Your company's salespeople claim your enterprise software is considered an industry leader, yet many of your potential customers ask why the website looks like a project from a college student.

When the public persona of a business contradicts how it sells its own products, potential buyers become less likely to trust that business, resulting in a delay in the sales cycle!

In this guide, you will learn how to conduct a comprehensive audit, implement your brand image strategy, and measure its effectiveness so that your market perception aligns with what you actually do.

The Unfortunate Truth About Market Perception

Market perception isn’t about a logo or a color palette; it is about how people think of you when you are not there to influence them directly.

Market perception is developed through every single interaction a customer has with you – from customer service calls to the price of your products. Therefore, if your message doesn’t match your actions (word vs. deed), customers will pick up on this immediately.

The majority of companies approach the creation of a strong market perception in the form of a creative expression (as a marketing “art” project) rather than as an integral part of their brand image strategy.

If you wish to gain higher prices for your products and to be able to complete sales faster, then it is essential to use tangible means of measuring market perception by using quantitative data!

This means regularly conducting tracking surveys (surveys focused on measuring market perception) two to four times a year, reviewing and replacing broken customer experience programs, and ensuring that the direction of your internal organization aligns with the marketplace in which you are selling.

When this is achieved, growth becomes much easier for the company.

Why Your Image and Brand are Confused

Marketers and business owners frequently confuse image with identity. Many people reading this will think that your company’s image is the same as your company’s identity, and this type of confusion will lead to a failure of any brand strategy.

Your company’s identity is defined by what you want your business to be. Your company’s identity includes your mission statement, colors, and positioning statements.

You define what your business stands for to your employees (you say that your company stands for quality, speed, and reliability) and prepare beautiful end-user presentations (pitch decks) and product descriptions for all to see on your website.

Your company’s image is how things actually are. Your market's unedited, raw perceptions of who you are can be formed from past experiences that potential buyers have had with your company.

For example, if your product is defective and the person receiving customer service support is not polite or respectful, the potential buyer's perception of your company will be poor regardless of how well your company's mission statement communicates its purpose.

When there is a mismatch between your company's identity and your reputation, you will lose business.

Distinct Differences Between Your Company Identity and Company Image

You have control over your company's identity. Your customer or potential customer has control of your company's image.

You may only influence your company's image through repetitive and consistent actions. If your sales team sends out emails filled with typos and mistakes while indicating that your consulting company is a high-end, expensive consulting firm, the market will perceive your consulting company as providing low-priced services.

The market will always prioritize actions over promises.

You cannot create an excellent impression solely via advertising.

According to Harvard Business Review, 64 percent of all consumers believe their relationship with a company is based on shared values. Only 13 percent of consumers are affected by frequent interactions.

Customers want to know what you do and the principles you stand for rather than the quantity of advertising that you have created. A prime example is TOMS.

They have built an enormous level of trust not by the number of ads that they have created but by donating 60 million pairs of shoes in 70 different countries. As a result of their actions, TOMS established their identity.

The Awareness Trap

A company can have an extremely high level of awareness and a very poor image.

A potential buyer may know who you are, but potentially will not spend money with you because he or she believes that using your product would be difficult to operate.

Awareness generates attention. Image builds credibility. Many businesses throw away all of their resources trying to create a brand identity without truly defining the essence of that brand.

Do not rely on a broken message being promoted to more people.

A negative brand image will only serve to create more negative awareness. The brand perception must be corrected before creating greater market awareness. Only when there is a high level of consumer confidence in the brand will the awareness increase.

The Premium Pricing Advantage

The perception of the brand in the marketplace provides the brand with the ability to charge more for its products or services.

When consumers trust a brand, they do not compare their product or service features with those of competitors.

Consumers will not negotiate on price, but instead will purchase based on their belief that the brand is safe and provides the highest quality. According to research, 60 percent of consumers prefer to purchase a new product from a brand they know and understand.

Lack of Trust and Brand Perception Equals Heavy Discounts

B2B start-ups must demonstrate credibility to be credible prior to securing a funding round or prior to going after enterprise-level sales.

You cannot simply say a company is credible; they must look, act, and speak like an industry leader, and their market image must support the price point.

Understanding Your Market Standing

Before you can accurately assess your ability to move forward, you must accurately gauge your current position in the marketplace.

Stop making guesses based on the perceptions of the market. Stop depending on your sales team’s input regarding the perceptions received during a single phone call.

You need to conduct a complete assessment of your current brand asset value and to determine the reasons for your current loss of trust in the marketplace.

The Baseline Perception Audit

Begin by asking your current customers some basic questions about your business (NY Times best-selling author and entrepreneur Tony Hsieh said this once: "How can you make an impact? Go out and talk to your customers, ask them what they think, if they’re happy, etc.").

You should also conduct a brand perception survey using a 1-5 point Likert scale or a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to find out how likely customers are to recommend your company.

Ask open-ended questions about what people think of when they hear your company's name (e.g., "What comes to mind when I say [brand name]?"). You should also measure NPS to determine how many customers actually recommend your brand.

Do not ask leading questions to customers; instead, let them tell you the truth about your company.

For example, "How much do you love our new feature?" will likely force a positive response; ask instead, "If you were describing our software to your best friend, what would you tell them?".

Finding the Negative Signals

In addition to collecting positive or neutral feedback from customers, make sure you actively look for negative signals (e.g., complaints, reviews).

You should read all of the negative reviews of your product on sites such as G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot. Use social media listening tools to monitor social media and keep track of what customers are posting about your brand. Pay particular attention to how often customers complain about specific issues.

Negative signals indicate broken touchpoints between your business and customers. For example, if twenty customers say your sales team is aggressive, it’s clear that there is a perception problem.

If there are fifty customers that say your onboarding process is confusing, then your company’s image is declining due to this overused touchpoint.

Until you address where your company’s current strategy is failing to create a positive customer experience, you cannot develop and implement an effective brand image strategy for fixing all of those touchpoints.

Analyzing Competitive Consensus

You should analyze and compare the perception of your company and top three competitors. This means understanding what buyers do not like about each competitor and what buyers love about each competitor.

The reason for conducting this type of analysis is to become aware of the perceived standard within your industry and how customers will perceive your competition as such if you fail to do so.

When all competitors in your sector provide poor customer service, creating and marketing a service delivered quickly and in a friendly manner will enable you to build credibility in the customer service sector.

Identify the opportunity that exists.

Use Aaker's Brand Equity Model and compare yourself to your competitors in terms of brand loyalty, brand awareness, and perceived quality. It is not necessary to have a perfect score on all components of the model.

However, you must be able to demonstrate that you outperform your competitors on the components of the brand equity model that are important to your best customers.

Creating the Trust Foundation for Your Brand Image Strategy

Identifying the components of a foundation that are broken is the first step.

To create a workflow that changes the way your prospective customers perceive your company is essential. It is not enough to launch a marketing campaign and hope for success.

All areas of the company must work together to ensure that messages regarding the company are consistent.

Internal Team Alignment

It is not possible for marketing alone to create a favorable impression in the minds of the customers.

If marketing communicates a product that is easy to use, but the product team creates a product that is confusing to use, then the outcome is guaranteed to be negative. All departments must understand the overall positioning of the company and accept responsibility for their piece of it.

The marketing department must communicate the position of the company effectively; the sales department must sell the product as advertised; the customer support department must offer assistance to those who purchase the product as described; and all executive officers must agree on the information regarding the company's positioning statement.

There are key components of human resource (HR) management that have a large impact on the success of internal alignment.

If HR improperly hires employees that do not believe in your company's core values, then the customers will eventually feel the consequences of that decision. All new employees must be aware of how the company would like to be seen by the public. A company's internal culture will eventually be visible to the public.

Defining Customer Touchpoints

Identify the customer touchpoints where customers may interact with your company.

Your website homepage, sales presentations, billing emails, customer service portals, and social media sites are all touchpoints for customers; each touchpoint offers an opportunity to create or to break trust.

We need to evaluate each touchpoint for consistency of messaging and how they support our brand promise.

Does the tone of your billing emails reflect the tone of your marketing emails? Does the information on your website actually match what your software does? If not, identify those touchpoints and rewrite them so that they have consistent messaging and feel like they are from the same company.

Translating Abstract Values into Concrete Actions

Abstract company values are meaningless unless they are demonstrated in concrete ways.

For example, if your company states that it values "speed" as a core value, then your website must load in seconds. Your sales reps should respond to inquiries within five minutes, and your support staff should resolve customer support requests on the first attempt.

It is through action that you build your brand's equity.

If your company values "transparency" as a core value, then you should put your pricing on your website. Don't hide it behind a sales call. Take what you say is an abstract corporate value and turn it into tangible values that your customers can see and feel.

Putting Your Brand Image Strategy Plan into Action

Execution of plans is where most companies fail.

Having a great plan or strategy is not enough; you must change the way your teams work on a daily basis in order to operationalize the plan.

Developing the Product and User Experience

It is the product that proves the promises made in your marketing efforts.

For example, if your marketing positions you as a modern and speedy alternative to old legacy systems, then your user interface should be modern and simple. A product that has a dated look will lead consumers to assume that your company is also outdated.

The product management organization must review its product roadmap with respect to how the company wants to be viewed in the market by consumers.

If the company wishes to be recognized as the most secure product available in the marketplace, security needs to be built-in or made readily visible. Security features need to be obvious to consumers in the application, and the product needs to speak for itself.

Sales and Enterprise Deal Cycles

Salespeople often negatively impact the way the market perceives your product because they over-promise sales in order to meet their quotas.

When a sales representative lies or exaggerates about a feature to close a deal, they have destroyed any trust that the buyer may have had in your product. The buyer is likely to churn in six months and to leave a bad review. The sales team must sell the truth about the product.

Train your sales team to use the right language.

If a company is selling premium, enterprise software, its sales representatives should not use inexpensive or cheap tactics when closing a deal. They should act as though they are consultants. The method of sale is how the buyer will determine the value of the product.

Customer Support and Tone

The customer support department is the last line of defense for a company.

When a user has an issue, that user is typically already frustrated with the product. How the support team handles the frustration of the user determines how the consumer will perceive and remember the company. A great customer support experience can make the customer more loyal to the company than if the product never failed at all.

Establish specific rules for support tone.

Do not use cold, unemotional, robotic dialogue in your customer support if your marketing messaging is fun and casual. Speak to consumers as human beings. Using a consistent and warm tone will turn angry customers into passionate advocates for your company.

How to Measure Success

Measurement is critical! If you're not measuring, you cannot improve.

Tracking metrics will give you a true test of whether your efforts are altering marketplace perceptions of your organization. Therefore, you need to implement an ongoing measurement process for gathering data.

Create a Repeating Process for Measuring Perception

Survey vendors such as SurveyMonkey recommend that you conduct perception tracking surveys between two and four times a year.

Do not change the questions asked every time! You need to ask the same questions over a period of time to measure trends.

Make Sure the Measurement Process is Brief

A survey that takes 20 minutes to complete will likely only be completed by those who are really upset with your organization.

Limit your core questions to five to ten maximum. Also, make sure that you are measuring your share of voice within the marketplace by asking how many respondents mention your name relative to your competitors.

Quantitative Feedback Tools

You can see the big picture through the use of quantitative feedback tools.

Using CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing) to send surveys via email to everyone on your list will provide a lot of responses. Ask your respondents to rate your organization on a semantic differential scale from 1 to 7 on each of the adjectives you choose. Then track your average response scores for the above scale.

If the average innovative score drops from 5.5 to 4.2 over a period of six months, you will know that you have a very serious problem. Quantitative measures are your early warnings that you will lose customers due to perception change. Quantitative measures provide the evidence that something large is happening.

Deep Dive Qualitative Research

Numbers tell you "what" is happening, but discussions tell you "why".

You cannot rely on only one single data source to provide you with all of the information you are looking for; therefore, combine your methods (quantitative and qualitative).

To better understand why current users choose to work with you over other options (or vice versa), conduct interviews or focus groups with current customers or past customers. During these sessions, ask them to describe in detail their thought process behind doing so.

Record the exact phrasing used by each participant.

If three or more participants in a single session mention that they believe your product is "too complex for small teams," then you have uncovered an extremely significant gap between what you think and what others perceive.

Using qualitative data, you will obtain insights that will ultimately allow you to build a strong business case and determine how to address this very significant discrepancy.

Common Roadblocks and How to Fix Them

Even with carefully laid-out plans, execution is not always guaranteed to be successful. As you begin the process of changing the way that a business operates, there will inevitably be friction.

Therefore, you must understand what internal challenges and external disruptions you will encounter on your journey.

How to Manage Reputation Shocks

Your brand and reputation are not fixed but, rather, constantly changing.

A single poor product launch, a significant PR blow-up, or a major new marketing campaign from a competitor can alter the way people see your company virtually overnight. As evidenced by Qualtrics data, 61 percent of respondents indicated that how a business handles a crisis will determine the level of loyalty they maintain.

Therefore, it is critical for you to have a contingency plan for how you will be impacted by a negative incident or situation.

You must proactively develop an action plan and implement it rather than reactively waiting for something to happen. To receive timely notifications of any negative comments or mentions regarding your company and gauge how people perceive you, you should establish an alert system that monitors social media and sentiment trends.

In addition, you should regularly examine all customer support inquiries to identify any potential red flags, or trending issues, that may lead to increased levels of frustration. When you do make a mistake or create an undesirable situation, acknowledge it and apologize swiftly; rectify your mistake, and communicate with your customers how you are addressing it.

How to Overcome Budget Constraints

Perception tracking can become a costly effort for most businesses.

In many organizations where there are small teams with limited resources (such as B2B teams), many people feel that they cannot afford to measure their marketing activities using large agency research projects. However, sending out a simple targeted survey to the people on your email list allows you to start measuring your marketing efforts at the lowest possible cost.

It is always best to begin small and then step-by-step build onto the initial research until it is effective.

Initially, you should use the very basic online survey tools available for free, and to conduct your surveys with the people you consider your best or biggest customers. If your website is confusing, for example, you do not have to interview ten thousand people to determine if it is.

You can simply speak to twenty of your very best prospects and identify patterns in their responses to your survey. Once you start generating sufficient revenue, you can continue to build your research budget.

Inconsistent Messaging

Legacy positioning takes time to die.

If your company has been known for the last 10 years (or more) as a company that sells low-cost software, your customers will likely still have that memory in their minds. You cannot simply tell your customers today that you have changed your positioning to a premium brand and expect that a majority of your previous customers will suddenly believe you.

The old messaging still exists and is available on old blogs and videos and still exists in the minds of your current (old) customers.

You must constantly be on the lookout to remove and update all of the old messaging. You need to be constantly updating and retraining your sales team, and you must force your new messaging into all new touchpoints you will encounter.

The market takes time to accept the new reality; you must be absolutely ruthless about your messaging to the market.

Adapting Your Brand Image Strategy for Different Markets

Most all perception-based strategy elements apply to everyone, but the tactics used to achieve them will change based on your target customer groups.

To adapt your prospect to buy from you, you have to look at your specific deal cycles and your buyer type and adjust accordingly.

The Long B2B Deal Cycle and the Trust Factor

B2B buyers have all the risk if the tool they buy (e.g., an enterprise resource planning tool) doesn't work out for them.

If a buyer had purchased a tool and it does not work out for them, they can potentially lose their job. This puts their risk aversion in front of the entire experience. B2B buyers are risk-averse and are primarily concerned about reducing perceived risk.

Your image must reflect stability, security, reliability, and the ability to deliver results.

The most important factor in this space for the B2B buyer is the case studies and peer reviews of other companies who are similar in size to their company in terms of what they think about your company and your solution. The B2B funnel must focus on industry analysts, peer review websites, and the rate at which you receive direct referrals from existing customers.

The Fast Change of B2C

In the consumer market, the pace of change has been significantly affected by social media.

One post on social media has the power to create or destroy a brand's identity overnight. Consumers purchase products based on how they connect with their identity and values as individuals. The pace of change for consumers is very fast; therefore, businesses have to be able to respond rapidly to this environment.

Real-time tracking of consumer habits is essential, which has to be monitored and acted upon quickly.

Social listening has become a critical component of success in today's B2C world, where tracking how people are chatting about your company is a must. For example, businesses that do not have a social media presence will grow very slowly or not at all because they cannot take advantage of the immediacy of social media as a marketing channel.

Just like B2B, B2C requires consistency, but you must execute much more quickly than you would in the B2B space because of the need to react quickly to trends and changes in consumer behavior.

The Last Step: Plan, Measure, and Adapt

The market you serve already has an opinion about you, whether you want to admit it or not.

You can allow them to determine who you are, or you can actively shape their viewpoint. The key to establishing a positive perception is not a catchy slogan, nor is it all about an abundance of advertising. The key is to consistently demonstrate to the marketplace your claims in real life through every function within your organization.

Review your baseline audit today to identify gaps in your marketing strategy and pinpoint which touchpoints do not deliver on the promise made in your sales pitch. Over time, measure the ongoing changes that you have made through factual measurement to see the improvements generated from these adjustments.

In turn, you will be able to transform a general idea into a tangible asset that proves to the market that you can command a premium price for your product, close deals faster, and create an enduring presence as a leader in your industry over the long run.