Should Your B2B Company Consider Conducting an Awareness, Attitude, and Usage (AAU) Study?
In today’s competitive B2B landscape, understanding your market isn’t just an advantage — it’s essential. Yet many B2B companies still rely on assumptions, outdated data, or anecdotal feedback when making strategic decisions. If you want a clear, structured, and actionable view of how your brand and solution category fits into the minds and behaviors of your target audience, an Awareness, Attitude, and Usage (AAU) study is one of the smartest investments you can make.
In this article, we’ll walk through what an AAU study measures, why it’s especially important for B2B organizations, the value of the insights it offers, and how marketing teams practically use the results to drive growth.
What is an Awareness, Attitude, and Usage (AAU) Study?
An AAU study is a type of market research that measures three fundamental aspects of your brand's standing:
Awareness: How familiar are target customers with your brand? Are they aware of it and can they recall it spontaneously (unaided awareness) or only when prompted (aided awareness)?
Attitude: What perceptions, beliefs, and feelings do customers associate with your brand? How do they view your strengths, weaknesses, and value proposition?
Usage: How many customers are actively using your product or service? How many have they purchased and how frequently? What competitive alternatives are they considering or using?
In addition to these pillars, a well-designed AAU study often explores important habits and practices of your target audience — such as where they turn for information when researching solutions in your category. You can identify which sources they use most often (e.g., peer recommendations, industry publications, online reviews, analyst reports) and which they trust the most. These insights are critical for shaping your marketing and channel strategies, ensuring you're present where your buyers are looking.
Why AAU Studies Matter for B2B Companies
While AAU studies are common in consumer markets, they are just as — if not more — critical in the B2B world. Here's why:
1. B2B Sales Cycles are Longer and More Complex
In B2B, purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders, lengthy evaluation processes, and significant investments. Understanding how your brand is perceived helps you better position your solutions and address objections proactively.
2. Competition is Fierce and Differentiation is Hard
It’s not enough to have an excellent product; you need to ensure the market knows about it, understands its value, and chooses it over competitors. An AAU study uncovers gaps between how you want to be perceived and how you are perceived.
3. Brand Building is Often Under-Invested in B2B
Many B2B firms focus heavily on lead generation and sales activation but neglect the foundational work of brand building. AAU research provides the data needed to strengthen brand equity — which, over time, lowers customer acquisition costs and supports premium pricing.
4. Usage Data Can Represent Market Share
In industries where reliable third-party market share data is scarce or non-existent, usage data from an AAU study can become a vital proxy. By measuring who is using what, and how often, you can estimate relative market positions — giving you critical visibility into your competitive standing.
The Value of Insights an AAU Study Provides
When conducted properly, an AAU study arms you with critical insights that go far beyond basic satisfaction surveys. This type of market research study can provide:
Benchmarking of Brand Health: Track awareness, perceptions, and usage over time to see if your marketing investments are moving the needle.
Identification of Growth Opportunities: Pinpoint new segments or underdeveloped markets where your brand can expand.
Understanding Competitor Positioning: Learn not just where you stand, but how competitors are perceived, helping refine your messaging and differentiation strategies.
Informing Messaging and Content: Tailor marketing efforts to address misconceptions, emphasize your strengths, and connect emotionally with the right audiences.
Optimizing Media and Channel Investments: By understanding which information sources your target audience uses and trusts most, you can better allocate marketing budget to the platforms and partnerships that influence buying decisions. Instead of spreading resources thin, you can concentrate on the most impactful and trusted channels.
Ultimately, the value of an AAU study lies in its ability to bridge the gap between marketing activities and business outcomes — offering clear, actionable data that directly supports revenue growth.
Best Practices for Conducting an AAU Study
To maximize the impact of your AAU research, it is important to follow several best practices:
Clearly Define Objectives: Be clear on what you want to learn — whether that's measuring brand equity, understanding competitive threats, or identifying new opportunity areas.
Ensure Representative Sampling: Capture insights from a mix of decision-makers, influencers, and users across key industries, company sizes, and geographies.
Ask Balanced, Actionable Questions: Design surveys with clear, unbiased questions that combine unaided (open-ended) and aided (prompted) formats to capture both spontaneous and considered responses.
Benchmark and Track Over Time: Repeating the study on a regular cadence allows you to see trends and measure the impact of your marketing and sales efforts.
Interpret Results in Context: Resist the temptation to overreact to a single data point. Trends, relative performance, and the broader business context are key.
How Marketing Teams Use AAU Data in Practice
The ultimate power of AAU research lies in its application. Here are a few ways B2B marketing organizations typically leverage the findings:
Brand Positioning and Messaging Development: Use insights to craft positioning statements, value propositions, and marketing messages that resonate authentically with your audience.
Campaign Targeting and Personalization: Focus efforts on segments with high awareness but low usage, or tailor campaigns to overcome specific barriers to adoption.
Content Strategy Planning: Create educational content, case studies, and thought leadership pieces that directly address gaps or misconceptions uncovered by the research.
Sales Enablement: Equip sales teams with brand perception data, buyer preferences, and competitive insights to tailor pitches and overcome objections.
Optimizing and Re-Allocating Marketing Investments: Insights about the most used and trusted information sources help you prioritize media buys, content partnerships, sponsorships, and SEO/SEM efforts more effectively. You can reallocate budgets toward high-trust channels and pull back from lower-impact ones.
Connecting Awareness to Market Share Growth: If your industry does have available market share data, overlaying AAU results with actual share metrics creates powerful analytics. You can monitor how changes in awareness and attitudes correlate with changes in market share, providing a much clearer cause-and-effect understanding of how brand-building activities drive tangible business outcomes.
Final Thoughts
In a B2B world where perception often dictates reality, understanding how your brand is seen — and how it’s used — is not a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. An AAU study is a powerful tool to bridge the gap between marketing intuition and customer reality.
By investing in smart, well-designed AAU research, B2B companies gain the clarity needed to sharpen their brand, refine their strategies, and drive sustainable growth. In today’s environment, data-informed decision-making isn’t just a competitive edge — it’s table stakes.
If you haven’t considered conducting an AAU study yet, now might be the perfect time to start.
We’ve provided a template survey for an AAU study that you can customize for the needs of your organization, industry, and product or service categories. You can find it in our Resource Center for Tools.
