Customers consider the thoughts and feelings they associate with a brand when choosing between competing brands. In fact, 62% of customers feel emotionally connected to brands they purchase from.

That’s why brands need to create a positive association among consumers.

This blog explores the concept of brand perception, its importance to a brand’s success, and the key elements that shape it. It also explores how to measure brand perception, create survey questions, and improve it.

What is Brand Perception, and Why is it Important?

Brand perception is the customers’ impressions of a brand, shaped by their beliefs, emotions, and experiences.

It matters because it means the difference between a customer who chooses a brand and one who chooses the competitor.

Further, the brand perception affects the:

• Pricing Power: Brands that convey a ‘premium’ image can charge higher because their audience expects a hefty price tag for the quality they get.
• Brand Equity: Consumers who perceive a brand as high in value are more likely to trust it, be loyal to it, and make purchasing decisions.
• Growth: A positive image enables a brand to expand into new markets and pursue new business opportunities. Customers who experience a brand positively are more likely to support new ventures and refer others.

Key Components of Brand Perception

These are the elements that influence brand perception:

1. External Identity: Also known as the brand’s visual identity, this encompasses elements such as the logo, design, typography, photography, color palette, and style.
2. Messaging: With a well-crafted brand messaging strategy, a business can create compelling messaging that influences how customers feel about the brand. It’s a key component because it helps businesses articulate their value to their audience.
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3. Personality: It’s the collection of attributes that humanize a brand and create an emotional connection with an audience. It focuses on the brand tone.
4. Customer Experience: The quality of the customer experience across various touchpoints, such as customer service, post-sales support, social media engagement, and feedback, can shape brand perception.
5. Associations: When people encounter a brand, their associations with it can reinforce or undermine their perception of it.
6. Reputation: How people know a brand in the marketplace shapes trust, loyalty, and perceptions.

How to Measure Brand Perception

Measuring brand perception is crucial for identifying strengths and weaknesses and fine-tuning the brand strategy.

The following methods can help assess the brand’s market perception:

• Conduct Surveys and Interviews: Surveys gauge customers’ impressions of a brand. So, brands should interview repeat clients, recently lost customers, and competitors’ customers to get their feedback and opinions about the brand.
• Leverage Social Listening: Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social regularly monitor social conversations and analyze customer sentiments across social media platforms. These tools also provide reports that help a brand compare its brand perception with competitors’.
• Examine Online Reviews and Ratings: A brand can gather insights into customers’ impressions through reviews and ratings. Positive feedback indicates a high customer sentiment.
• Track Brand Perception Metrics: Teams can also leverage metrics that directly impact brand perception, such as brand awareness, market share, and customer experience KPIs.

Brand Perception Questions

Well-designed questions help identify the gap between what a brand intends to project and what customers actually feel.

These are the top 6 questions to ask:

Brand Perception Examples

Below are companies that demonstrate how to shape customer sentiment and perception:

1. Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of software, including Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, and InDesign, that is widely popular for creating visual content.

With so many tools, Adobe has successfully built itself as the creative hub for all, making aesthetically pleasing content possible, whether it’s a tech-savvy graphic designer, beginner artist, or business owner.

2. Workday

Human resources and finance are two of the most complex aspects of business operations. Workday is a platform that offers a wide range of finance and HR software. 

Designed to make work faster, more efficient, and more flexible, Workday has positioned itself as the ideal tool for businesses that demand agility in their processes.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly helps polish the writing by spotting grammar and spelling errors, suggesting better sentence construction, and checking for plagiarism.

This AI tool is among the most widely used software today, having successfully established itself as a necessity not just for writers but also for business owners, students, and teachers. The tool is for anyone who needs error-free written content.

How to Influence Brand Perception

A business can use various strategies to enhance its brand perception. Below are some of the tactics they can implement:

• Establishing a Consistent Brand Identity: A brand should incorporate consistent visuals and create consistent messaging across channels.
• Delivering Superior Offerings: Great brand perception requires quality products and services. A brand needs to innovate constantly, stay on top of industry trends, and adapt its offerings to changing customer demands.
• Creating an Impactful Customer Experience: Businesses can make every customer touchpoint meaningful. They can evaluate and improve the customer experience through post-sales support, social media engagement, and prompt resolution of negative feedback.
• Using Social Proof: Highlighting positive reviews, success stories, expert recommendations, case studies, and testimonials shapes brand perception.

Tips to Create a Brand Perception Survey

Creating a brand perception survey that provides clear, actionable insights requires a thoughtful question design.

Brands can incorporate these tips to help achieve that:

1. Have a Clear Objective: Businesses should determine the aspects of brand perception to focus on, for example, brand awareness, customer satisfaction, or retention.
2. Identify the Right Customer Segment: Defining the customer group and combining all segments provides a complete picture. At the same time, categorization can narrow the survey to the specific group’s needs and expectations. 
3. Use Easy-to-Understand Language: For more accurate responses, the survey questions should be clear and concise. 
4. Use a Mix of Question Types: Brands should incorporate open-ended, listing, and scale questions. Open-ended questions allow respondents to share their thoughts, scale questions, and help track changes over time, while listing questions help gather easy-to-analyze insights. 
5. Avoid Biased Questions: Unbiased questions elicit honest feedback, while biased ones can prompt respondents to give misleading responses.
6. Keep Survey Focused: Every question should help achieve the intended objective and remain short, under five minutes.
7. Conduct Test Survey: Before sharing the survey with the entire client base, the teams should test it with a small group, mostly internal members. They can also analyze the feedback for technical glitches, survey clarity, and length. Making adjustments where needed will improve the experience. 
8. Launch a Survey with an Incentive for Completion: Distributing the survey to clients via appropriate channels, such as SurveyMonkey, and offering incentives encourages full participation. For instance, a free trial or subscription discount.

Brand Perception Metrics Worth Tracking

After launching surveys and brand perception campaigns, it’s important to track the performance over time.

Here are some metrics brands should monitor:

• Sentiment Analysis: Brands should track the percentage of positive and negative brand mentions. Besides, conducting an emotional analysis helps to assess the emotions associated with a brand.
• Brand Awareness: It’s crucial to evaluate how customers recognize and recall a brand by tracking indicators such as direct traffic and earned media coverage.
• Customer Satisfaction: Businesses can monitor high customer satisfaction, high repeat customer volume, and increased customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Price Perception: Analyzing how consumers perceive the pricing of offerings and how that compares to other brands.
• Brand Authority: It measures the share of voice (SOV), the percentage of industry conversations a brand commands against its competitors.
• Market Share: It involves tracking the percentage of a brand’s revenue compared to its competitors. A higher market share is a good indicator of brand equity and a greater competitive edge.

How to Improve Brand Perception

A brand can use insights from the brand perception metrics to strengthen its image and outpace its competitors.

Check out how they can do so:

1. Track Performance Over Time: Assessing performance for clear, actionable insights and benchmarking a brand against competitors.
2. Gather and Respond to Feedback: Brands should resolve customer complaints and respond promptly to customers’ inquiries and concerns.
3. Leverage Influencers: It’s crucial to collaborate with influencers in the industry who authentically share the brand values and increase its credibility.
4. Deliver on the Value Proposition: Businesses should ensure the products and services meet the customers’ needs to build trust and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
5. Emphasize Emotional Connection: Crafting emotional messaging that resonates with the audience builds a relatable, human brand image.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Learn more about brand perception here:

How to Create a Brand Perception from Scratch?

Here are the top 4 steps to build brand perception:

1. Research the Market: The brand should understand the audience, competition, and market fit.
2. Create a Recognizable Brand Identity: Teams can start with the brand core and reinforce it with visual branding elements such as your brand name, logo, and tagline.
3. Create a Unique Value Proposition: Another important step is to identify the core differentiators that set a brand apart from competitors and influence the customers’ decisions.
4. Develop a Messaging Strategy: Lastly, a brand should create a messaging framework that outlines how to communicate the brand story, value, and benefits to connect with the audience and inspire the desired action.

What is the Difference Between Brand Perception and Brand Equity?

Brand perception is what the audience believes a brand stands for and represents, while brand equity is the perceived market value of a business.

What Factors Influence Brand Perception?

These elements help shape brand perception:

• Brand reputation
• Visual identity
• Personality
• Associations
• Customer experience

Conclusion

A brand’s ability to create a perception that appeals to the target market drives pricing, brand equity, and overall company success.

Central to that is a messaging strategy that shapes a compelling brand story, adapts it across channels and at various stages of the marketing funnel, and reinforces positive audience sentiment.

Partner with me to create a messaging framework that guides all your messaging and reinforces positive audience sentiment. We’ll also create compelling messages that adapt to your various channels.

Let’s get on a discovery call to create personal, impactful messaging that can improve your brand’s image and boost your bottom line.