A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: A Simple and Elegant Tool Determines How Customers Perceive Your Brand

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
– Socrates

Brands have personality. Brand personality is a set of characteristics associated with the positioning, products, price and service mix offered by a company.

How would you describe your brand?

I’m often surprised how often clients are unable to answer this simple question. Even those who have a defined set of brand characteristics don’t know to what extent customers’ perceptions of the brand match the bank’s defined brand. Often what is needed is a cold hard look in the mirror to determine how they are perceived by their customers. What brand personality does our customer experience create in our customer’s minds?

As often in life, the best solutions to a given problem are in fact very simple. One simple and elegant tool is to ask customers to describe your customer experience with just one word.

A picture is worth a thousand words. When we asked a bank’s customers to describe the customer experience with one word the results produced the following word cloud:

With one simple question, we produced a simple and elegant depiction of how customers perceive the brand as a result of a recent experience.

This cold hard look in mirror can be painful; certainly it is tough to hear, as in the case above, that some of your customers might consider you disappointing, indifferent or pushy.  But once you determine how you are perceived, you can figure out how you want to be perceived, and begin addressing any gaps between the two.