Building a brand image is probably the most important asset of your business. Furthermore, it is important to build something your customers can associate themselves with. All in all, it is how you get remembered.
What is brand image? When people think of your company, they form an impression of it called a brand image. Customers build a brand image based on their interactions and experiences, as well as the aesthetically pleasing appearance and connotations that your company has.
In this article, I will go over brand image in more detail.
1. What Is Brand Image?
A person’s opinion of a brand is called a brand image. More specifically, a brand’s image is the perception of thoughts and feelings that a person has when interacting with your company. This refers to the sensation we get when we use a company’s products or see their advertising.
What colours and imagery do we identify with our business so that it delivers that particular storey in the minds of our customers? This is what brand image is all about.
A business, if done well, can imprint a certain picture in your mind. Furthermore, marketers might persuade you to think or feel a specific way by linking your desired image with an experience that is appropriate to your target consumer.
2. Why Is Brand Image Important?
Customer behaviour would be positively influenced by a positive brand image. Increasing loyalty, charging a price premium, and producing favourable word-of-mouth are examples of the types of behaviour.
The more positive a brand’s image is, the more ready consumers are to pay for it. In addition, it can be used as an extrinsic cue to assess the quality of a brand or product. It was also pointed out that it can serve as a product guarantee.
3. Brand Image Vs. Brand Recognition
These two terms are used almost interchangeably. Although, they are likewise somewhat different.
While brand image refers to the colours and imagery that we associate with our company, brand recognition refers to what these colours and imagery mean to our customers.
Overall, as you can see they are very closely linked and almost the same. Although, brand recognition is evaluating displaying an epathetic judgement. Whilst brand image is projecting a rational one. I like to think of these of look at the same object in a different light, or a different context.
4. Touch Points Of Brand Image
Everyone time your business interacts with a person they form establish a brand image so it is important to know your touch points and have a strategy in place to ensure the intended image will be achieved.
The Touch Points Include:
- Advertising communication
- PR
- In store
- Website
- Customer service
- Customer Support
- Design and packaging
- Price
- Functionality of product
- Product Quality
The touch point include any medium that whereby your business is able to communicate to it audience.
5. Attributes Of Brand Image
Eight traits can capture your brand image. We define these within your communication at any touch point of your business.
- Efficiency
- Excellence
- Aesthetics
- Spirituality
- Ethics
- Status
- Play
- Esteem
When communicating your brand image you can do so by thinking of the attributes that best associate with your target audience.
6. Psychology Behind Brand Image
When we are first presented to something new, our mind, or more precisely our conscious, seeks to understand it by gathering all available information from the environment. After your conscious mind has gathered some data, your subconscious mind connects the dots to develop an assumption. By associating your business with positive things in your target customers’ minds, you can help them build a positive brand image.
By displaying your business along these experiences will automatically start creating that mental image in their minds. For example, Range Rover adverts are always showing the car driving off-road in the middle of nowhere. What they are doing here is associating outdoorsy and adventure. Not only does this mean you can create positive similarities between your target audience and your business. But, you can change these over time just by exposing them to your marketing material.
Conclusion
Brand image a person’s beliefs about the brand based from the available information they have from a set of diverse product and non-product attributes. All in all, it represents the personal symbolism that consumers associate with a brand.
This makes creating a brand image more beneficial for niche companies. It easier for smaller as more niche businesses to position themselves, as they occupy a specific space in the market.
