Probably you have made yourself these and some other similar questions more than once. The amount and the quality of the responses that you receive from your consumers will allow you to establish your brand image, an essential attribute to highlight and differentiate yourself in a context with huge amounts of information.
What is brand image?
All brands build an image in their public, this can be good, regular or bad. You can influence it by developing a marketing and communications plan based on a coherent and strong brand identity, but it can also be influenced by external aspects or even by your competitors.
In this way, diverse stimulus contribute to generate the identity of your brand, and not all of them are under your control. That's why it's important that you can find ways to understand your audience and to see if what they think about your brand is in line with the identity that you are trying to build.
Online surveys are a valuable tool to discover this.
Here are three benefits of using surveys to learn about your brand image.
1. Discover what the world thinks about your brand and what they know about it
Before creating your online survey, first you have to define who do you want to answer it.
One alternative is to create one that is not only focused on people who have tried your product or service. In this case, the first thing that you should understand is if they recognize your brand. For that you can use open-ended questions at the start to learn about what brands in your category they know.
After this, you can include questions that ask directly if they know your brand or competitors brands and ask them with what attributes would they associate it. For example, "With what word would you describe [Brand name]?".
For this questions you could use some closed-ended questions with a series of answering options, such as multiple choice or if you prefer to receive broader information you could use an open-ended question such as a text box for your users to answer freely. Closed-ended questions will make your job of analysing your results easier.
2. Measure and improve the satisfaction level of your consumers
These tools are a valuable resource to elaborate satisfaction reports which will help you to understand and improve what your users think about your brand.
For example, if a user visits your store you can ask him about their general satisfaction level and about some other topics, such as the attention received, the cleanliness of the store, the payment methods satisfaction, etc. Each one of these attributes contribute to generate the image of your brand and it's important that you understand how these attributes are perceived by your users.
For these type of questions you could use scoring questions such as "How would you evaluate/rate the quality of the product/service?", "How would you rate the attention received in our store?" or "How would you rate your general satisfaction level?".
You can also user Net Promoter Score questions to measure the loyalty of your audience and divide it in promoters, neutrals or detractors. This will give you a clearer picture by understanding how each category of your users see and perceive your brand.
Finally, if you need more information about each response and information about why they selected some options, you can add follow up questions for each topic that is being analyzed.
3. Determine the success or failure of your marketing and communications plan
The results gathered will allow you to extract valuable data and build conclusions about the effectivity of your communicational efforts when you talk and communicate with your audience. If what users think and tell about your brand is similar to the objective image that you have, then this means that you are in the correct path to building a good and lasting relationship with your users, this means growing your business.
On the opposite side, if the results show that your users have a different brand image different to what you have developed, it's time to evaluate and see where your marketing and communications plan has been failing and look for improvement points from a different angle.
The good news is that you can always improve your brand image, sometimes it can be a harder and sometimes it can be easier but once you understand where you have to focus your efforts you will have a more clear idea where to start.
As we always say, information will help you make better and more accurate decisions.