2.03 – Optimal Timeframe To Customer Awareness

In 1966, the late great Eugene Schwartz published the now-classic marketing book called Breakthrough Advertising.

Inside the book, Schwartz describes five levels of product awareness, as you can see in Figure 1-4 on page 7: the most aware, your solution aware, solution aware, problem aware, and unaware. Let’s explore these a bit.

The Most Aware

Prospects and customers who are the most aware know the benefits of your specific product or service. They could have already purchased it in the past. This is the easiest sale. Usually you can just put a discount or other offer out and people will purchase.

This is the most mechanical advertising. It’s also where most advertisers start and stop on Facebook. This is the smallest group of people. They not only have to know that your product or service exists, but they already know you exist!

This is the Bottom of Funnel example you saw on page 3. It’s the smallest part of the funnel with people who have already done most of the research in your market.

Your Solution Aware

A prospect is Your Solution Aware when they know what you sell, but don’t know everything it does. They might not be convinced how well your product or service works or might not know of its most recent improvements.

This stage of the Customer Awareness Timeline is where most advertising is done. According to Schwartz’s timeless wisdom, your ad has to do one of six tasks for your specific sellable thing (let’s use keto as an example):

1. Increase overall desire (keto’s celebrity endorsements).

2. Clarify a specific desire (eat all you want).

3. Broaden existing desire, usually in time or location (eat out and don’t ruin your diet).

4. Show new proof (another scientific study or another success story).

5. Show a new mechanism of how it works to make it better or remove prior problems (don’t starve yourself on a diet).

6. Change the perception or mechanism to set it apart from competition (all other diets limit your eating).

Solution Aware

A prospect is Solution Aware when they don’t know you exist, but they know solutions exist. In this stage, you can name the desire or solution in your ad, but you don’t want to have much about your company since it’s unfamiliar to the prospect. You have to give proof to logically lead people to considering your brand versus the competition.

Problem Aware

A prospect is Problem Aware when they have a need, but don’t recognize it as a problem. You’ll need to name the problem and/or possibly the solution in your ads. Your job is to intensify the problem and let prospects know there is a solution.

Unaware

A prospect is Unaware when they don’t know they have a need or problem (or they just won’t admit it to themselves). Your ad has to make people aware of the problematic situation.

You can do this by identifying and declaring a problem to the market. Your ad usually isn’t selling. It’s trying to identify people who have this unknown need. Then your ad can intensify the problem to move prospects to problem aware.

Some old examples of this would be the “Ring Around the Collar” campaign from the laundry soap Wisk, or Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” ads.

Some more current examples would be 23andMe and others who created a market for people who suddenly need to know their ancestry and ethnic history, learn what genetic diseases they might be prone toward, or learn what type of diet they need to eat.

The keto example of this would be an ad that talks about “losing weight without counting calories.” It calls out to people who want to lose weight but lets them know counting calories is a problem that can be solved. Unaware prospects are at the very top of the funnel. It’s the largest group of people, but it takes the most work (and money) to turn these prospects into customers.

Each of these stages hold very different prospects. Each level of awareness has different needs and they need to be addressed differently. If you sell anything more complicated than an impulse buy (like a kitchen gadget or toy), it’s very rare that you can do all of this with a single ad. As you’ll see with the Deep Funnel Marketing topic in Chapter 21, there’s a very specific process you can follow to effectively move people from Unaware to The Most Aware.