Unaided (or spontaneous) awareness is a sought-after brand question and a key ingredient to measuring the “mental availability” of a brand for consumers. The question is typically posed by giving respondents some context, followed by an open text field to enter one or more brands. For example, one might ask, “If you are planning on buying a new car, which brands would you think of?", or “What brand do you associate most with refreshing drinks on a hot day?".

Unaided awareness questions require more effort from the respondent than multiple choice questions, and are thus always accompanied by a (monetary) reward for the respondent. 

Since we at Latana exclusively run non-incentivized surveys (and also get lots of requests for measuring unaided awareness), we wanted to find out more about the possibilities of running unaided awareness questions in a non-incentivized environment. We were particularly interested in the following questions: 

1. Do enough people fill out open-ended questions so that we can get reliable results?
2. How do response dynamics differ across countries and target audiences?
3. What impact does the type of category have on response behavior?

To answer these questions, we set up three test surveys across different geographic regions, audiences and categories.

The first one tried to understand which toothpaste brands are top of mind for Kenyan women who are responsible for household purchases. The second question asked people in Texas, USA, which brands come to mind when thinking of confectioneries. The third question asked frequent business flyers in the UK which airline brands come to mind. Here’s what we found:

Which toothpaste brands are top of mind for women in Kenya?

We showed the following question to Kenyans between October 25th and November 5th 2024, across 262 different mobile apps from a wide range of categories.

In total, 5,769 people saw the question and 1,202 responded, giving us a response rate of just over 20%. The question was followed by demographic and profile questions, allowing us to both weight responses to match census data and segment the results, like identifying household purchase decision-makers.

Of the 1,202 people who answered the question, 1,031 provided a valid response. We defined a valid response as one that either names a brand or provides a meaningful answer like “none”. Of these 1,031 responses, 1,003 people mentioned a brand relevant to the category.

The first surprising finding was that, although we left the number of brands people could enter open—and explicitly asked them to separate answers with commas, only 17% named more than one brand. On average, respondents mentioned just 1.3 brands, meaning that while the question was designed with a more open format, it effectively captures the most top-of-mind brand.

The total number of brands (with at least five mentions) that people shared was five. By far the most frequently mentioned brand was Colgate, which was named by almost four out of five respondents (78%) - six times as many as the runner-up, Pepsodent (13%). The margin of error (MoE) for Colgate was 3.1%, and 0.9% for Oral-B, the smallest brand mentioned.

We then looked at the results for women who make household purchases, analysing the data using a method called multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP). This technique is used to estimate subgroup relationships and adjust them to match population demographics for better representativeness.

The overall results for women who make household purchases were remarkably similar to those of the general population. The MoEs were also very close, ranging from 0.8% for Oral-B to 4% for Sensodyne.

Which chocolate brands are most salient for Texans?

Having answered our first question—whether enough people complete open-ended questions to get reliable results—we turned to the second: do response dynamics differ across countries and target audiences?

To do that, we ran a survey in the US state of Texas, where we asked people about which chocolate confectionery brands came to mind. We reduced the fieldwork to just two days, from December 4th to December 6th 2024, and exposed the question to 1,285 people. 

592 answered the question, meaning a response rate of 46% - more than twice as high as the first test in Kenya. The number of responses that were considered valid was 523, with 88% of people providing a valid response. However, those tied to a real brand in the category were 354 (61%), so a lower rate of real brand answers than in the Kenya test.

Apart from the higher response rate, the other response patterns were surprisingly similar to the test in Kenya: slightly fewer people mentioned only one brand (77% versus 83% in Kenya). Therefore, the average number of brands mentioned is also slightly higher (1.5 brands were mentioned versus 1.3 in Kenya).

The total number of individual brands (at least five mentions) that people mentioned was seven. Similar to toothpaste in Kenya, there was a clear frontrunner (Hershey's), which almost 40% of people mentioned. The gap to the second brand was slightly smaller, but the frontrunner still had six times the mentions of the runner-up, Godiva.

The results on the Texas test showed MoEs ranging from 1.4% for Cadbury to 5.2% for Hershey’s, so also very similar to the results in Kenya.

Which airlines do frequent business flyers in the UK think of?

In our third experiment, we wanted to find out whether the number of brands in a category matters to response behaviour. We designed a test for unaided awareness of airline brands in the UK among frequent business travellers, i.e. people who should be most familiar with a wide range of airline brands. As more than 80 airline brands fly out of London Heathrow alone, this seemed to be an ideal test case. 

The fieldwork took place in parallel to that in Texas, from December 4th to December 6th 2024. Of the 1,829 people who saw the question, 826 answered it; a very similar share as in Texas (45% versus 46%). Far more people provided a valid response in this test, 755, which is 91% of those answering the question, versus 88% for confectionery in Texas and 86% for toothpaste in Kenya.

If we compare response patterns to those in Kenya, on average, slightly fewer people provided relevant brand answers (76% versus 83% in Kenya), but fewer people mentioned only one brand (71% versus 83% in Kenya). Plus, on average, a higher number of brands were mentioned per person (1.8 brands were mentioned versus 1.3 in Kenya).

The total number of brands (with at least 5 mentions) that people shared was 18. Similar to toothpaste in Kenya, there was a clear frontrunner (British Airways), which almost 40% of people mentioned. The gap to the second brand was much smaller in this test, with 2.5 more people mentioning the top brand than the runner-up, EasyJet. After British Airways, the competitive landscape was much more evenly spread, with the third, fourth and fifth subsequent brands all hovering around 11%.

For this test, we wanted to validate whether a much more saturated industry would still provide us with reliable data per brand. The results on the UK airlines test showed MoEs that range from 0.8% to 4.2% within the general population, again, well within the range of acceptable data quality. However, when segmenting for the target audience of frequent business flyers, a more niche audience than in any of our other tests, margins of error increased to a range of 2.4% to 10.3%. 

Our key learnings

Measuring unaided awareness in a non-incentivized environment works surprisingly well. Response rates are sufficiently high to ensure that enough data can be collected to properly weigh and segment the data. 

Average error margins for the top five brands were 3% at the general population level, and even at a more niche segmentation (primary household shopper, frequent business flyer), they were 5%.

One important thing to note is that when the goal is to measure the unaided awareness of many brands, or when categories include lots of brands, response patterns in a non-incentivized setting can differ markedly from incentivized responses.

In an incentivized environment, asking respondents to name brands in a category with lots of familiar brands, such as chocolate or airlines, usually results in people listing three to five brands. Part of this might be due to the survey setup itself: incentivized respondents are often more aware they're taking part in research and, as a result, tend to spend more time and effort on their answers.

Conversely, in a non-incentivized environment, the number of brands that people are willing to report as top of mind is lower, more like one to two, regardless of the geographic market, audience type or product category.

The implications of the above are twofold:

1. Measuring unaided awareness in a non-incentivized setting is closer to top-of-mind spontaneous awareness, which measures which brand comes to mind first, rather than all the brands that a person is aware of.
2. Unaided awareness levels of brands that are not the frontrunner can be significantly lower than in incentivized research, which makes them incomparable: a brand that might show up as having 20% unaided awareness in incentivized research might score in the single digits with non-incentivized