Brand awareness is earned, not bought
A fortnight ago I wrote about a day in Cambridge with Meena and Mahera, the mother-and-daughter team behind AuraLai, walking the city's retailers together and studying the shelves. Last week Laura Turner wrote about it in CWB: the AuraLai multi-functional nursing cover, a wool, silk and cashmere blend, lightweight and breathable, hand-finished edges, several prints, packaging good enough to give as a gift. I was genuinely proud to see it. And the two events are not unconnected, which is the reason I want to talk about brand awareness this week, because what this brand is doing is the version that works and almost nobody writes about it honestly.
Here is what building brand awareness actually looked like for them. Getting out of the office and onto shop floors to understand how the category merchandises itself. Talking to retail staff rather than only to customers. Knowing which editors genuinely cover maternity and baby, and approaching them with a specific thing rather than a general announcement that the business exists. None of that is glamorous and none of it is quick. It is the opposite of the advice most small brands are sold, which tends to involve buying reach and hoping recognition follows. Recognition does not follow spend. It follows being visible in the places where the people who matter actually are, repeatedly, over months.
But the reason it works for AuraLai is that there is a real product decision underneath it, and this is the part worth studying. Look closely at the cover and how the collar is structured, it allows a mother to look down and see her baby's face while she feeds. Almost every nursing cover on the market solves one problem, the mother's privacy in a public place, and in solving it creates a second: a piece of fabric hanging between a woman and her newborn, so she cannot see whether the baby has latched or is even awake. These feeding shawls protect a Mother's modesty, but allow the Mother to see her baby feeding, provide better breathability for the baby and are luxurious gifts, so they solve four problems in one.
That is also why a trade editor spent a page on it. Laura Turner is an expert in the children's product category, and what she is genuinely good at is spotting the product that solves a real problem and telling it apart from the many that only claim to. That is a harder skill than it sounds. She is not writing about AuraLai because somebody asked her nicely. She looked at that their unique design and could see the problems it would solve.
And here is the part I most want to leave you with. When you are starting out you almost certainly do not have a large marketing and PR budget, and that is normal rather than a failing. It also means that everything you can do yourself to raise brand awareness matters enormously. Walking the shops. Talking to the staff on the floor. Reading the two or three publications that genuinely cover your category so you know which editor writes what. Turning up at the trade shows with a notebook and doing your research. None of that costs anything except your time, all of it compounds, and it is exactly what puts you in front of the editor who eventually writes about you.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How does a small brand build brand awareness without a big budget?
By being consistently present where your buyers and customers already are, rather than paying to interrupt people who are not. In practice that means walking the retailers who might stock you, attending your category's trade shows as a visitor, building genuine relationships with the two or three editors who actually cover your sector, and showing up in the same places often enough to be remembered. It is slower than advertising and it compounds, which advertising largely does not.
How do I approach a trade editor?
Know which publications genuinely cover your category and read them first, so you understand what they actually publish. Then approach with the specific interesting thing, a design decision, a material, a result, rather than a general announcement that your brand exists. Editors are not short of press releases, they are short of stories. Make it easy for them: good images, the facts they will need, and a clear sense of why their readers would care.
What makes a product worth writing about?
A decision that solves a real problem the rest of the category has not. Write down every person who touches your product, the child, the parent using it, whoever buys it as a gift, and ask honestly which of them your current design is failing. If you can point at one specific thing you changed because of that answer, you have something an editor can write about. If you cannot, you have a brand story rather than a product story, and the difference shows.
If you are working on how to get your brand in front of the right buyers and the right press, that is exactly what we do at The Nest. Come and have a conversation.
The Nest News lands every Tuesday: three insights shaping maternity, baby and children's products, and the actions you can take. Sign up at https://www.thenest.uk.com/the-nest-news-signup
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