By Indiana Lee
The public perception of your brand is at least as important as your internal intentions for it. This is because no matter what lies behind your mission statement, what consumers think of your business has a direct influence on whether they choose to engage with it.
This doesn’t mean that your internal values and carefully cultivated image have no importance or bearing on your success; quite the opposite. Rather, you need to consider whether consumer perception aligns with your high hopes for the status of your company. If not, it may mean that something isn’t quite translating between your business and the public. This, in turn, may lead to disrupted consumer engagement. It is vital to the success of your company to be vigilant of consumer opinions about your business and take proactive steps to ensure that your brand maintains a positive reputation.
We’re going to dig a little deeper into some practical yet creative approaches to enhancing your brand perception.
Clarifying Your Brand Identity
One of the main steps to enhancing the perception of your brand is clarifying its identity. If consumers can’t clearly recognize what your company stands for, what its values are, or even what it does, customer perceptions are unlikely to be anything but muddy. By taking measures to finesse your brand identity, you can influence positive perception with a dose of creativity.
This starts with gathering your team to assess your current branding materials. Wherever possible, include people from all levels of your organization, particularly new hires who aren’t entrenched in your culture yet. Make a list of what you want your brand identity to communicate. You can then ask your staff and yourself whether the components of the image you’ve cultivated reflect these ideals in the simplest way possible.
Some of the creative elements to consider include:
- Colors: Your choice of brand colors are direct and subconscious creative communicators for your identity. It’s worth using color psychology theory to match the ideals and feelings you want to present to the hues you use on your website, logo, and other materials. For instance, blues often evoke feelings of trust and loyalty, while reds can suggest passion and excitement. If your current colors don’t align with your intentions or values, working to develop schemes that more clearly represent the perception you want customers to have is vital.
- Logo design: Your logo should be an instantly recognizable aspect of your brand, whether consumers see the entire image with your name, or just the silhouette you use. When customers see your logo, it should trigger immediate associations with your intended brand perception. It’s best to work with experienced designers to choose shapes and images that send clear messages about your image and boost brand recognition.
- Voice: Your brand’s voice is a core part of its identity. When multiple people are working on your marketing materials and customer service without clear guidelines, the voice can very easily become lost. You might also find some types of voice characterization your staff use might be incongruous with the ideal perception you want consumers to have of your company. Your marketing team should develop the tone of voice that both authentically represents your company. You can then build a detailed guideline for staff members, including examples of the types of language that are consistent with the brand voice.
Remember, too, that the clarity of your brand image is dependent upon consistency. You can be creative about developing a brand identity pack that you provide to all members of your team, from your content creators to your customer service agents. Don’t just outline what materials and images they should use but also design the pack itself using the principles of your brand identity. This helps to provide a practical example that ensures consistent use.
Leveraging Storytelling
It’s not just the visual components of your identity that can influence consumers’ perceptions of your brand. The story you tell about your company and its activities has a role to play, too. People generally don’t just want to be advertised or pitched to. Taking the time to weave a compelling story can humanize your brand and key into the types of media customers already enjoy engaging with. It also provides them with a better understanding of what’s genuinely important to your brand, which can influence their perceptions and even suggest common ground.
Content marketing
Content marketing is likely to be your most powerful creative tool for brand storytelling. It’s important to take a multifaceted approach here, though, as not all your consumers will engage with the same types of content. Short-form video content can be effective on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. You can then expand on these shorter videos with more in-depth narratives on YouTube. Blog posts hosted on your website can involve reads of different lengths, combined with engaging imagery.
Remember, too, that you can leverage a range of tools to tell multimedia stories. You can begin a narrative on your blog, linking to a longer YouTube video or podcast that provides interviews related to the subject. At the end of these media, you can then provide links to related social channel posts, encouraging users to comment on these and continue the conversation. This type of storytelling provides greater value and engagement that boosts not just consumers’ positive perceptions but also their connections with your brand.
Story selection
It’s important to strategize the types of stories you intend to tell so that they best serve your brand perceptions. Narratives surrounding your brand’s values are a good example of this. Providing engaging storytelling content about the ethical and social standards you maintain can influence positive consumer perceptions about the priorities they share with your company.
If your key brand values revolve around sustainability, you can create blog posts that delve a little deeper into the efforts you take to identify renewable raw material sources or videos that provide behind-the-scenes looks at your green manufacturing.
Your storytelling must be authentic, too. Corporate sustainability tracking can give you accurate insights into how effective your brand’s measures are. Embedded sensors in Internet of Things (IoT) devices throughout your workplace can gather information about your energy use and how much waste you produce.
Impact measurement and management (IMM) software can also collect and analyze data on your brand’s environmental and social efforts, providing reports on the outcomes. As a result, you can share this information within your storytelling, showing your successes and where you’re committed to making improvements. This can influence perceptions around your honest and open adherence to shared values.
Engaging with the Community
One of the most important tools for enhancing your brand perception is avoiding being too distant from your consumers. Sure, there are brands or industries that some customers may want to keep a certain amount of distance from. For the most part, though, you can cultivate a warmer and more personal connection with your consumers by being a meaningful part of their lives. One way you can do this is to creatively engage with their communities.
There are various ways you can do this with authenticity that boosts consumer perception. Whichever route you take, make sure you document your efforts and post them on your website and social media channels. This provides useful marketing content that reinforces the idea that you’re actively engaged with the community.
When planning your approach, it’s worth considering the following as potential areas of connection.
Events
Hosting community events is a great way to enhance social connections with consumers that can translate into brand loyalty. There are various types of events that could align with your brand values, from cultural celebrations that showcase local artists to workshops held by experts on your staff. While this can be a marketing opportunity in itself, you’ll still need to market the event to attract attendees.
Do a little basic research to identify the most relevant audience for your event and what marketing channels are best to reach them. You should then design a visually appealing one-sheet for printed posters and flyers alongside digital materials on social media and websites. This must include colors and images that engage viewers, alongside a short event summary that describes the impact your brand wants to have on the community with your event.
Local initiatives
Your company doesn’t have to host or spearhead an event for it to have a meaningful impact on brand perception. One alternative approach is to get involved with community initiatives and projects. For instance, you can arrange a group of staff to volunteer for beach clean-ups or to help at food drives. These types of efforts show that your brand is committed to being an active part of addressing the challenges the community faces.
Indeed, by encouraging employees to suggest initiatives for your business to be a part of, you’re changing perceptions within your business, too. You’re showing your staff that you care about what’s important to them. Not only can it make them more engaged, but it can also boost employee advocacy, which may in turn enhance the credibility of your brand.
Conclusion
Given how influential brand perception is on consumer engagement, enhancing the public view of your company must be a priority. There are various creative ways to approach this, from clarifying your identity with color and voice to leveraging storytelling with content marketing tactics.
It’s also worth considering that consumers themselves are influencers of the public perception of your brand. Alongside your internal tactics, think about ways you can leverage user-generated content to crystalize positive brand recognition. By involving your customers directly in developing your identity, you can not only achieve a more positive reputation, but also forge stronger connections with customers.
Indiana Lee
