If people really wanted it, they’d already know about it. Beware the awareness trap

From there you get a varied coterie of characters:

First there is spontaneous awareness. And perhaps the clipboard wielder notes Top-of-mind awareness (sometimes called first mention). And occasionally they do a “top two”, or “top three” of those.

It’s then that you start telling people the answers and asking them if they agree, which in marketing terminology means making the jump from the ‘unprompted’ to the ‘prompted’ varieties of awareness.

Eventually you might get right down to very specific things like ad awareness, until you reach my perennial favourite: “aided recall,” which is asking someone “do you recognize this advert we’re holding a picture of right in front of your eyes”?

I’m not bashing measuring this stuff. And out of all the things to measure awareness is a pretty good one. Especially the unprompted, spontaneous, top-of-mind stuff that is a crucially important metric in any category that people don’t really care about. So; most categories.

No, I’m not writing this to tell Kantar to stop sending people with clipboards out into the world to ask consumers what toothpaste brands they can think of. 

But, I am asking a question: Are we really aware of how we’re using awareness? Or has it taken on a strangely incoherent life of its own?

Goodhart’s Law strikes again

Humans, and especially the ‘works in advertising’ style of humans, simply cannot resist turning any measurement into an objective. This unfortunate fact of life is a bitter pill that must be swallowed by everyone who intuitively sees how bad of an idea it is to Goodhart your metrics.

Awareness was meant to be diagnostic. But like all diagnostic tools, somebody eventually, infuriatingly, decided that “Pick A Number & Make It Go Up” is how they want to approach their highly remunerated job.

So, what starts as “let’s understand if people have heard of us” will depressingly and inevitably become “we need to raise awareness”. To the Goodharters, this constitutes a strategy; to anyone who understands what a strategy is, this constitutes eye-twitching levels of frustration.

But Goodharting awareness into an objective isn’t merely a ‘common or garden’ problematic misunderstanding of a basic concept. As we’ll now see; it has a uniquely sinister edge to it.

The dangerous assumption hidden inside awareness

This part is where I tend to go slightly apoplectic. The underlying logic is simply too delusional. It rests on an idea that is both confusingly backwards and catastrophically wrong:

“If more people knew about us… then more people would want us.”

The reality of the matter is, of course, the complete opposite. People are astonishingly good at noticing things they care about, and supernaturally gifted at filtering out everything they don’t.

The truth is, consumers don’t live within a perpetual fog of ignorance waiting to be “made aware.” They are not tabula rasa. Their attention simply obeys a gravitational pull toward products and categories and problems and ideas and things they care about.

To paint a more accurate picture, we could say:

“If someone wanted something like you, they’d probably know about you already.”

The funnel is the trouble

A big part of the issue is that awareness sits at the beginning part of the shape that marketing organises the complex multidimensional fabric of spacetime into: The funnel.

Conceptually, awareness gets treated as a kind of primordial ooze. The nutrient-dense sludge from which all other stages are assumed to crawl out and evolve. Before there can be consideration, before there can be preference, before there can be any actual choosing, there must first be… Ooze.

So, advertising professionals will talk about awareness as if it were the original medium. The precondition. The ur-substance of brands

“In the beginning was awareness, and awareness begat consideration, and consideration begat preference, and lo, purchase doth follow.”

It seems that because it comes first, people seem to assume it must be causal. And because it appears to be “causal,” the best thing to do is raise it.

And that is how an innocuous measurement becomes an abjectly misguided objective.

The assumption is that people must know you before they can want you. That awareness is the most essential precondition for desire, a magical gateway through which all purchasing journeys must initially pass.

Easy enough to grasp, but the diametric inverse of how human attention works.

Awareness does not create wanting. Wanting creates awareness.

Mental what!?

Byron Sharp, for all the snark he attracts, and occasionally invites, and regularly dishes out, makes a genuinely useful contribution. His point about mental availability is, as his name suggests, sharp:

It’s not “has anyone heard of us?” 

It’s “Do people think of us at the moment of choice?”

This is a distinction the industry routinely flattens into oblivion. Mental availability is not abstract recall. It’s not the ability to name a cat food brand in a quiz. Most crucially; mental availability exists at the end of the purchase journey, not at the start.

Mental availability is context-sensitive, and situation-triggered. It’s something that is behaviour-adjacent. Awareness simply tells you whether someone can remember your name as a fact. Mental availability tells you whether they retrieve your name as an option.

And would you look at that?! We’re not confusing measurement with objective anymore.

Escape the ooze?

So the practical implication is this: awareness isn’t the beginning of anything. It’s a measurement. A useful one, but still just a measurement.

Awareness only tells you whether you’ve entered someone’s mental world, it says nothing about what will happen next. So treating it as the starting point reverses the actual sequence of how people notice, think, and choose.

It’s not quite as simple as “if people want something like you, they’ll know you exist.” Life isn’t that straightforward. People miss things or have vague, partial knowledge. They’re busy. But the broader point holds: attention tends to follow interest. When people care about something, they are dramatically more likely to be aware of the relevant options. And when they don’t, “raising awareness” won’t change much.

The far more important question to be asking isn’t “are we known?”, but “are we thought of at the moment someone is deciding?” That’s the fundamental difference between awareness and mental availability. One is a memory test mistakenly stuck at the start of a journey; the other is a behavioural condition sitting precisely where it matters.

So the implication is simple: stop treating awareness as a proxy for progress or as some causal engine at the start of a funnel. Focus instead on the specific moments, contexts, cues, and associations that make your brand easy to think of when it actually matters.

The dumb irony here is that if you do that, then chances are you’ll raise your awareness.

Get in touch with Joe on LinkedIn.

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