Brand perception is the sum of a consumer's feelings, experiences and thoughts about a product or service. It's what people think a brand represents, rather than what a brand says it represents. If you're inconsistent, this will impair your ability to develop a cohesive brand personality, which will only confuse your audience. That's why brands work hard to create positive associations in people's minds, rather than negative or neutral perceptions.
Retailers such as Target, Safeway and Wal-Mart create their own brands to create a loyal customer base. Social media is an incredibly effective way to create your brand image, whether it's sharing content with consumers, keeping them informed about the latest news and product launches, spreading your message and interacting with consumers on a personal level. As difficult as it is to separate business from brand, it's equally impossible to separate product from brand (and biases). Many people have the misconception that a “brand” is basically the name of the company and the logo they use.
To do this, you'll want to make your brand known through a variety of marketing initiatives, such as creating a website that emphasizes your unique mission and value proposition, creating content optimized for SEO, using social media to interact with consumers and publish your content, and much more. Italians were considered to be among the first to use marks in the form of watermarks on paper in the 12th century. Once you have enough data to measure brand perception, you can assess whether consumer opinion aligns with your brand identity. Developing a brand's personality is vital to connecting with your audience on an emotional level and for making your brand identifiable.
Together, all the elements of the brand work as a psychological trigger or a stimulus that causes an association with all the other thoughts you have about this brand. With that question, the interviewer pointed out that a brand is much larger than a logo and its colors. When a customer is loyal to a brand, 86% will recommend it to friends or family and 66% are likely to write a positive review. Brand perception, or the thoughts and feelings associated with a company, influence why people wear a particular brand of clothing or choose one pasta sauce over another at the supermarket.
And while your business model, in the strictest sense, is not innovative or unique, the way you operate within your model has a profound impact on the way consumers perceive your brand.
