sustainable growth comes from moving people emotionally, rather than simply accumulating exposure.

I developed four stages for understanding that movement: Apathy, Awareness, Alignment and Advocacy. Apathy means people feel little toward you. Awareness means they recognize you. Alignment begins when they see a connection between your brand and who they are. Advocacy happens when they voluntarily recommend, share or defend the brand.

That last stage changes the question you need to ask about marketing. Instead of asking, “How many people saw us?” I started asking, “What happened after they saw us?”

One campaign helped crystallize this for me. Nationwide Children’s Hospital came to our agency for help with annual giving after healthcare donations had slowed following the extraordinary support hospitals received during the pandemic.

We built the campaign around the butterfly in the hospital’s logo, a symbol of hope. During the holidays, illuminated butterflies were placed on the hospital lawn. When someone donated five dollars, the butterflies lit up, creating an experience children inside the hospital could see from their rooms and donors could watch as well. Video, social content and local media connected that physical moment to the larger story of hope.

The donation mattered, but the experience surrounding it mattered, too. The active participation helped donors feel personally connected to the hospital and what it represented. And those who watched the content online felt a new connection to the hospital as well.

You can apply the same principle without building an elaborate campaign. Choose one important customer interaction this week and ask: What does the customer feel at this moment? Then ask what small change could create reassurance, recognition, relief, pride, belonging and participation.

That exercise can reveal more than another report on impressions.

Because awareness is the starting point rather than the destination, I’ve always believed measurement has to look beyond reach. Reach tells us whether people encountered the brand. What matters next is whether that exposure begins to build belief and move people toward a deeper relationship.

Start by looking for behaviors that require progressively more commitment. Someone seeing a post requires almost nothing. Reading to the bottom of a page requires more. Returning to the site, subscribing, providing preferences, buying again, writing a detailed review or recommending you publicly requires progressively greater investment. Those behaviors help reveal whether people are moving closer to the brand.

Then add attitude to behavior. Read reviews and open-ended survey responses. Listen to the actual language customers use. Look for phrases that indicate identification and trust, such as customers describing the brand as reflecting their values or understanding people like them. My Emotional Movement Index, found in my book, combines signals such as action and attitude because a click and a conviction are very different things.

Create a simple quarterly scorecard with four questions: Are more people taking voluntary actions? Are existing customers returning? Are customers expressing trust or shared values? Are people recommending us without being prompted?

The trend matters more than producing a perfect score.

I think about brand experiences as deposits and withdrawals from an emotional account. Helpful service, consistent behavior and a surprisingly thoughtful interaction make deposits. Friction, broken promises and irrelevant communication make withdrawals. Over time, that balance determines whether someone becomes an advocate or quietly drifts toward indifference.

I have experienced the withdrawal side personally. A much-anticipated 20th-anniversary trip to Scotland with my wife collapsed after mechanical problems, poor communication, rerouting mistakes and lost golf clubs. The airline talked publicly about doing the right thing, yet the experience we received told a very different story. I have since shared that experience with hundreds of people.

That is advocacy working in reverse.

This week, map five customer touchpoints: discovery, purchase, onboarding, service and follow-up. For each one, write down the promise your brand makes and the experience customers actually receive. Fix the largest gap first. Small changes accumulate because customers experience brands through moments rather than strategy presentations.

Throughout my career, I’ve viewed attention as an essential first step, not proof that marketing worked. The more important question is what that attention leads people to think, feel and ultimately do.

Your strongest growth signal may therefore be something that never appears on an impressions dashboard. It is the customer who tells a colleague about you, writes the review you never requested, returns when a cheaper alternative exists or speaks for your company when nobody from your company is in the room.

That is the outcome I want marketing to create. Visibility can introduce a brand. Belief gives people a reason to carry it forward.