Branding and building brand identity

Why do consumers choose your company’s products or services over the competition? Chances are it’s your branding—your name, reputation, personality, and what you stand for—that sets you apart. Get expert ideas and survey templates to help build your brand.

As a marketing professional, you’re getting new ways to measure what’s going on with your business every day. From census data to web analytics to revenue numbers, you probably do know a ton about your customers already—but that’s just implicit data you’re collecting. The implicit data you collect can tell you how customers behave, but you don’t get the why behind the numbers—or a full understanding of the customer experience.

So while you may be able to quickly see the sales lift from an ad spend, how do you know whether a campaign changes the way people think about your company? Or what your customers think about your competitors? Or if existing customers trust you more or less than they used to?

Smart marketers use online branding surveys to determine their brand power—which is your brand’s value as determined by consumers’ positive or negative attitudes about your brand.

According to our research, 80% of marketers believe building brand awareness is extremely or very important—but 76% admit that they don’t know what percentage of their target market is aware of their brand. Here’s how you can use branding surveys to find out if potential customers think of you first—and how they view your brand.

Related: How to come up with a brand name

How do you get consumers to recognize you—and to recommend your product or service to others? Through helping people conduct market research every day, we’ve learned a lot about how to improve the strength of your brand identity (especially through surveys).

Is your brand on consumers’ minds when they’re looking to make a purchase? When you know how visible (or invisible) you are to consumers, you’ll understand how strong your brand is in your market segment, and whether you need to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. Ask survey questions that test for brand recall—your consumers’ ability to name your brand on their own to see if they’re thinking about you (or your competitors) first.

For example, ask an open-ended question like, “When you think of online streaming video services, what brands come to mind?”

To measure brand recognition, which is consumers’ ability to recognize your brand among a list of the others in your category, ask a closed-ended question like, “Which of the following brands have you heard of? (Select all that apply.)” Make sure that in the list of answer choices, you include your brand name along with the names of other big brands.

It’s one thing for consumers to be aware of your brand—but knowing what they think of your brand category (or which brand attributes or characteristics they associate with it) is just as important. If your market is bottled water, for example, what brands within that category come to mind for most people? And what are the good, bad, and even ugly traits that people associate with bottled water?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can shape your brand image to combat negative attributes and play up the positive ones. Start gathering these details by asking questions about your brand category—and via asking people to assign characteristics to your brand.

When your customers have the opportunity to go with another brand and they continue to choose yours—well, that’s brand loyalty. A great way to measure customer loyalty is to use the Net Promoter® Score (NPS), the standard companies around the world use to see if customers are recommending them to others.

Taking your brand identity seriously can mean everything for your business. Make sure branding remains a priority (and that the competition stays in the rearview) by measuring your brand equity on a regular basis via benchmarking your survey results. Doing so will help you set a baseline you can use to measure your efforts against periodically. The result? A strong brand identity that always sets you apart.

Want to compare your survey results with others in your industry? Check to see if we have benchmarks relevant to your organization.

Not sure how to get people to take your survey? Let SurveyMonkey Audience help you with your market research. Tell us who you want to take your survey, and we’ll find consumers who meet your specifications to get you the results you need.

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.