What is Brand Perception? Key Metrics and Strategies

Why are Nike or Adidas the first brands millions think about when it comes to sports and athleisure? Why does Apple command the “premium” in mobile devices, and why do you think nine out of 10 most valuable brands trust Sprinklr for social and customer experience management?  

Customers decide on a brand based on its reputation and public image. Seventy-eight percent of B2B customers prefer content from brands they trust. Decision, reputation, and trust — when these factors work in your favor, a positive brand perception follows.  

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The question is: How do people perceive your brand?  

Here are five strategies to enhance your brand perception that have worked for the biggest brands in the world — and metrics to measure how much you could move the needle.  

What is brand perception? 

Brand perception is the collective consciousness — beliefs, opinions, feelings, and impressions — that consumers have about your brand.  

This perception is shaped by your brand’s offering(s), support, pricing, positioning, messaging, experiences, and other public factors as well as from the values users derive. Most factors affecting brand perception are outside your control.  

One of the most dramatic displays of brand perception in action was following the announcement of Jaguar’s “FEARLESS. EXUBERANT. COMPELLING” rebranding earlier this year!

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The British automaker’s rebranding was a radical departure from its heritage-driven brand identity to a “convention-defying” new one. And it ignited a mixed public discourse and media attention. 

As soon as the new rebranding teaser was teased, which notably didn’t feature any car, people flooded social media with their views over the new campaign and lamenting the loss of the “growler” logo and other Jaguar aesthetics that had a cult following.  

But many people also applauded the flabbergasting newness and the bold rebranding by the automaker.  

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The rebranding challenged the public’s long-standing brand perception of Jaguar as a luxury, internal-combustion (IC) car maker for an upbeat and trendy one. The public reaction, particularly the attachment to the old Jaguar brand perception, demonstrates the resilience of established brand perception and shows how you can decisively change it for your benefit.  

Jaguar's case is also a reminder that more influences shape brand perception today, for better or worse, thanks to the democratized internet, online reviews, influencer opinions, public forums, etc. How can you influence the brand perception to your benefit? You will learn about the strategies below.  

Brand perception vs. brand awareness vs. brand identity

Perception, identity, and awareness can seem like overlapping concepts in branding, but they have specific roles to play within brand perception:  

📖 Keep reading: How to turn customers into a community of brand advocates 

5 Strategies to enhance brand perception and build customer trust

Here are the time-tested strategies to consider: 

1. Define a unique brand identity and imbibe it at every touchpoint 

Your brand identity encompasses both tangible components like logo and color schemes and intangible components like brand value and messaging. These are only on paper or a PDF for your internal use unless they appear in public-facing materials.  

When you use the brand identity consistently and strategically throughout your branding, it has the power to give your brand a competitive advantage and foster trust, loyalty, and recognition.  

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Very few brands in the world have a brand identity as iconic as Apple’s! How did Apple achieve the cult following? The tech giant has for decades cultivated a powerful brand identity that shapes the public’s brand perception around:  

• Premium-ness (pricing, quality, durability, minimal aesthetics) 
• Industry-leading technology (proprietary tech) 
• Product innovation (inventing, defining, and innovating categories) 
• Customer experience (world-class support and service network) 
• Marketing communications (stimulating, metaphorical, and sophisticated copy and campaigns)   

Apple has consistently invested in branding that assimilates these identities to the brand — right from the moment a person discovers Apple and trickles down to the product design and philosophy, messaging and positioning, marketing communications, packaging, ESG goals, and other aspects of its market presence.  

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The result is Apple Inc. that we know: Globally, one in five people own an iPhone, and in the US, it’s six in 10 people. And people buy Apple products as a lifestyle choice and, of course, for the tech they pack. 

However, brand identity should stay close to the core offering. You should be able to deliver what you’re trying to be known for! Trying to manipulate an identity that you cannot deliver can backfire dearly, and you should keep an eye on what you’re influencing.   

💡Strategies to define brand identity 

• Invest in a brand narrative to create an emotional connection with customers. Start by digging into existing customer perception using social listening and identifying ways to influence it (if needed) 
• Maintain consistent branding across all customer touchpoints and acquisition channels. Ultimately, every touchpoint should scream your brand, be it in terms of colors, verbal style, design language, experience, or messaging 
• Invest in customer experience. People never forget how you make them feel, and this experience shapes your brand identity, which shapes brand perception 
• Focus on aspirational marketing, where you sell the emotional values before the product. Use authentic storytelling to communicate the human concerns your brand solves, and the emotions associated with resolving that problem  

⚡ Pro tip - Use Sprinklr’s consumer intelligence platform to understand what themes customers correlate your brand with through a mix of the voice of the customer, sentiment analysis, brand mentions, and competitor activities.

You can also use the same Sprinklr Insights dashboard to launch brand perception surveys for a direct and indirect idea of brand perception. 

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2. Deliver exceptional customer experiences

Sixty-one percent of customers are willing to pay at least 5% more if they know they’ll get a good customer experience (CX). CX directly impacts conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value.  

Creating an exceptional customer experience requires developing customer-centric solutions and processes across every channel of your customer’s journey — from the first point of contact to post-purchase. As you consistently deliver a pleasant experience, it influences your brand perception positively over time.   

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Amazon is a case study on CX in retail and e-commerce. The brand has consistently ranked highest in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for e-commerce, and it is driven by exceptional customer experience.  

Over the years, Amazon has perfected the bottlenecks that irritate and detract customers from online shopping, such as choppy product discovery, unintuitive UI, lengthy cart-to-checkouts, and convoluted returns.  

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Today, every experience on Amazon is psychologically tuned for seamless shopping experiences. Try to contact customer support, and you can do that in a few clicks. Trigger a return request, and you’re handing over the package to an Amazon agent in no time.  

All these are examples of how Amazon shapes its brand perception using exceptional customer experience. 

💡Strategies for exceptional customer experience 

• Conduct customer journey mapping to get a bird’s-eye view of every touchpoint and identify gaps and opportunities to invest in better experiences 
• Look into digital transformation opportunities to accentuate your legacy channels that impact CX. While also simultaneously solving customer pain points from fragmented digital channels  
• Offer omni-channel customer support to remove the contact barrier and instill a sense of immediate support from any device and channel 
• Personalize interactions at scale using AI, such as automated product recommendations and marketing automation for personalized communications based on pre-set triggers 

3. Listen to what customers are saying in public

Customer conversations around their experiences with your brand, products, or services can be a great way to gauge your brand’s perception and improve it. It is knowing what people think about your brand before attempting to change their perception.  

You can listen to unsolicited customer feedback using social listening, which involves monitoring and analyzing online conversations about your brand and competitors across various platforms. With this data, you can get a high-level picture of your customers’ existing perceptions about your brand and manipulate them for good.  

Spotify introduced AI DJ in 2023 but restricted access to the US and Canada. When users from Ireland and the UK took to X (formerly Twitter) to urge Spotify to make the feature accessible to all regions, the brand acted on it right away.  

Brands that consistently deliver customer requests gather a positive perception of a customer-centric brand.    

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💡Strategies to listen to what customers are saying: 

• Use a listening tool to constantly monitor your brand and competitor mentions, hashtags, and track customer conversations on social, digital, and traditional channels. This data will help you draw critical insights into the voice of the customers  
• Use NLP and gen-AI (native AI if your social listening tool supports it) to automatically analyze customer data to discover trends, themes, and root causes and get recommendations on next steps 
• Regularly engage with positive and negative social discourse around your brand, either by directly responding or scheduling communications addressing their concerns as soon as possible 

⚡ Pro tip - Track down real-time conversations around your brand using triggers such as keywords, hashtags, industry jargon, and other signals on Sprinklr’s social listening platform. This can help you understand brand perception beyond the limits of solicited surveys.  

After capturing the data, use native AI to analyze, interpret, and draw action-ready insights from the same dashboard. 

Learn more

4. Be the brand that feels human, engaging, and relatable

Seventy-six percent of consumers would buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor. Real-time and authentic engagement adds a human touch and makes your brand more relatable and approachable.  

So, invest in creating spaces for dialogue and interaction to foster a sense of belonging for your customers and strengthen relationships.  

The best part is you don’t always need to have an agenda for engagement. Candid responses, humorous comments, or just an emoji in customer conversations can do wonders for your brand’s perception.   

Duolingo has used Gen Z’s absurdist humor to engage with customers and create memorable experiences that positively shape brand perception.  

Duolingo’s mascot, a green owl named Duo, has become a TikTok personality with over 7.2 million followers (who’s also known for his love for pop star Dua Lipa).   

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Duo is famous for satirical veiled threats against Duolingo users who skip daily lessons with phrases like “Spanish or vanish”.   

Duo also routinely shows up in comments and discussions across social media on behalf of Duolingo to engage with customers.  

💡Strategies for engaging with customers: 

• Bring your social and public touchpoints in one place to monitor and respond to conversations in real time using a social media publishing platform. Recurrent engagement helps stay on top of people’s minds 
• Create a rapid response team, like Uber did, to proactively listen for critical customer concerns and route them to appropriate teams for quick resolution 
• If you know any issues facing customers, reach out proactively with assistance or solutions before they formally complain, such as through a bulk direct message offering help or an in-app notification  
• Use browsing history, purchase history, location (if consented), current activity, and related data to deliver hyper-personalized content or micro-experiences at specific moments that shape brand perception, such as during onboarding or the first usage 
• Engage customers through interactive polls, surveys, and Q&A sessions to make them feel involved with your brand 

5. Collaborate with influencers 

Posts created by or with influencers have 4.7 times greater engagement rates than those without influencers. Collaborating with influencers works because they hold incredible cultural and emotional sway over many people.  

If you partner with the right influencer, you’re harnessing their reach to connect with your prospective audience and influence your brand perception.  

Think of popular YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who has almost 20 million subscribers (about the population of New York) and is considered the best tech YouTuber of all time!  

There have been instances of company stocks plummeting after Brownlee critically reviewed their products. The opposite is also true for genuinely good products, which is why brands routinely partner with Brownlee.   

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GoPro uses influencers differently by asking anybody with a GoPro to share their stories and get sponsored. Those stories become their social media content that shows the product live and reaches a massive audience through content partnerships.   

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In a similar example, Patagonia collaborates with environmental activists (their preferred influencers) who share their commitment to sustainability. Over the years, they have successfully linked their brand perception to the larger mission: “We're in business to save our home planet.” 

💡Strategies for collaborating with influencers: 

• Pick influencers who genuinely love or can appreciate the value of your brand, product, or service. A niche-influencer mismatch could hurt your brand perception 
• Harness the expertise of your influencers to create content that stays true to the influencers’ credibility while authentically portraying your brand. Avoid reinventing or trialing radically different content and ideas  
• Pick from a mix of macro- and micro-influencers. Macros have incredible reach but potentially less interpersonal engagement. Micros have deeper connections with their audience, and hence, your brand will reach closer to the TG 
• Track key performance indicators such as conversions, customer engagement, and content reach to measure the impact of your influencer campaigns 

📚Related reading: What are the core elements of a brand community? 

10 Metrics to measure and track brand perception 

Here are 10 effective methods for measuring and tracking brand perception. The first five metrics are core and widely used for direct attribution to measure brand perception through traditional channels such as surveys and web analytics tools: 

1. Net sentiment score (NSS): The overall positive or negative feeling about your brand. It indicates the general emotional leanings of customers 
2. Net promoters score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by assessing their likelihood of recommending your brand. Find the share of promoters versus detractors 
3. Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Gauges how satisfied customers are with specific interactions or your brand overall. Get a snapshot of immediate contentment levels 
4. Omnichannel feedback: Customer opinions across all brand interaction points. Offers a holistic view of customer perception throughout their journey 
5. Brand awareness: Web traffic, social mentions, social followers, etc., that suggests how familiar your target audience is with your brand. You can also pair this with similar metrics, such as brand recall, recognition, and association  
   
   Measure these metrics below in addition to the core ones mentioned above if you’re using social listening and a VoC program in your workflow as suggested: 
   
6. Share of voice: Shows your brand's prominence in online conversations compared to competitors 
7. Brand mentions and search volume: Tracks how often your brand is mentioned online and the frequency of searches for it 
8. Referral traffic: Measures the number of visitors directed to your brand from customer recommendations. It signifies the power of word-of-mouth and customer advocacy. 
9. Customer review stars: Represents the average rating customers give your brand on review platforms. It provides a visual indicator of the overall perceived quality of your offering. 
10. Open-ended survey results: Candid responses without any set agenda for unbiased and top-of-the-mind feedback on brand perception 

🔖From the vault: How to use trend analysis to maximize social listening 

How customers perceive your brand matters! Positively influence it with Sprinklr Insights 

A strong brand perception is a prelude to customer trust and enduring loyalty. Consistency in messaging, exceptional customer experiences, and proactive engagement are vital for cultivating a positive image and ensuring your brand perception remains healthy. 

Sprinklr Insights brings seven tools into one unified platform to do everything it takes to shape your brand’s perception at an enterprise scale. It is built from the ground up with verticalized AI that’s 90%+ accurate in discovering trends, themes, root causes, and suggesting action-ready insights. Bring your team to collaborate, analyze, take actions, and even route cases to relevant teams on Sprinklr’s unified-CXM platform.