How to Build a Strong Brand Image

A strong brand image is crucial to brand growth. In fact, large-scale research by PwC shows that more than 60% of shoppers consider Brand Image to be one of the most important elements of the customer experience. In addition, a strong Brand Image ensures that more people think of you more often, which increases sales and thus drives growth. 

There are countless ways in which a positive and concrete brand image makes your brand stronger. But how do you build a strong brand image? In this blog, we discuss the five steps to a strong brand image. 

 

Step 1. Define your Desired Brand Image

The first step is to get clear on what your desired brand image is. In other words, what do you want to convey to the customer? How do you want the customer to think about your brand? 

Identify some promising characteristics that your brand should focus on. This could be anything: a particular product advantage, a specific personality or a more social value. 

The crux of an effective attribute is that it must connect to a conscious or unconscious goal people have with the product or category. Red Bull, for example, builds brand image on conscious purpose (stimulates body and mind) and unconscious purpose (adventurous personality, reinforced by all the extreme sports they associate themselves with).

At Unravel, we regularly perform brand image research. Even in such research, the first step is to identify key brand associations, then test the extent to which customers actually recognize these associations.

Step 2. Brand Image Research: The 0-measurement

Once it's clear what attributes a brand wants to be associated with, it's time to take a 0-measurement. After all, without 0-measurement you don't know where you stand. In practice, brands themselves often have a slightly different perception of their brand image than customers do. 

Brand image research provides insight into the differences between the desired brand image and the actual brand image. There are several methods for doing this, and selecting the right one is critical. After all, what you want to avoid is that the method you use is not appropriate, giving you a distorted picture of the actual image. That way, you would start steering for faulty inputs. 

At Unravel, we use neuromarketing methods to test brand image. Because, as you may have read in a previous blog, brand image exists partly unconsciously. So, consciously surveying brand perception will in all likelihood give a distorted picture of how people actually think about your brand in buying situations. 

In addition, conscious questioning has the disadvantage of social desirability. Respondents often tend to answer in line with what the survey seems to want to measure. As a result, the brand image often comes out more positive than it really is. 

This is exactly what we saw happen with the "less plastic" claims on packaging. While you would consciously think that this would benefit sustainability perception, unconsciously it turned out to do just the opposite; it actually made sustainability perception more negative, by unconsciously making the issue of sustainability active whereas without the claim it was not an obstacle.

What we do at Unravel to prevent this is to measure precisely the unconscious brand image as well. We do this by using neuromarketing methods that measure reaction time, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Intuitive Response Test (IRT). 

You can read more about these methods here, but in a nutshell, what these methods have in common is that respondents classify combinations of brands and attributes under time pressure. This time pressure not only causes respondents to respond more intuitively, but this response time also says something about the strength of an association. The stronger we associate a brand with a trait, the faster we can process them together, and the faster our response time.

The result of such a survey is a clear representation of your actual brand image at this time. In simple graphs it becomes immediately clear what the difference is between the desired brand image and the actual brand image. If relevant, the brand image of the competition is visualized as well, providing insight into your positioning in the market. 

It is also possible to distinguish in the research between the brand image for customers versus non-customers. That way you can identify what the most important associations are for success, or the most important associations to get someone to convert. You can read more about this in this blog.

Step 3. Determine Your Strategy

Now that you know the differences between your desired brand image and your actual brand image, it's time to determine your strategy. First, it may be wise to scrutinize your brand identity.

Does your identity match what you want to portray? It is difficult to portray something you are not. You can highlight elements of your organization to a greater or lesser extent through marketing and communications, but distorting who you actually are becomes difficult and is also not transparent. 

When your identity is in line with what you wish to project, it is time to define a branding strategy. For example, you could launch a branding campaign that emphasizes the very traits on which your brand has not yet scored well. 

However, it is wise to work one by one on your "weaker" associations, and not to lose sight of the attributes you score well on. Our brain is best at creating new memory traces when it receives small pieces of new information to process within a familiar context.

You could also investigate whether your brand assets (such as your logo, brand colors, slogan or jingle) match your desired image. You could investigate this with a brand asset test, which you could also include immediately in the 0-measurement. 

By repeatedly revealing attributes, you can ensure that the customer will associate your brand with that particular attribute, thus strengthening your brand image.

Step 4. Stay Consistent

It takes years to build a strong brand image. Once it is strong, your brand image can make a structural contribution to brand growth. So it is essential to understand what the powerful elements of your brand image are and make them work fully for your brand. 

Step 5. Measuring is knowing: the evaluation phase

Once you have implemented your branding strategy for a while and have developed and run one or more campaigns, you naturally want to know if all your efforts have paid off. Not only because it is nice to know, but also to adjust your strategy where necessary. 

Next, it is time for the 1-measurement. In other words, the same brand image survey that reveals your brand image again. It is wise to use the same method as during your 0-measurement. That way you avoid differences in the measurements being attributable to the method you use. 

Curious on what a brand image research report looks like? We have made a complete sample report which you can find over here.