What is Brand Salience? — Amati and Associates

In marketing measures, brand salience is a KPI that gauges how well respondents notice a brand. In cognitive psychology, “salience” defines the domain of the most prominent or noticeable. A Salient brand is a brand that consumers see and — more importantly — remember. This measure is particularly effective in assessing a brand’s likelihood to be part of a consumer repertoire. As a matter of fact, according to , “Brand salience is a marketing KPI that tells you how well people recognize, notice, or think about your brand when they’re making purchasing decisions.”

Brand Salience vs. Recall and Top of Mind Awareness

In this sense, salience is more closely related to purchase intent than similar measures included in brand equity, like brand awareness and recall. Brand Salience incorporates “top of mind” awareness but predicts the ability to impact future consumption, which is not the case for the equity measure.

Whereas brand recall explains how well consumers remember a brand — a crucial step towards equity building: no memory, no equity, high recall, high equity potential (but of course, if consumers recall your brand for the wrong reasons, like a scandal, they have a negative perception and that’s not building equity either.) But salience is more action-driven.