Brand awareness survey questions: a simple (but complete) guide

When designing a brand awareness survey, there are various questions that typically need to be included in the questionnaire.

In addition, the questionnaire, which is usually written as a Word document, needs to be ordered and set out in a certain way, and include instructions for the programmer who will put the Word version online, using survey software.

You might wonder why bother with the Word version, and just go straight to the survey software or similar. The answer is that it saves (a great deal of) time, despite it seeming to involve an additional step!

A brand awareness survey questionnaire would typically take respondents under 5 minutes to complete and could contain fewer than 10 questions.

So, let’s get started.

Questionnaire Part 1 - Demographic questions

The first few questions in the questionnaire need to be about the respondents. So, typically they might include age, gender and region. And each of these questions will be a “single response” question, meaning respondents can give only one answer. So they could look like the one below (with the last question adjusted for your locality).

Which of the following are you?

Male
Female
Non-binary/Other

What age band do you fall into?

Under 20
20-29
30-39
40-49
50-59
60-69
70+

Where do you live?

Region A
Region B
Region C
Region D
Etc

There can be other demographic questions, depending on your particular requirements. For example, these could include questions on income or life stage.

Questionnaire Part 2 - Screener questions

You may wish your research to be carried out with people who meet certain criteria, rather than with just anybody. For example, if your research is for a dog food brand then you would probably only want to know about brand awareness among dog owners.

So, you would need a question in the questionnaire to identify dog owners. You could ask it as a single response question like the below.

Do you own a dog?

Yes
No

However, we would not advise this, because some respondents will answer “Yes” even if they do not own a dog. This is so they can get the payment for taking part in the survey!

It is much better to ask a more indirect question, to which respondents can give more than one answer. This is known as a multi-response question. It could be something like the below.

Which of the following do you do on a “typical” weekend?

Please select all that apply

Go to the pub
Go to the cinema
Read a newspaper
Go to church/place of worship
Walk the dog
None of these

Then, anyone who does not select “Walk the dog” at this question will find that they are excluded from (or “screened out” of) the survey. Of course, a respondent might walk someone else's dog! But this can be discovered via a further question.

Continuing this example, it could be the case that your dog food brand is aimed at a premium market, in which case you may want your research to only be with dog owners who buy premium dog foods. So you could have another screener question to identify such people and to screen out non-buyers of premium dog food.

Rather than asking this as a direct question (such as “Do you buy premium dog food?”) you could ask it indirectly, such as by asking their household income, or which supermarkets they shop at for groceries. In this way you can deduce whether or not a respondent is likely to be a buyer of premium dog food.

Now that we have discussed screener questions it is important to mention that demographic questions can also be used to screen out respondents who you do not want to complete your research. For example, you may not want men to complete the questionnaire, in which case the question on sex/gender can be used as a screener question.

Another point to mention here is that any screener questions need to be near the start of the questionnaire. It’s fine to have 3-4 demographic questions before any screeners, but if you had more than this then you would need to move the screeners towards the start of the questionnaire.

This is because the companies (known as "panels") which provide respondents to take part in brand awareness surveys do not like respondents to answer a large number of questions, only then be screened out, and therefore not receive any compensation for their time.

Questionnaire Part 3 - Brand awareness questions

Usually, two types of brand awareness questions would be asked within a survey, namely “Unprompted” (also known as “Spontaneous”) and “Prompted”.

An “Unprompted” brand awareness question would be an open-ended question, asking respondents what brands they know of. So, this might be phrased as below.

What brands of XYZ are you aware of?

Please write in…

This might seem straightforward, but it is important to think carefully about how to describe the market “XYZ” in which your brand operates. It must be done in a way that respondents will understand, but which also accurately reflects your brand’s market. So it cannot be in marketing lingo!

The “Prompted” brand awareness question would be multi-response, listing the various brands in the market, and asking respondents to tick each one that they know of. So, this might be phrased as below.

Which of the brands below are you aware of?

Please select all that apply

Brand A
Brand B
Brand C
Brand D
Etc…
Other (please specify)

If there are dozens of brands within your market, you might want to limit the list to the top 10-12, so as to avoid the respondents having to read an enormous list.

Similarly, you may want to use brand logos, rather than brand names. But in this case you must make sure each brand logo is a similar size so that respondents’ eyes are not drawn to some more than others, thereby potentially skewing the results. Similarly, they must not be so large that respondents have to scroll down the page to see them all.

Summary

You can include other questions in a brand awareness survey, and we discuss this in another article called: How to undertake a brand awareness survey in 5 easy steps

If you are too busy to design your questions please do get in touch, and we can do this for you. We can also undertake the survey programming and sourcing the respondents for you.

Alternatively, if you just want some help or guidance, we can provide this on an hourly basis.