The Power of Surveys.

Wonder what consumers, stakeholders and employees really think of your brand?
Just ask.

Like a diesel-powered mind probe, surveys are an incredibly powerful tool that give you insight into the mind of your audience, offering a wealth of information to help you optimize your brand.

Whether it’s to get customer feedback, gauge employee satisfaction or a forthright opinion from a board of directors, surveys can serve different purposes and offer a range of insights. But the ones we find most valuable are brand surveys because of what they tell us about how your brand is viewed and the effect that has on your business.

Brand surveys are easy-to-use tools that clear up any assumptions about whether your brand is working in all the ways you want it to. Think of them as a checkup that allows you to find out if it’s really saying what you intend, what it’s doing right, what it could be doing better and what people think overall.

From this valuable feedback, we get information that goes beyond customer sentiment to learn more about your audience, what they want from your company and how they’re absorbing your message and brand. In turn, this can help inform the direction you move your business, whether it’s to include a new product or service, rethink your marketing messaging or even initiate a rebrand.

So, what kind of surveys are we talking here? These are a few that we find valuable in helping business leadership get the answers they’re looking for.

Brand Positioning Survey 
This type of survey helps you understand your brand’s value compared to competitors. Can your audience or employees differentiate what sets you apart from the competition or do they have a hard time seeing a difference? A brand positioning survey will shed light on where your brand sits to help you make an informed decision and move in the right direction.

Visual & Verbal Brand Survey
Here, a business discovers whether its visual assets and voice are aligning with its intended identity. Although they’re unique in their own way, they often work together to create a cohesive character that represents the brand visually and through language. This type of survey will help you determine whether this brand character is being built in the audience’s mind the way you planned, and if not, what adjustments can be made to achieve the desired identity.

Brand Awareness Survey
A brand awareness survey is exactly what it sounds like—a questionnaire or interview that finds out how familiar people are with your brand and what it offers. Obviously, you hope they’ve heard of your brand, but this survey can help you understand what might be keeping that from happening, and if so, dissect the information to determine what factors are drowning it out.

Brand Perception Survey
Brand perception surveys help you understand how your brand is (you guessed it!) perceived. What comes to mind when people think about your brand? How do they feel about it based on past experiences with your product? Would they recommend it over a competitor? This is the type of information you can acquire from a brand perception survey to help get your business on track and keep it there.  

Whether you do one or all of these types of surveys, here’s the great thing: they’re all easy to organize and don’t have to break the bank thanks to today’s tech. Plus, with so many ways of conducting them—from online and email questionnaires, focus groups, mobile/social surveys and phone interviews—there are plenty of opportunities to get the feedback you’re looking for and that your brand-building efforts need to keep on track.

So if you’re saying to yourself, “that’s perfect, but what’s the catch?” Well, there isn’t really a catch as much as a dose of reality—you should be prepared to learn your brand isn’t worthy of a “my brand made the honor roll” bumper sticker. Because surveys can be anonymous, you get genuine and honest feedback, so you have to be open-minded to the results and willing to accept criticism. Whether the results are negative, or not what you expected to hear, we find it valuable because it helps us course correct, identify fundamental beliefs and steer your brand in the right direction to ensure you’re hitting the mark with your target.

And that’s where even more value exists. The data and research acquired from a survey can help you uncover latent problems or discover verbatim responses that are often relayed to reps via customers. It also lets you engage with internal stakeholders, showing them that you value their opinion, which can positively affect brand perception and unify the team with a more authentic and organic sense of purpose.

Which leads us to the big, important questions:

Are your perceptions of your brand matching up with those who interact with it, from stakeholders to employees and current or potential customers?

Have you done any kind of survey to find out how your brand stack ups with positioning, identity, awareness or perception?

Are you curious about the changing needs of your employees and wonder what they or the people they interact with think of your brand?

Last question…Are you unsure where to start to get the answers you need? A trusted branding partner can show you how easy and affordable it is to get the research you need to move your brand forward.