Swipe Right on Success: How Might We Elevate Brand Perception

Hey! Welcome?to Edition 7!

Brand Perception: The Foundation of Customer Choice

Between madness and method, businesses and their customers share "perception" as a cornerstone.

Brand perception combines customer experiences, interactions, and inherent values. This perception can make or break a customer's choice, influencing their loyalty, advocacy, and overall engagement with the brand. But what does this mean for different types of businesses—D2C brands, large enterprises, and B2B companies?

The Critical Link: Interaction

Brand perception is critically shaped by customers' understanding, impression, recall, and interactions. Each interaction strengthens or weakens the brand's image from the first touchpoint—an advertisement, social media post, or website visit—to post-purchase support. A seamless, positive experience can create a loyal customer, while repeated negative encounters can drive them away.

Focus on Customer: The Heart of Brand Reality

For a brand to thrive, it must focus relentlessly on the customer. This means understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points. By placing the customer at the heart of their operations, businesses can create products and services that resonate deeply, ensuring their brand reality aligns with customer expectations. This alignment is crucial in maintaining a positive brand perception.

Brand CX Roadmap: Guiding the Journey

A brand's customer experience (CX) roadmap is a strategic guide that outlines a customer's journey with a brand. It encompasses all touchpoints and interactions to deliver a consistent and memorable experience. For D2C brands, this means ensuring that every step, from browsing to delivery, is smooth and satisfying. Large businesses must manage complex customer journeys, ensuring uniformity across channels and locations. For B2B companies, the focus is on creating trust and reliability through every professional interaction.

What It Means as a D2C Brand

For direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, perception is built on direct customer relationships. Without intermediaries, these brands must excel in digital engagement, personalized marketing, and exceptional product delivery. Every email, social media interaction, and website experience contributes to how the brand is perceived. A strong D2C brand listens actively to customer feedback, adapts swiftly, and fosters a sense of community among its customer base.

A few brands I love in this segment that make mindful touchpoints are The Good Bug , Juicy Chemistry , and The Whole Truth Foods .

What It Means for a Large Business

Large enterprises face the challenge of maintaining a consistent brand perception across a vast and diverse customer base. They must leverage extensive resources to ensure uniform customer experiences, whether in a physical store, online, or through customer service channels. Large businesses often invest heavily in brand management strategies, employing sophisticated tools and analytics to monitor and shape brand perception globally.

What It Means for a B2B Company

For B2B companies, brand perception is built on trust, reliability, and expertise. These businesses must demonstrate their value through high-quality products, dependable service, and thought leadership. The B2B customer journey often involves multiple stakeholders and longer sales cycles, making consistent and clear communication crucial. A positive brand perception in the B2B space can lead to long-term contracts and partnerships, driving sustained business growth.

Building and Breaking Customer Choice

Perception is a powerful driver of customer choice. Positive brand perception fosters trust, encourages repeat purchases, and transforms customers into advocates. Conversely, negative perceptions can quickly erode customer trust and drive them to competitors. It's a delicate balance—brands must continuously nurture their image through authentic interactions, consistently delivering promises, and listening to and adapting to customer feedback.

Crafting the Right Brand Perception: Innovation Exercise for Marketing and Founding Teams

Achieving the right brand perception requires more than just strategic planning; it involves a deep, collaborative effort to understand both the market and the psychological factors that drive customer behaviour.

Integrating psychological frameworks with design thinking can help marketing and founding teams align their vision and craft a brand perception that resonates authentically with their audience.

Psychological Frameworks

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

This framework helps identify the basic to advanced needs of your customers. By understanding where your product or service fits within this hierarchy, you can tailor your messaging to address those needs effectively. For instance, a health food brand might focus on safety (basic need) and esteem (higher need) by promoting both the nutritional benefits and the prestige of choosing premium products.

Volvo Group has masterfully positioned itself as a leader in automotive safety, a core value that transcends the allure of luxury.

While many luxury car brands focus predominantly on opulence and status, Volvo emphasizes its unwavering commitment to protecting drivers and passengers.

This focus is evident in their pioneering safety features, such as advanced collision avoidance systems, robust structural designs, and innovative child safety technologies. By prioritizing safety, Volvo taps into the fundamental human need for security, as outlined in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

This approach not only differentiates Volvo in a crowded market but also resonates deeply with customers who value peace of mind and the well-being of their loved ones above all else. As a result, Volvo's brand perception is synonymous with safety, instilling trust and loyalty among safety-conscious consumers.

Customer Value Proposition (CVP):

This psychological tool focuses on what the customer perceives as valuable. It encompasses functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits. By honing in on what your customers truly value, you can craft a brand perception that highlights these aspects, ensuring your message resonates deeply.

iD Fresh Food (India) Pvt. Ltd. has strategically positioned its brand by emphasizing a direct-to-use convenience in its packaging, which resonates strongly with its customers' desire for simplicity and efficiency.

This customer value proposition (CVP) focuses on delivering fresh, preservative-free food products ready to use straight from the pack, eliminating the hassle of pre-preparation.

By doing so, the brand addresses both functional and emotional customer needs. Functionally, it saves time and effort for busy individuals and families, while emotionally, it assures healthy, home-style meals.

This approach enhances the perceived value of their products, as customers appreciate the blend of convenience and quality. ID Foods is a trusted choice for those seeking to simplify their cooking routines without compromising health and taste.

This direct-to-use packaging strategy differentiates iD in the marketplace and perfectly aligns with modern lifestyle demands, strengthening its brand perception and loyalty.

The Halo Effect:

This cognitive bias suggests that customers' overall impression of a brand can influence their feelings and thoughts about its specific products or attributes. Leveraging this, teams can focus on creating strong, positive initial impressions that will halo onto other aspects of the brand.

Athletic brands leverage the Halo Effect by adopting renowned athletes as heroes to convey an image of peak performance, excellence, and dedication. By associating their products with top-tier athletes, these brands create a powerful positive impression that extends to their entire product line.

When consumers see their favourite athletes endorsing a brand, they subconsciously attribute their qualities—such as strength, resilience, and success—to the brand itself. This association enhances the brand’s credibility and appeal, suggesting that their gear and apparel can help everyday consumers achieve higher performance and athleticism.

Brands like 耐克 and 阿迪达斯 have perfected this strategy, using endorsements from sports icons to create an aspirational aura around their products, driving customer loyalty and the perception of superior quality.

Through the Halo Effect, these brands highlight their commitment to high performance and inspire their audience to emulate their athletic heroes, fostering a strong emotional connection and a desire to purchase and use their products.

Reimagining Brand Perception with Design Frameworks

Empathy Mapping:

Empathy mapping helps teams dive deep into their customers' experiences by capturing what they say, think, feel, and do. This process uncovers the emotional and psychological drivers behind customer behavior, allowing brands to craft messages that resonate personally. By understanding these nuanced customer perspectives, teams can create more relatable and impactful brand messages, fostering a stronger emotional connection with their audience.

Customer Journey Mapping:

Customer journey mapping visually represents the entire customer experience, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. By identifying critical touchpoints and potential pain points, teams can ensure that each interaction enhances brand perception. This comprehensive view allows for the strategic design of every customer engagement, ensuring consistency and a positive brand experience throughout the journey.

Ideation Sessions (Brainstorming, SCAMPER, and Mind Mapping):

Ideation sessions stimulate creative thinking and the generation of innovative ideas. Techniques like SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse) are particularly effective for reimagining existing brand elements. By exploring these various angles, teams can develop fresh, aligned brand strategies that reflect the desired brand perception better. These sessions foster a collaborative environment where new and effective branding ideas flourish.

So what’s the Finish Line? How Might We Better Help Create Brand Perception?

Giving people a fantastic experience isn't just a bonus—your brand must shine. A smooth and user-friendly online experience designed by top-notch website design experts doesn’t just impact users at the moment; it leaves a lasting impression.

Brands that invest time and effort into creating great user experiences and work closely with skilled website designers show they truly care about making their users happy, building real connections, and being authentic.

Turning users into fans with an awesome customer journey is a game-changer for growing your brand and thriving in the digital age. So, always remember that every click, swipe, and hello is a chance to shape how people see and remember your brand.

Let's catch up on DM if you are considering Brand Transformation.

Hope this was useful.

As always, open to ideas and fab collaborations.

Cheers,

Vaishnavi