What are the best ways to measure how customers see my brand?

First of all, what do you actually want to know?  Maybe you want brand awareness, or do you want to know if people think of your brand as cheap? 

Do you want to find out if your brand were a person what person it would be?   Are you looking at bringing out new products and so want to understand if they will fit with your current brand?

Here are two measurement tools.

Focus groups

This is where you have up to 10 people per group and a facilitator asks them about their perceptions of your brand.  This is only a really small sample of your consumers, so it is only going to be indicative as to what the majority of them think. 

Also bear in mind that this can get expensive. A cheap alternative is to recruit the people yourself and hold it at your office and then just pay for a facilitator, I have done this a few times and got really good results.

Surveys

These are good in that you can get results from a large number of people, which means your results will hopefully be more realistic. There are two formats that a survey can be formatted.

Give them answers (for example, we are a: friendly, b: reliable etc) to choose from. This makes it easier for the respondent, but it may mean that you are subconsciously getting the results you want, depending on the words you choose – try to be unbiased.

In the survey get them to write down what they think. Unfortunately, many people don’t have time for this

If you are going with the survey option try www.surveymonkey.com, which has free survey software – perfect  if the economic situation has hit your budget.

A friend of mine recently did something that worked… she sent an email to all her customers asking what three words first come to mind when thinking about her brand, and asked them to email her back.  She got a really good response because it was quick and easy for them to get back to her. 

With those words she then made a “word cloud” – a word cloud is basically a page with all the words that people have said on it and the more the word has been said the bigger it appears in the cloud.  This creates a result that is easy to see what your customers think, and you could use it in your marketing as well.

Another option is to use voting buttons on your website for a quick-and-dirty result. The only drawback with this is that there are only a limited number of options, but it does mean a quick response.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com and author of Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.

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