Alphabet®
Branding Questionnaire: How to Optimize Your Research
Setting your brand apart in a saturated market is no easy feat. However, there’s an invaluable tool that can help you achieve this: a branding questionnaire.
A branding questionnaire is a set of questions designed to gather information from various stakeholders about an organization. It helps define your brand positioning, values, voice, and personality – and ultimately your brand strategy. When you understand how different audiences (both internal and external) perceive your brand, you can develop a brand message and marketing strategy that resonate with your identified target market.
Let’s take an in-depth look at how to develop a branding questionnaire and then use it to shape your brand story and stand out from the crowd.
Determining the Stakeholders
Various groups of people are essential to making your brand a success. Depending on your organization, these stakeholders might include employees, partners, donors, vendors, members, and customers.
Identifying and understanding their needs and preferences is key to developing powerful, unique, and attractive branding. After all, these stakeholders can offer valuable insights to help guide and strengthen your messaging.
A branding questionnaire directed toward stakeholders can uncover their perception of your brand, products, services, or solutions. You can then clarify strengths and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement. However, overlooking any group of stakeholders can lead to a missed opportunity. For instance, not considering investors could lead to lost funding, which makes serving customers difficult. Similarly, leaving out employees can cause high employee turnover and impede business efficiency.
When formulating your branding questionnaire, you want to encourage stakeholders to express honest opinions about various brand aspects. Let’s look at ways to achieve this.
Branding Questionnaire: Questions, Examples, and Tips
You must ask the right questions to get the most out of your branding questionnaire. By including relevant, open-ended questions about brand perception, you can see what stakeholders think of your brand. Use these tips to develop a branding questionnaire that will provide the insights you need:
1. Design for Engagement
Your survey design is integral to keeping users engaged and encouraging them to complete the entire questionnaire. Maintain respondents’ interest with interactive graphics, conversational questioning, and inventive question formats. Use a survey platform that provides a pre-built, user-friendly, and engaging survey design to make this easier.
Remember, participants don’t have all day to dedicate to your survey. So, keep it brief and only include questions essential to your research.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
A branding questionnaire is only useful when directed at the right audience. In most cases, you want to get feedback from the specific group most likely to be interested in your product, service, or solution. Distributing your survey to the relevant audience will give you a more accurate indication of how you compare to competitors.
Use a different survey for employees, partners, members, etc.
3. Offer Optional Anonymity
When you allow survey participants to remain anonymous, they’re more willing to complete the survey and provide honest feedback. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions – it’s the only way to get real results and make improvements, even if you don’t like the answers.
4. Combine Aided and Unaided Questions
Unaided questions are open-ended. For instance, if you’re a tourism brand, an unaided brand awareness question could be, “What Ontario cities are great to visit in the summer?” Unaided brand awareness questions can see if you rank top-of-mind among prospective customers without prompting them.
Aided questions mention your brand by name. For example, you can provide a list of brands (including yours) and ask, “Which of these brands are you aware of?” You can also include brand logos or images instead of names.
Results might indicate that 90% of your target audience is familiar with a competitor’s brand while 75% is familiar with yours. You can then benchmark brand recognition.
Tip:
It’s always better to start your branding questionnaire with unaided questions to prevent respondents from taking a cue.
5. Dig Deeper Into Brand Perception
Follow up with character questions to gain feedback about what your audiences associate with your brand and what they think about it. For instance, you might include a question such as, “What words would you use to describe [brand name]?”
6. Be Concise
When formulating your questions, don’t leave any room for interpretation. Instead, be clear about what you’re asking and choose simple language anyone can understand. Avoid industry jargon, technical terms, and complicated sentence structures.
How to Make Use of Your Brand Questionnaire Findings
Your branding questionnaire will reveal the most common threads and perceptions from various stakeholder surveys. Ideally, you turn this into a key findings report to clearly see your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. These insights enable you to make informed decisions about your branding and marketing strategies.
Let’s say your survey revealed lower brand awareness than anticipated. This shows you need to focus on brand awareness as a primary goal before acquisition and retention.
Use insights from every stakeholder session to develop measurable goals with a time frame linked to outcomes. For instance, you might want to improve your brand messaging, refine your target audience, or create new products, services, or solutions to better suit your audiences’ needs. It can also include enhancing internal communications, cultivating a positive work environment, and facilitating ongoing employee education.
Communicate the results and your strategy going forward to the relevant stakeholders. Where appropriate, involve them in decision-making to ensure their buy-in and support for the brand’s direction. Keeping relevant groups informed about findings and changes ensures everyone works toward the same goal and builds a positive sentiment. It also confirms to stakeholders that you’re proactively and continuously improving your brand. Ensure the defined strategy addresses the identified problems and determines specific, actionable steps to solve them.
Boost Your Brand Impact With Alphabet® Creative
Your brand is more than your company name and logo. It’s the entirety of your organization from your culture, people, and processes to your vision, voice, influence, and reputation. It’s also how your stakeholders feel about you – which is why it’s vital that you ask them.
No matter the size of your business, you can’t grow if you don’t know your strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, you can’t strategize to better communicate and add value if you don’t know what draws your audience to your brand.
We’re here to help. At Alphabet®, we approach every brand project with a deep research and discovery phase. It’s how we uncover your true and authentic brand story – then align your brand strategy with your business strategy to solve real problems, impact change, and get the results you want.
Ready to harness your brand’s potential? Contact our branding experts today.