Perception of a brand—how members of the public view and understand your brand—is one of the most important aspects of its success. It doesn’t matter what your brand says it does. If your customers perceive your brand to represent something else, that perception will color their experiences with you moving forward. For this reason, brands must stay in tune with their public perception and make strides to align it with their mission and purpose.
How brand perception is shaped
Every experience a customer has with your brand helps shape their perception of you. This includes touchpoints along your marketing campaigns, first-hand experiences with your employees, products and services, word-of-mouth recommendations (or warnings) and much more.
Brand perception includes how a customer feels about your brand, how they would describe your brand and what they associate with your brand. Together, these things can solidify a positive or negative reputation among your audience and even lead people to believe your brand is or is not right for them.
In order to ensure your brand perception aligns with what your company actually stands for, you must provide a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints. This means your branding and messaging must clearly communicate your mission and values across the board.
When brands
fail to provide
consistent messaging, or when they craft misleading or inaccurate messages for their target consumer, their public perception might become skewed. When the public perceives your brand as something other than what it truly is, you won’t have that foundation of trust, value and equity you need to create lifelong customers.
Ways to monitor your brand’s perception
Brands must pay attention to how the public perceives them so they know how and when to adjust their messaging. Monitoring brand perception can help you uncover feelings and beliefs your brand was completely unaware of. There are many ways to do this, such as:
• Surveys:
Brand perception surveys are fast and easy ways to get direct feedback about your brand from existing and potential customers. You can ask both closed and open-ended questions about your brand to get a better understanding of their opinions.
• Social listening:
Social listening involves monitoring what people are saying about your brand across various social media channels. Many programs make it easy to search for keywords like your brand or product name alongside positive and negative keywords or phrases.
Of course, public perception isn’t necessarily permanent. There are many ways to change brand perception if it’s less than favorable. If you discover that one or more elements of your branding is misleading customers, such as your font choices or color schemes, changing these items can bring them back in line with what your customers expect. A
complete rebrand
might benefit some companies, giving them a blank slate to rebuild their public perception.
Changing your marketing and advertising tactics might also be useful. Accurate and timely messaging is responsible for guiding your customers to think one way or another, so it might pay to revisit your marketing campaigns and make sure you’re
correcting your brand image.
Ultimately, crafting a consistent brand identity and messaging strategy must go hand-in-hand with listening to your customers and course correcting when their perceptions and your mission don’t line up. Need help crafting a solid brand foundation that builds consumer trust and loyalty?
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Spin Creative is a video production company and creative agency helping marketers create winning video and creative strategies that engage, inspire and activate targeted audiences. Spin is headquartered in Seattle with offices in San Francisco and London, serving brands around the globe.
