Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have changed how organizations see their role in communicating to the marketplace. For years, executive teams have put months of time into determining the specific fonts and wording that make up their mission statement.
However, the real-time narrative of the marketplace is shaped by consumer voices through user-generated online reviews, social media, and AI-generated summaries. This guide will outline the functional differences in brand image vs brand identity, exploring what you want to project as a company and what the marketplace actually “sees” as you and how you compare to other brands currently available in the marketplace.
Core Ideas Behind Brand Image vs Brand Identity
Your identity is under your control, but the market owns your image.
Your identity: The strategic framework through which you define your company, including positioning, voice, core values, and visual elements (logos, colors, etc.).
Your image: The totality of buyer experiences; how buyers' experiences with the product and how they discuss you online impact the way they view you as a brand.
When no gap exists between identity and image, the buyer will develop trust with the brand. If a gap exists, buyer trust will drop significantly.
The increased cost of acquiring customers across the board leads to lower (or nonexistent) pricing power. Today's teams utilize a combination of continuous social listening and quarterly surveys to identify gaps in perception early in the process; they do not wait for yearly brand studies to discover such gaps.
As discussed by David Aaker, it is up to you how to define each of these two important areas of your marketing strategy: internal mission and external voice will define your company’s identity. You have total control over this aspect of your company.
Your team will create the exact messaging, color scheme, and tone of voice that you want to use in every campaign. This phase is, therefore, entirely strategic, and will lay the groundwork for how you want the world to view your brand.
How the Market Sees You
Keller conceived of the term "image" as existing solely in the memory of the consumer. You cannot control it. The image you have in their mind is created by your actions.
For example, an online consumer who experiences delayed flight scheduling or poor customer service experiences while searching for information about your product will form a negative perception of your brand based on their experience. Others may form positive perceptions of your product based on user reviews on sites like Reddit and five-star software ratings on the App Store or Google Play.
Visual Design is Not Your Whole Brand
A common mistake made by many marketers is to assume visual design comprises the entirety of the marketing strategy. The logos, typography, and website or landing page designs of a visual identity represent only one category of what an overall marketing strategy is.
Visual identity cannot, in fact, represent an entire image of a brand. Just because a company has a beautiful, attractive logo, it does not mean that they are the best company in the market providing software.
If the company is delivering defective software, then the image that consumers will have of the company will be that they are a poor provider of software along with being a company with an attractive logo.
The purpose of visuals is to support a strategy; visuals do not replace the reality of what a product delivers.
Finding Where Your Brand and the Market Do Not Match
When a company fails to create the proper image for their products, it is then unable to make a profit. Many industries experience this misalignment or discrepancy in highly distinct ways.
Premium Brands Face Daily Problems
Every day, retailers and direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands face this type of misalignment. Marketing knows, by analysis of the premium branding, that a company is building an image that is high-end and premium. The way the website looks is very high-end or expensive looking.
In addition to the look, the copy is also very high end or expensive to reflect an exclusive brand. To compensate for this, the sales team uses discount codes heavily to achieve monthly numbers and also sends shipments out very slowly.
Because of the disparity between the overall branding strategy and the reality of the customer experience over time, the market will perceive the experience as being cheap, therefore eroding the company’s pricing power. Therefore, the overall brand will have a luxury identity; however, the overall image will be that of a lower-end, bargain product.
Healthcare Providers and Patient Feedback
In addition, many healthcare employers, in order to satisfy their customers, use a very patient-centered approach to developing their brand identity. This is exemplified through their marketing materials, which make their promises for care and empathy as well as speed.
However, if you pull down the Google reviews of a healthcare provider, they reveal that the issues found in the Google reviews are simply the opposite of the brand’s marketing message. The vast majority of customer reviews express frustration with the length of time they had to wait to see a doctor, as well as the lack of effective communication at the front desk.
Tools like Angryturtle have identified that when using the tools to measure a provider’s actual customer reviews against their canonical positioning, there is a significant gap between the two.
Therefore, the way the healthcare provider positioned itself strategically does not match the operational reality of how they serve their patients.
Challenges for B2B Software Companies
Long-cycle B2B software companies face a different set of challenges. In many cases, a B2B SaaS marketing lead will notice a very small conversion rate of trial signs to paid subscriptions, when they promote their software as an "enterprise-grade" solution.
In addition, when they begin to investigate through support tickets and third-party referral sites, they will find that several of their customers have complained about bugs or slow responses.
Therefore, B2B SaaS companies do not have a market that believes their claim that they have an enterprise-grade solution. Instead, the brands are believed to have a lightweight and buggy product, while at the same time their brand is positioned for scaling.
Tracking Tools for Brand Image vs Brand Identity
The time of conducting an annual brand perception study has come to an end. To measure the current state of their market, companies need continuous and live data. That means that consumer brands will now conduct quarterly tracking studies, while B2B brands with sales cycles of longer durations will likely conduct semi-annual tracking studies.
But conducting surveys alone is no longer a sufficient measurement method. Tracking static information combined with ongoing social listening is now a common practice among teams. Intensive research will typically include tools such as SurveyMonkey Audience, Attest, and Qualtrics XM.
In conjunction, daily alerts may also be done through social monitoring platforms (e.g., Sprout Social, Mention, Brand24, Awario). For large companies, the cost spent annually on large-scale platforms (e.g., Brandwatch, Kantar BrandTracker) can be over $50,000, compared to a mid-market team who typically builds robust stacks at a cost of $5,000 to $25,000 annually.
Finding Truth in Review Data
The leading companies identify their inconsistency by mining public data, determining what their users experience, versus what they advertise.
While there are tools that specialize in collecting ratings, like reviews and conduct sentiment analysis from sites such as G2, Google Reviews, and Reddit, leading companies take this concept to a higher level with the inclusions of the advances with AI tools.
These tools claim 85–92% accuracy in determining sentiment classification and have the ability to process a very large number of comments and provide a quick snapshot of how the marketplace views a company based on speed, quality, frustration, etc.
Setting Baseline Numbers and Speeds
To effectively track and understand the gap between their operational experience versus user experience, operators rely on three fundamental metrics:
sentiment ratio: This metric defines the exact number of positive mentions when compared to total classified mentions.
sentiment velocity: This metric defines how quickly a sentiment ratio changes within a specified time period.
narrative reach: This metric defines the amount of sentiment content and word-of-mouth marketing that exists within different target audiences.
Additionally, teams should have SLA agreements that outline their response time to negative feedback, tracking within two hours for all critical negative mentions as part of a formalized crisis management protocol.
Steps to Run a Gap Audit
The defined audit process will provide the means necessary for correcting the marketplace narrative. You cannot simply speculate on what your prospective customers believe about your product or yourself as a company.
Creating an Internal List
To begin the audit, create a list of all materials that define or communicate your overall promise. The list will contain all of your internal resources, including marketing materials, sales documents, and your company website.
From there, identify the three most important attributes that define your promise. This internal inventory is critical, as it represents the foundation of who you are and what you stand for, and it provides the opportunity for verification with your marketplace.
If your sales team promotes something different than what you have posted online, or what is being promoted in the marketplace, then there is a significant fracture of identity before any of your marketplace stakeholders have an opportunity to assess who you are.
Doing an External Check
Following the compilation of your internal inventory, you need to conduct an external exploratory analysis. Take your most recent 500 reviews and compile them from multiple sources (e.g., all platforms) and analyze them with an automated tool designed for text analysis.
The results will show you the three most common references made by your customers about your products. For example, if in your internal inventory you make the claim "innovation and speed," and your external exploratory results show "expensive and hard to use," then you now have a confirmed gap.
The Shift to Machine-Made Summaries
The evolution of search engines has occurred over the past several years. The arrival of artificial intelligence answer engines has accelerated the rate at which companies are being summarized through the use of machine-generated summaries created in a matter of seconds.
A New Area of Brand Focus
When an end-user asks an AI tool about a specific company, the tool gathers data from multiple sources, compiles the data and automatically generates machine-created profiles of that company. Therefore, since your marketplace image has now been created through the use of machines, and because those images are being shared across multiple online sites, the perception of your marketplace is being created by machines.
If you position your identity based upon modern advancements in technology, but AI generates a summary suggesting you are a "legacy tool with slow support," there is a dramatic decrease in your market perception before they have even clicked on your website.
How to Guide AI Answers
You can’t buy your way out of a negative AI summary; you must influence the data the machine reads. This requires clearly structured site data, highly authoritative content to support your intended positioning, and above all, an abundance of positive, detailed third-party reviews.
AI engines rely upon consensus. When the market consensus aligns with your intended identity, the AI will naturally echo the consensus.
Final Takeaways on Fixing the Gap
It is impossible to disguise or fake your way into alignment with the market when balancing brand image vs brand identity. If you wish to be seen as a fast, reliable, premium partner to buyers, your internal operations must be in direct alignment with your external marketing initiatives.
Winning companies do not simply produce better logos or slogans. They conduct rigorous internal audits of their operations against the external market conditions.
They identify the specific points that break down their intended positioning in real-world situations, and then they fix the operations, service procedures or pricing strategy until the market perception aligns with their original intent.
Questions and Answers: Brand Image vs Brand Identity
What is the quickest way to fix a sudden drop in sentiment velocity?
Isolate the specific source of the drop. Is it coming from a single channel, such as a new group of negative G2 reviews or a viral Reddit post? Once you find the source, check the complaints against your internal positioning.
If the complaints reflect an actual problem with your product or service, immediately suspend your marketing efforts based on that specific claim. Resolve the core issue with your product or service before attempting to change the narrative with new messaging.
What is the quickest way to align a traditional visual system with a new positioning?
Begin with your highest-traffic touchpoints. You don’t have to update every single internal asset or PDF file overnight. Begin with updating your website homepage, primary sales presentations, and the top social media profiles.
This creates an immediate visual change for the vast majority of your audience. This allows your team to continue the audit and updating effort of other secondary assets over the coming months without shutting down regular operations.
Who is responsible for managing the market perception data on a daily basis?
It requires cooperation from both marketing and other teams, but ultimately it must be held by marketing. A dedicated product marketing or communications leader should own the main tracking dashboard and be responsible for monitoring daily alerts.
However, the data must flow directly to the customer support and product teams in real-time. Market perception can be tracked by marketing; however, the product and support teams are the only groups that will actually fix the underlying reasons for negative market feedback.