Awareness is only the starting point; sustainable growth comes from meaningful experiences that move customers from attention to emotional alignment and, ultimately, advocacy.

I began my career in brand strategy and consumer insights, so I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about a bigger question than whether people notice a brand: What does that brand mean to them, and does that meaning influence what they do?

Years ago, while serving as managing director of consumer insights for Teach For America, I saw a vivid illustration of that question at the University of Miami.

I was conducting a focus group with college students in a noisy campus food court. Behind the students hung an eight-foot Teach For America banner, active marketing that we weren’t allowed to remove. When I asked whether they had seen our messaging on campus, they told me they were unaware of it.

Afterward, I walked around campus and watched students moving between buildings with headphones in and eyes fixed on their phones. Posters and banners were everywhere. Physically, the messages were impossible to miss. Experientially, they might as well not have existed.

The moment didn’t change my thinking about brand awareness so much as reinforce something I had spent years examining: awareness matters, but earning it was becoming harder. And with a new generation growing up surrounded by more messages, more screens and more competition for attention, simply being seen would no longer be enough.

The bar was getting higher — not just to capture attention, but to create an emotional response and for a brand to matter.

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