One of the most effective ways to keep your campus resilient and prepared for what’s next is to strengthen your brand. Understanding your brand equity—the value your brand holds in the minds of your audiences—is how you strengthen it over time. Brand perception is a key element of brand equity. Perception is reality and your brand is determined by what people think of it. Brands with a high perceived value are able to influence desired behaviors across the consumer lifecycle.
This post is part of a series that explores each aspect of the brand equity framework in depth.
Brand perception is what audiences generally think about your brand, providing insight into your market position and brand health. It compares your public perception with your institution’s self-presentation, conveying results that influence your messaging, positioning, and differentiation strategy.
Strong brand perception influences stakeholder behavior from application to enrollment to donations. The data and insights indicate how the marketplace feels about your institution and inform brand strategy over time.
Using social intelligence to assess perception enables you to understand the top-of-mind sentiment, characteristics, topics, and themes that represent your general brand perception. It also answers what your brand is in the mind of your audience.
Top-of-mind sentiment. Examines how people think about your brand, their initial thoughts and opinions, and whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.
Institutional characteristics, topics, or themes. The features, topics, and themes associated with your brand. Are you known for what you want to be known for? The insights determine if narrative building or narrative change is needed, and identify the risks of shifting the narrative.
Audience-focus. Evaluates earned conversation to understand where and how people talk about your brand, identifying brand-aligned conversations and audience-defined differentiators.
A small private university in the Midwest wanted to understand public perception, confirm brand strengths and weaknesses, and identify opportunities to elevate the brand. They used social intelligence to create a brand messaging roadmap and compare what the public perceives the university to be with what it aspires to be. The detailed roadmap helped them progressively elevate the brand and monthly insights demonstrated their priority messaging resonated with their audience. They developed content about their close-knit community and highlighted individuals, which increased engagement, grew brand-aligned content, and sustained positive messaging.
A comprehensive brand health assessment gave the university the opportunity to see how their message performed within their existing brand and audience. It also gave them a baseline to leverage social intelligence insights, messaging, and brand persona research to implement a cohesive strategic communications plan across marketing, enrollment, and advancement. The accompanying action plan supported their need to grow specific messages over time.
A medium-sized private college in the East learned the primary way individuals perceive their brand is through an athletics lens. Athletic events tend to generate more positive sentiment and fewer negative reactions, which enhanced their overall audience perception. Athletics topics were frequently the top conversation drivers, and in non-athletic spaces negative aspects were more common.
Their community’s passion for athletics was a valuable brand strength they leveraged to engage key stakeholders and advance institutional goals. Efforts to enhance their perception included highlighting student athletes for their academic success, engaging key stakeholders in athletic events, and leveraging game day experiences to build brand affinity across audiences. They also focused on articulating their value proposition and emphasizing their return on investment with testimonials and encouraging student ambassadors and thought leaders to uplift messaging. Strengthening their value proposition and differentiators was critical to uniting their community in a non-athletic context.
Broader knowledge and understanding of your brand awareness prepares you to examine the rest of your brand equity and build a brand strategy aligned with your future vision.
Learn more about the value of measuring brand equity.