Five Tools to Use for Perception Research
Effectively measure how customers perceive your brand by leveraging the power of these five essential perception research methods. Like beauty, brand perception is most decidedly in the eye of the beholder. As Forbes Magazine succinctly puts it, “Brands are not just what they say they are. Brands are what consumers say they are. A brand’s true identity lies in its perception.” No matter how carefully you have crafted your brand image, you cannot be sure how your target audience in actually perceiving that brand image. In reality, a great gulf may exist between your best intentions and the interpretations of those intentions by your existing and prospective customers. Although the inner thoughts and emotional/logical responses of others will always remain something of a mystery, you can employ a variety of techniques to peer into the hearts and minds of your marketing audience. Of course, few business leaders have the time and expertise to engage in ongoing, high-quality, in-depth customer perception research, but any professional marketing agency worth its salt will certainly offer these indispensible services with a focus on the unique wants and needs of the companies that it serves. Here are five tools that experienced and innovative marketers use to identify and measure brand perception. By leveraging the power of these tools, you can make sure that your company narratives and advertising messages successfully reinforce the brand image of your company that exists in the collective mind of your customer base. 1. Leverage the Data from Google Alerts Imagine if you could hire someone to monitor worldwide Internet use 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, scanning for each and every mention of your company and its specific products/services. You could gain incredible insight into public thoughts and feelings regarding your brand by weighing positive mentions against negative mentions and examining the specific contexts that merit each of these mentions. Well, imagine no longer, because Google Alerts allows you to do just this for all activity on the search engine that is used by well over 90 percent of the global population. Simply enter your company name and other essentials in the Google Alert system, and you will receive an email alert whenever any of those keywords appear online. 2. Conduct Brand Perception Surveys A great way to find out what your customers think about your brand is to simply ask them. And there is no better way to collect the thoughts of a broad swath of your customer base than to conduct a survey. From mass emails to your official website, there are many ways to distribute surveys to existing and prospective customers online. In light of the busy lives that your customers probably live, keep surveys short and consider offering some sort of incentive for completing them. 3. Organize Brand Focus Groups / Online Forums Compared with surveys, both of these options offer opportunities to get more in-depth information from a far smaller sample of your customer/audience base. Good questions to ask in brand focus groups or online forums will be similar to those asked in effective surveys, but you can probably ask far more and follow up with secondary questions for further clarification. Consider questions such as “Why do you choose this brand over others?” and “What comes to mind when you hear this brand name?” 4. Monitor Social Media It goes without saying that the best way to interact with customers today is through social media. According to the independent social media public relations news source Regan, 33 percent of consumers prefer to connect with a business through social media. Regan goes on to identify social media as a great place to get unbiased and unfiltered feedback on perceived brand image, citing research that has counted an average of 2.1 million negative mentions of brands among US social media users on a daily basis. 5. Monitor Online Reviews Customer review sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List are also great sources of unbiased and unfiltered brand perception feedback. By tracking reviews of your company and its products/services on an ongoing basis, you can get a more complete picture of the ways your target audience interprets your transmitted brand image. Getting professional help If you have questions about the supreme importance of consumer brand perception or are looking to secure expert perception research services, don’t hesitate to contact a marketing professional at Bigeye. We have the experience and forward-thinking vision necessary to make perception research work for you and your company.
Business Naming Really Is a Science – Or Is It?
Although the business naming process is far from exact, you can develop a formula to find a name that can rocket your company to success and sustain ongoing growth. Would a rose, by any other name, truly smell as sweet? Romeo may think so in regard to his fair Juliet, but in the business world, a name can truly make or break you. First and foremost, let’s address the obvious: a good name cannot save a bad company. A clever or interesting name may attract some consumers to a particular company, but those consumers will not stick around when they encounter significant flaws in that company’s products and/or services. Furthermore, that once “clever/interesting” name will take on a whole new meaning in the marketplace as public opinion of the company begins to decline. So why is a company’s name so critical to success? The answer lies in the fact that a name is so easy to instantly love or hate. First impressions are incredibly important, and so are the ways in which a company’s name initially hits the ear and/or the eye. Everybody automatically judges a name and, furthermore, feels qualified to do so. For this reason alone, investing in an effective name makes great business sense. So what differentiates a good business name from a bad one? Investigating this question, The Atlantic contacted marketing executive and legendary brand naming expert Hayes Roth, who could offer no universal rules for landing on the ideal name, but presented the act of business naming as a protracted process that begins in strategy and ends in practical application. As an example, Roth, the mastermind behind the brand name BlackBerry, stresses the importance of speaking with “a familiar voice.” He adhered to this principle by choosing all one-syllable words for BlackBerry’s line of smartphones (Bold, Curve Storm, etc.). From the iPad to the iPod, Apple’s mobile products also epitomize this concept by universally beginning with a lower-case “i.” Forbes adds to this key tactic with several other general but imperative tips for effective company naming. Consider the following four tips carefully before embarking on the business naming process. 1. Keep it simple and catchy. Avoid overly long and hard-to-spell names. You want your name to be eminently “googleable.” Obviously, you want to avoid any boring names, but you can easily confuse and/or repel potential customers if you choose a name that is too strange or outlandish. As Forbes puts it, ”You want your employees to be able to say where they work without hesitation, and you want your name to resonate with your target audience.” Pay close attention to the way your name sounds when it is spoken and looks when it is read! 2. Use a name that conveys strategic meaning. Although meaningless names such as “Google” can certainly catch on, in general, the name of your company should clearly convey something that is meaningful, positive, and associated with the type of business that you conduct. By developing a name that has recognizable meaning with direct ties to your company, you can also cut down significantly on branding costs. 3 Don’t pick a name that could be limiting as your business grows. Today, few people are aware that the electronics chain Best Buy formerly did business as Sound of Music. That name worked perfectly well during the early years of the company when it primarily sold home stereo equipment. But as the company gradually expanded to offer the diverse array of products that it offers today, the originally chosen name of this multinational retail giant just made less and less sense. The moral of this story? Prevent the tremendous expense and dangerous pitfalls of a complete rebrand by avoiding company names that are narrow enough to cause future problems. 4. Conduct thorough Internet and trademark searches. When you begin to favor a particular name, it’s time to check to see if it is already in use. Although businesses with the same or similar names can conduct business simultaneously in some cases, this arrangement will almost always create significant issues. After conducting a general Internet search, check USPTO.gov to see if you can get the name trademarked or service marked. Getting Professional Help In light of the incredible importance of an effective company name, wise companies will often seek the help of a quality marketing agency that provides professional business naming services. If you have questions about effective naming strategies, contact a skilled and knowledgeable marketing expert at Bigeye today.
Warm Messages, Cold Devices: Branding Authentic Digital Connections
It is not difficult to understand why consumers respond to a personal connection, as the evidence is overwhelming. Consider the persistent power of word-of-mouth advertising, for example. Today’s companies can create an extraordinarily sophisticated and insightful marketing campaign — support this campaign with bleeding-edge technological tools — and still lose a customer, simply because she was given a different word-of-mouth recommendation. Marketing, at its core, attempts to facilitate these kinds of personal connections between brands and their audiences, whether intellectual or emotional. When this is done well, it creates brand intimacy, a close, personal and enduring bond between people and the companies they use and love. Yet these all-important human connections must be forged in an era where people are becoming increasingly atomized and distant. Fifty years ago, people joined fraternal organizations, participated in civic life, went bowling together and lived in relatively close proximity. Today, popular fraternal organizations such as the Lions Club or Rotary Club have withered, civic participation is at record lows, bowling leagues are considered retro entertainment, and suburban sprawl has created unprecedented physical distance between neighbors. These developments have created a tear in the social fabric of society, as the public commons have grown ever smaller, and people fail to socialize and form connections. Mutual trust is also at record lows, as we continue to retreat into private spaces rather than the public sphere. All of this raises a few important questions: Is technology to blame for societal atomization? Are our devices alienating us from each other? If so, how should marketers respond? Technology and its distancing effect on audiences People have always looked to technology as a means of reducing distance. The telegraph and telephone brought unimaginable change to the 19th century; television and the Internet did the same for the 20th century. Yet while technology may offer a soldier the opportunity to speak with his children from thousands of miles away — facilitating a profound human connection in the process — that same technology can also have an alienating effect. Walk into any restaurant today, and you’ll inevitably witness two people sitting across from each other idly scanning their smartphones rather than speaking, or even looking at each other. This scenario is now so common as to be almost the default expectation. Research has shown that when mobile devices are present in a face-to-face interaction, both empathy levels, and attention wane. Theoretically, smartphones and social platforms have given us much greater (near total, in some cases) visibility into each other’s lives, something that should facilitate greater connections. Yet social media is often full of artifice; a hyper-curated representation that bears little relationship to lived reality, and too often inspires feelings of anxiety, envy or sadness in others. For all of its communal pretensions, social media is often an alienating experience. The truth is simple: People change at glacial pace and technology changes at breakneck speed. The changes we’ve experienced, particularly in the last 30 years, have been extraordinary, and we still have little notion as to the long-term effect. Whether this is ultimately for good or ill is an open question. It does, however, present a specific challenge for brands seeking to create meaningful connections with audiences in this environment: How can we forge human connections through machines that are often alienating in their effect? How brands create human connection across machines The correlation of a warm human connection delivered via a cold collection of hardware and software is a striking one. Humans, at our core, have always had mixed feelings about technology — one look at dystopian science fiction makes this techno-anxiety palpable. Brands, of course, are highly motivated to create these invaluable connections, and they understand how powerfully modern technology can facilitate them. This means that brands must strike a delicate balance: Use technology to deliver compelling and emotionally resonant marketing messages without tapping into broader human anxiety about that technology. Marketing campaigns for Charter, one of the world’s largest telecommunications firms, provide a good example of how to thread this needle. Charter’s TV commercials have a notable tendency to depict large groups of people singing and dancing while surrounded by computers, screens, and other devices. In this representation, the technology is present, but it takes a definite backseat to humans interacting together within their natural social context. Technology firms aren’t the only organizations attempting to take a more humanistic approach to advertising and marketing. Charter’s campaigns are following a larger trend toward brand personalization and human experience. Aviation firm JetBlue created its clever “Air on the Side of Humanity” campaign to connect with air travelers who felt alienated by the impersonal process of taking commercial flights. A generation ago, boarding a plane did not require navigating strict security protocols, and the experience was far more relaxed. JetBlue’s campaign skillfully highlights the “chicken run meets DMV” aspect of modern flying and positions the company as a more humanistic alternative, simply by acknowledging how cold and impersonal commercial flight often feels. The banking sector has also become rapidly depersonalized in recent years, as automation and other technologies have reduced the need for tellers. Thanks to ATMs and online banking, many people may go months or even years without speaking to someone at their bank. The primary tradeoff for this efficiency is, of course, the human touch. In order to compensate, BMO, TD Bank and other financial services firms have created advertising campaigns that emphasize the “human” angle of their business. Meanwhile, global insurer Liberty Mutual dispensed with subtlety altogether, using “Human” — the Human League’s inescapable number one single from 1986 — as background music for a high-profile ad that ran during the 2012 London Olympics. These efforts illustrate the value of an authentically human and personal approach to marketing messaging. Today, so many of our interactions with the companies we patronize are not only mediated through technology but wholly lacking any human connection. Consider how virtual receptionists attempt to route your calls and answer your questions without the need for