Understanding Brand Perception and Ways To Measure It

Intro

Branding is more than the company name and logo. It's the personality or character that differentiates businesses and their products and services from the competition. Unfortunately, no matter how well you design or strategize your overall brand, how the market perceives it will still depend on your target audience. Their view of your brand will dictate how successful your business could become.

This is why understanding brand perception is crucial. It's an important aspect that will help you learn more about your brand, improve your products or services, and elevate the overall customer experience.

Keep reading below to learn more about brand perception and how to measure it. Discover how it can help your brand and more.

Understanding Brand Perception

Brand perception refers to how consumers interpret a company's overall identity. It's how the target audience sees your company as opposed to or in line with the image you want to present.

Generally, this concept covers all factors, including products and services, marketing, and customer service. Consumers generate brand perceptions based on interactions, experiences, and emotions from encountering a business.

For instance, customers will view your business as an excellent brand when you deliver quality services like convenient download of train e-tickets or meaningful messages about mental health care. These factors, among others, amount to positive brand perception, considering it's a mental association.

Having a positive brand perception can help you stand out from the competition. Businesses with negative brand perceptions will find it challenging to connect with their target audience and perform well in the market. That's why it's a vital element in determining success.

Improving it increases your chances of converting potential customers and bringing more revenue to your business. Plus, if you have an excellent brand perception, existing customers will likely recommend you to new ones.

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Ways To Measure Brand Perception

There are many ways to improve your brand perception. However, before doing that, you must first determine if you have a positive or negative one. While there aren’t any online tools or metrics that can help you measure brand perception, you can use various practices to identify yours.

The following are some of the best ways to measure your brand perception.

Brand perception surveys

One of the simplest ways to measure brand perception is by asking the target audience through surveys. You could ask various questions to participants as long as you determine what they feel about your brand and its offerings and experiences.

Some questions you can ask include the following:

• "How likely are you to endorse BRAND to other people?"
• "What do you think of BRAND's marketing campaigns?"
• "How does BRAND make you feel while using its products or services?"
• "How likely are you to continue using or trusting BRAND in the future?"
• "On a scale of 1-10, how trustworthy do you find BRAND?"

In addition, you must aim to identify areas of improvement. Regardless if you receive positive feedback from your existing customers, it's still best to know such factors to elevate the quality of the experiences you're already offering.

Moreover, you can reward participants with special offers, like discounts and product bundles, to encourage them to answer the survey. Aside from asking your existing and potential customers, it would help to ask those that left for the competition. Their opinions are valuable because they will offer insights into what your brand lacks or is doing wrong.

Surveys and other consumer research efforts can help inform brand activation campaigns. These are events or interactions through which a brand drives customer actions.

They can also inform shopper activations, which are campaigns designed to engage shoppers through experiential activities.

Social listening

Social media can tell you more about your business and its brand perception. You can learn what customers say about your brand by monitoring activities like comments and shares. This strategy is one of the many examples of social listening.

Social listening is the act of tracking and analyzing various online conversations on any platform, including social media and forum sites. Doing this will enable you to gather insightful information that can help you gauge how well or how poor your brand perception is. Plus, you can also collect data about your competition.

You can manually conduct social listening by utilizing the right keywords. For social media, you can also use hashtags relevant to your brand. Meanwhile, some online tools offer social listening features that help you track easier. These tools can help you follow social media pages, blog posts, and other online conversations about your brand.

Focus groups

Besides sending out brand perception surveys, you can also conduct focus group studies to ask your target audience directly. For businesses, a focus group is a small group of eight to ten people representing the ideal target market. They can help you understand your brand better and address any issues firsthand.

The goal is to understand your brand perception better. Create a group representing different demographics, genders, locations, and preferences to understand various voices. However, don't limit yourself to such categories. You can come up with your specific classes.

Regarding the questions, you must prepare a set that helps you achieve your goals. Plus, you must set boundaries on how far the discussion can go so everyone remains comfortable and focused during the study.

Lastly, rewarding your participants with special offers or complementary items is also advisable. It will motivate your participants to engage further with the study.

Brand audit

A brand audit refers to the practice of evaluating a company's brand position in the marketplace. It encompasses three major areas: internal branding, external branding, and customer experiences.

Think of brand auditing as a general health checkup for your business. Doing it will help you assess your brand's strengths and weaknesses. It also enables you to learn your target audience better, particularly how they perceive your brand. Not to mention understanding your competitors too.

Moreover, a brand audit provides various opportunities to improve your offerings. Practicing it regularly is an excellent way to ensure that branding and all other efforts are on track or that you consistently meet your target audience's needs. It also helps you identify potential issues before they escalate.

Improve Your Brand Perception

As today's business landscape becomes more competitive, branding is becoming more crucial for businesses to stand out. Most importantly, to better connect with the target audience.

Through brand perception, you can determine your company's standing on its roadmap to success. Measuring it enables you to pursue effective strategies that lead to better customer loyalty, higher revenue, and excellent market reputation.