TL;DR: Consumers discover new brands mostly through search engines (34%), TV ads (32%), word-of-mouth (30%), and ads on social media (30%), according to GWI Core data across 54 markets. But those averages hide sharp generational splits: Baby Boomers are 42% more likely than average to find brands on TV, while Gen Z leans on social and in-app ads. So plan your channel mix around the audience you're actually buying against.
Picture a media plan coming together. There's a budget, a target audience, and a dozen channels all making a case for a slice of it. Search, TV, social, retail media, review sites, product placement, each one promises to put the brand in front of someone new. The question underneath all of it is quieter, and harder: where will this particular audience actually run into the brand for the first time?
That first encounter is brand discovery, and getting it right shapes everything downstream. Guess wrong about where your audience shows up and the rest of the plan sits on sand. So we pulled the current data from GWI Core, our global study spanning 54 markets, to see how people are finding new brands right now, and where the obvious answer quietly falls apart.
In this piece we'll explore:
- What is brand discovery
- How consumers discover new brands and products
- How each generation discovers brands
- How consumers research before buying
- How to use GWI data for brand discovery
- Key takeaways
- Frequently asked questions
What is brand discovery?
Brand discovery is the first point of contact between a person and a brand they don't yet know. It's the moment someone spots a product in a search result, catches an ad mid-scroll, hears a friend rave about something, or notices a product turn up in the show they're watching. No relationship, no loyalty, just a first impression starting to form.
For anyone planning media, this is the top of the funnel doing its most important work. Everything you spend later on consideration and conversion assumes people have already found the brand. If discovery lands on the wrong channel, you're paying to nurture an audience that never showed up. Which is why knowing the real brand discovery channels for your audience matters more than any single piece of creative.
So where are people finding brands right now? The top of the list is closer together than you'd expect.
How consumers discover new brands and products
The honest answer is that no single channel runs away with it. The leaders are bunched tightly, which tells you something before we even split the audience: winning discovery is rarely about one big bet.
Search and TV are neck and neck
When people recall how they first heard of a brand, the most common answer is still the search bar. Search engines lead brand discovery at 34%, the closest thing to a universal starting point.
Right behind it sits a channel plenty of planners have written off. TV ads drive discovery for 32% of people. That two-point gap is a useful reality check for anyone weighing linear budget against digital: television is still doing heavy lifting at the discovery stage.
Word-of-mouth keeps pace with paid social
Here's the part worth sitting with if you've got a big social budget. Recommendations from friends and family spark discovery for 30% of people, the kind of endorsement you can't buy directly.
Paid social lands at exactly the same level, with ads on social media also reaching 30%. The algorithm and the dinner-table recommendation are pulling even weight, which is worth remembering before a plan tilts entirely toward the feed.
The channels that earn their way in
Some discovery happens when people aren't looking at all. A product appears in a series or a film and it sticks: 25% discover brands through TV shows or films, the case for smart placement in a streaming-first world.
And when curiosity kicks in, people go looking for proof. Consumer review sites drive discovery for 22%, a reminder that other people's opinions are a channel in their own right.
All of which paints a tidy national picture. The trouble is, the average consumer these numbers describe doesn't actually exist.
How each generation discovers brands
Split the same question by age and the neat ranking scatters. The people using search and the people noticing TV ads aren't evenly spread across the population, they cluster hard by generation. This is where a media plan actually gets made.
Gen Z: social first, search second
For most of the population, search is the default. For Gen Z, it isn't. This is the one generation less likely than average to discover brands through search engines, at 30% (11% less likely than average).
What takes its place is the feed. Ads on social media are Gen Z's top discovery channel at 33% (10% more likely than average).
A good chunk of their attention also lives inside apps, with 24% discovering brands through ads in mobile or tablet apps (12% more likely than average). Plan for Gen Z the way you'd plan for everyone else, and you'll spend hardest against the channel they use least.
Millennials: paid social, quietly self-reliant
Millennials share Gen Z's pull toward paid social, just less dramatically. Ads on social media reach 31% of this group (3% more likely than average), so the feed is a solid bet here too.
The quieter signal is what they lean on less. Word-of-mouth drives discovery for 28% of millennials (6% less likely than average), a hint that this group is comfortable finding brands on their own terms rather than waiting for a friend to mention one.
Gen X: the search-and-TV bridge
Gen X is the generation you can reach on both sides of the digital divide. Search engines are their top discovery channel at 37% (10% more likely than average), the highest search figure of any age group.
They haven't left the living room behind either. TV ads reach 35% of Gen X (10% more likely than average), which makes this the audience where a combined search-and-broadcast plan does double duty.
Baby Boomers: television, by a mile
If you remember one contrast from this piece, make it this one. TV ads drive brand discovery for 45% of Baby Boomers, and this group is 42% more likely than the average consumer to find brands that way. For an audience plenty of digital plans quietly skip, that's a lot of reach to leave on the table.
Trust does much of the rest. Word-of-mouth sparks discovery for 40% of Boomers (35% more likely than average), the personal recommendation still carrying real weight.
They're also more reachable online than the stereotype allows, with 27% discovering brands through online retail websites (20% more likely than average).
Want to see these splits for the exact audience you're buying? Book a GWI demo and put your own segment against the data.
How consumers research before buying
Discovery gets a brand noticed; what people do next splits by age just as sharply. Once a brand has someone's attention, the channel they turn to for more depends heavily on how old they are.
The older the audience, the more they lean on search
There's a clean gradient here. Just 42% of Gen Z mainly use search engines to research brands, and that figure climbs with every generation, reaching 63% of Baby Boomers. For older audiences, the search bar is still the workhorse of product discovery.
For younger audiences, the feed is a research tool
Now flip the channel. Social networks tell the opposite story: 48% of Gen Z mainly use them to look into brands, against 21% of Baby Boomers, making Gen Z 129% more likely to treat social as a research tool.
The starkest split shows up in product research specifically. 52% of Gen Z use social platforms like Instagram to research products, compared with 7.8% of Baby Boomers, making Gen Z 567% more likely to research a purchase through social.
Search isn't dead for the young, though. Even here, 74% of Gen Z still use search engines like Google to research products, only a little behind Boomers at 80%. For Gen Z, social sits alongside search rather than replacing it, which means younger audiences need both: discoverable in the feed, and backed up by whatever a search will surface.
Knowing all this is one thing. Turning it into a channel plan you can defend to a client is another.
How to use GWI data for brand discovery
This is where the data earns its place in the plan. Every figure above comes from GWI Core, a custom-capable, repeatable study that runs across 50+ markets and 100+ countries, with around 1 million respondents a year and 57,000 signals per respondent. It refreshes quarterly and it's GDPR-compliant, so the picture you plan against is current and defensible, representing 3 billion people worldwide.
For a media planner, that turns a national average into something you can act on. You can filter discovery channels down to the exact demographic, market, and interests you're buying against, so your budget follows real behavior instead of assumptions. You can pressure-test a plan before you spend by checking whether its channels match where that audience actually finds brands. And with a quarterly refresh, you catch shifts in discovery habits as they happen, rather than planning on a picture that's a year out of date.
When a client fires off a question mid-meeting, you don't have to wait for a research turnaround either. Agent Spark, GWI's AI-powered human insights analyst, lets you ask in plain English, something like "how does Gen X in Germany discover beauty brands?", and get survey-backed answers in seconds.
Ready to see the brand discovery channels that matter for the people you're trying to reach? Book a GWI demo.
Key takeaways
The through-line here is easy to say and easy to forget under deadline: the average consumer is a planning convenience that no real person matches. Search and TV still anchor discovery for the market as a whole, but the moment you name your audience, the ranking rearranges itself. A plan built for Baby Boomers and a plan built for Gen Z share almost no channels, and treating them the same leaves both reach and budget on the floor.
The brands that win discovery plan against real behavior, in the markets and demographics they care about, and keep that picture current as habits move. Ready to build a channel plan you can stand behind? Book a GWI demo and see exactly how your audience discovers brands.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main brand discovery channels?
Across all consumers, the leading brand discovery channels are search engines (34%), TV ads (32%), word-of-mouth recommendations (30%), and ads on social media (30%), based on GWI Core. No single channel dominates, so most brands need a considered mix rather than one big bet.
How does brand discovery differ by generation?
Sharply. Gen Z skews toward social and in-app ads and is less likely than average to use search, while Baby Boomers are 42% more likely than average to discover brands through TV and lean heavily on word-of-mouth. Gen X sits in between, reachable through both search and TV.
How do consumers research products after discovering a brand?
Older audiences lean on search, with 63% of Baby Boomers mainly using search engines to research brands, compared with 42% of Gen Z. Younger audiences flip that: 48% of Gen Z mainly use social networks to research, and for product research specifically, Gen Z is 567% more likely than Boomers to turn to platforms like Instagram. So the smart move is to show up on both, weighted to the audience you're planning against.
.webp?width=495&height=317&name=pink_thumb_graphs%20(1).webp)
.webp?width=495&height=317&name=pink_thumb_letter%20(2).webp)