As a brand manager or entrepreneur, one of your greatest concerns should be to know what consumers in your target market think about your brand as a whole and the products or services you offer.
This is critical to the success of your marketing communications.
If significant gaps exist between the brand identity or messaging a company projects and the brand image consumers have, this misalignment will hold the brand back from reaching its market potential regardless of marketing efforts.
Thankfully, this is one of the things a brand perception survey helps to unravel.
Brand perception surveys help you to know how you currently stand with customers. They also help to understand how your past and current marketing communications have helped to shape customers’ perceptions of your brand.
Whenever the need arises to conduct a brand perception survey for your company, it’s important to ask the right questions so you can get the kinds of responses that will provide valuable insight.
In this article, you’ll learn what brand surveys are, what they include and how to position them for maximum results.
What Is A Brand Survey?
To understand what a brand survey is, we need to get on the same page about what a brand stands for.
Simply put, a brand is an idea that people connect to a product or service. It’s a perception that lives in their mind.
Understanding whether or not that idea is aligned with consumers’ perceptions is the reason a brand perception survey needs to be done regularly.
Different Types of Brand Surveys
Brand surveys are tools organizations use for brand tracking and to measure their impact though there are different types of surveys for different scenarios.
So let’s take a closer look at these survey types.
#1. Brand Positioning Surveys
This survey can help you find the unique value of your products or services according to consumers in your target market.
It also shows you how you can consistently offer more of that value to occupy a unique position in their minds.
It combines some elements of brand awareness, perception and value and it helps brands to measure their brand equity and make the right business decisions based on the customer experience the brand wants to develop.
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#2. Brand Identity Survey
This tool can help you to determine whether you are communicating your brand’s core values and identity correctly.
With this survey, you can determine whether your brand image matches your brand identity.
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#3. Brand Awareness Survey
The brand awareness survey measures your brand’s recognition in your target market.
It shows the popularity of your brand among consumers, and this can help you determine the reach of your campaigns helping with campaign optimization.
The brand awareness survey determines how many of your target audience recognize your brand name whether they’ve purchased any of the brands’ products or services or not.
#4. Brand Perception Survey
Their perception might be shaped by their past experience with your product, what they see on your website and what they hear from other consumers.
Let’s consider more on this.
Why Brand Perception Surveys Are Important
The brand perception survey enables brand leaders to understand what their customers and target audience think of their brand and to determine to some extent, brand loyalty.
Since perception is subject to the views of consumers, it can help you measure your brand performance based on the opinions of users.
The survey can also help you with some aspects of market research like measuring the effectiveness of your promotions and knowing more about your consumers and audience.
When you know the sentiments people have towards your brand, it will help you to reinforce your brand qualities and if necessary, reposition your brand if the outcome of the survey is largely negative.
Ultimately a perception survey helps to unravel the following:
How your marketing campaigns; past, present and future have impacted or will impact your brand perception.
Whether a gap exists between your brand identity and your brand image. Your brand identity is what you intentionally portray about your brand through your logo, colours, and visual presence, while your brand image is the perception with which your brand lives in the market through the eyes of the customer. Your brand identity and image should align with the attributes in the brand’s perception.
How you can use real customer experience and perception to improve your messaging and brand quality. Here’s the thing, consumers and target audience might have a different perception of you than what your brand communications convey. Positive and negative reviews online or on social media can impact people’s perception so you also want to understand what shapes their perceptions.
The goal of a brand perception survey is to find areas where you can improve the customer experience while building the right image for your brand.
It also helps to find ways you need to reposition your brand in a competitive market.
Perception Survey Question Types and Formats
If you want the best results from your survey, you’ll need to include a variety of question types in your design.
Below are some question types to consider:
Single and Multichoice, where respondents can select one or more options from prepared answers.
Net Promoter Score, to know how likely consumers will recommend your brand to friends. It’s a scale of 1 – 10 and it’s mostly those that choose the highest parts of the scale that are likely to recommend.
Ranking questions, to rank traits in the order of how respondents strongly or weakly associate them with your brand.
Scales, to select how much they agree or disagree with a prepared statement about your brand.
Open-ended questions, provide consumers with the opportunity to share their thoughts rather than choosing from given options. This style is qualitative and it helps you to capture more insights into how your consumers are feeling about your brand, product or service. This type can also come immediately after a list, to request more information or context about the choice or answer a respondent gives in a previous question. If you find impressive answers from your respondents in your open-ended questions, you can request their permission to share such answers on your website or social media as a testimonial.
Gathering Responses
When analysing your responses, you will have both quantitative and qualitative responses.
Quantitative responses can be reported in the form of numbers. For example, when a certain percentage of respondents select a particular answer. You can categorise it as 53% of respondents are for answer C, 17% are for answer A, and 30% are for answer B.
Qualitative responses are generated from open-ended questions where respondents provided answers in their own words. You need these responses to put the figures into context as it usually provides more information about what respondents think or feel.
The figures provide an empirical basis for your analysis while the statements provide additional insights from respondents.
Brand Affinity Survey Questionnaires Should Address
There are four major human factors that influence brand affinity and these are what should determine the question types that you can include in your brand perception survey.
These factors are cognitive, emotional, language or descriptive and action or experience.
Cognitive
When asking cognitive questions, you want to unravel the concepts and associations that consumers connect to your brand.
Cognitive Sample Questions
When you think of our brand, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Who do you think our brand is aimed at?
Which of the following words in your opinion describes our brand?
How would you personally describe our brand?
What do you think about our brand’s advertising?
What do you think about our brand’s pricing?
Emotional
Emotional questions are aimed at understanding the feelings consumers connect to your brand.
Are they positive feelings that draw them in or negative feelings that pull them away?
Emotional Sample Questions
Which of the words below describes how you feel when you think about our brand?
Are there other things you feel when you think about our brand?
How would you describe your level of emotional attachment to our brand? (This type of question uses a ranking scale e.g “strongly attached to strongly unattached”)
Language/Descriptive
What types of words do consumers use to describe your brand?
Happy customers can provide referrals though it’s whatever consumers have internalized about your brand that they will communicate to others.
Since perception shapes trust and according to Edelman Trust Barometer, 81 percent of consumers buy based on trust.
The language they use to describe your brand to their friend’s matters because it reveals their level of trust.
Language/Descriptive Sample Questions
What words would you use to describe our brand’s packaging?
How would you describe this product?
If you were to tell a friend, how would you describe this product?
Which three words would you use to describe our brand?
Which of the following words best describe our brand (provide options)
Action and Experience
Asking questions about the positive or negative experiences your consumers have had about your brand can help you understand their perceptions.
They might have formed their perception based on shopping experience on your eCommerce website or the way they were treated by your customer service.
Action and Experience Sample Questions
How would you describe your latest experience with this brand?
Which of the following words best describe your last experience with our brand?
On a scale of 1 – 10, how likely are you to recommend this brand to your friends?
For either cognitive, emotional, language or action, you can include a variety of question formats such as open-ended questions, single/multichoice list questions, scale questions as well as ranking questions to measure positive or negative sentiments about your brand.
Who Should Be The Target Audience Of Your Brand Perception Survey?
As you design your survey, you might be thinking about which focus groups to target.
The group that readily comes to mind are your customers.
And the reason for that is obvious, they already have some experience with your brand, marketing communications, and products so they have valuable insights to share.
However, should you limit this survey to your existing customers alone?
Not really. You see, there are people who are very much aware of your brand yet haven’t purchased any of your products or services.
You need to capture the opinion of such people as well in your survey.
You should also send the survey to former customers that stopped purchasing your product because of dissatisfaction.
Having a broad range of target groups for your survey will help you gain different perspectives.
When To Run A Brand Tracking Study
If you just launched out in the market or just ran a couple of marketing campaigns, a brand perception survey is not for you yet.
Maybe what you just need is a brand awareness survey.
To run an effective perception survey, you should have been in the market for a reasonably long time.
This means your brand should be well-known with new and recurrent customers who could provide tangible information in your surveys.
Such people should know your brand name, purchase and use your products or services before you can considerably measure their opinions and perception of your brand.
Brand perceptions surveys are also suitable for those times you want to launch a new product or change your marketing strategy.
They help you to find your areas of strength and weaknesses in your brand quality and communications.
In addition, the need to expand your business might require seeking funding or partnership with new strategic stakeholders.
A positive brand perception means you’ll have a greater chance of attracting new business partners, and only empirical data can be convincing.
Other times you might need to run the survey include when there is a need to gain additional insights into the expectation of customers in order to improve their experience with your product and when you want to identify new market trends.
Over To You
To get the desired response rate for your brand surveys, make sure you ask the right questions and send the surveys to the right people.
Besides, use standard survey templates and tools to prepare your surveys so that people will know it’s a legitimate communication from your brand and not a scam.
These days, hackers use online surveys from big brands to scam unsuspecting victims so use a secure survey site with some of the best survey software in the market.
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