Before diving into the best brand perception survey questions to ask, let’s take a look into what you are measuring. In B2B branding, brand perceptions are what your target audience, customers, and prospects—and to some extent, your employees—think about your brand.
Customer perception of your brand identity will affect your sales team’s ability to develop leads and bring them through the sales funnel. Brand perceptions can also affect your ability to command a higher price and fend off competition. Ultimately, developing a positive brand equity with your target audience will improve the customer experience and drive loyalty and growth.
Tracking this metric over time (known as brand tracking) with the right brand perception survey questions will help you keep tabs on what the market is thinking. This type of market research through a brand awareness survey aims to guide you as to where you can invest in building your strengths in the coming year.
What is the difference between brand perception and brand awareness?
Brand perception and B2B brand awareness often mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, they link and even overlap.
Brand awareness measures how likely prospective customers are to recognize your brand and what it stands for (known as brand recall).
Brand perception is a deeper dive, uncovering what customer beliefs and expectations are, especially in relation to your competition. Ideally, you want your customers to be able to identify the qualities that make your brand the preferred choice because you have built up brand equity. A good brand perception study uncovers more than what customers think about your brand. It uncovers what customers are saying about your brand.
Why measure brand perception?
Your business is built on the relationships you have with your customers. Customer perception, your relevance, the level of trust your customers have in you, customer feedback, and their loyalty, are tied up in that relationship. Measuring brand perception is a way to measure the various facets of customer relationships.
A leading digital agency successfully acquired new clients in competitive market segments with a marketing strategy refined through a brand perception study. With niche insights, they adjusted their brand positioning and marketing strategy to gain an edge over competitors.
If customers believe in your brand and see it as delivering on the qualities that matter most to them, they will trust and value it. That will help you maintain loyal customers. It will also open doors to new customers—possibly on the recommendation of a satisfied client. If something goes wrong or if you receive customer feedback that threatens perceptions of your brand, you’ll want to know fast.
Establishing a baseline of your brand perception or brand recall is a vital first step in this kind of market research. Setting up ongoing brand tracking will help you monitor the health of your brand and customer relationships. It will help you plan and fine-tune your marketing tactics, and it will help you drive growth and protect margins.
A caveat: “Make sure your sample is consistent from wave to wave. If you change how you define your sample, the results will not be comparable,” says Patiwat Panurach, NewtonX VP of Strategic Insights and Analytics.
Types of brand perception survey questions to ask
Brand perception is a multi-faceted concept that requires you to consider it across four dimensions:
1. Cognitive questions
This group of questions seeks answers about your customers’ associations with your brand. You can start with open-ended questions to uncover ideas you may not be aware of and then move on to multiple-choice to test customer thoughts about known or wanted qualities.
- What comes to mind first when you think of [your brand]?
- For what is [your brand] most known?
- What positive and negative qualities does [your brand] have?
- Which of the following ideas best fit [your brand]?
- Rank these ideas with the most fitting at the top and the least fitting at the bottom.
2. Emotional questions
Believe it or not, B2B brands can trigger emotions as much as consumer brands do. Because brands are tied to relationships, you will want to uncover feelings in your brand perception studies.
- What do you feel about [your brand]?
- Which of these emotions best fit [your brand]?
- Rank the feelings associated with [your brand] with the most fitting at the top.
3. Descriptive questions
What customers say about your brand can be highly revealing. Open-ended brand perception survey questions that ask customers to describe your brand will give you the most insight. Understanding the language customers use can be extremely helpful when it comes to messaging about your brand.
- How would you describe [your brand] to others?
- What positive things might you say?
- What negative things might you say?
4. Action-based experience questions
This last group of questions get at the experiences customers have had that can be drivers of brand perceptions.
- Describe your experience with [your brand].
- What words describe both negative and positive experiences you have had with [our brand]?
- How likely are you to recommend [our brand] and why?
Field precise quantitative brand perception surveys with NewtonX
Reaching the right people is vital when conducting a brand perception study. You will want to reach a variety of audiences, including customers (new and long-term), potential customers, and past customers. Having a 360 customer perspective is the key to understanding how your brand is perceived. NewtonX offers B2B market research services that can help you find the right people and ask the right types of questions, from customer experience survey questions, message testing survey questions, brand awareness survey questions, and more. Contact us today if you have any questions about brand awareness and how tracking it can help your business.
