By Claudia Perez

Welcome dear owners of small and medium-sized businesses to a new weekly meeting.

Have you ever wondered what your follower’s perception is of your personal brand or business image?

Taking this question as a reference, I am going to propose a simple, interesting, and entertaining exercise for which I will use my personal brand as an example. I will apply the qualitative technique “Free Association”, which seeks to identify the possible range of associations that spontaneously come to consumers’ minds when asked about a brand-in this case, my personal brand.

For those who do not know me, my name is Claudia, I am the founder and director of the marketing consulting Group MACLA, and I interact with my followers in the digital space as a marketing professional, while also embracing everyday life and authenticity

As part of this qualitative technique, I created a small questionnaire composed of the following questions, which you can also apply with your respective audiences:

1. What is the first word that comes to mind when you see my content on social media? Question Type: Open-ended
2. What emotion or feeling does my content evoke in you? Interest/ Joy/ Annoyance/ Boredom/ Anger Question Type: Categorical-Multiple Choice
3. What aspect, angle, or part of my content do you retain and remember most easily? Question Type: Open-ended
4. If you had to recommend my content to someone, what adjective would you use to do so? Question Type: Open-ended
5. What areas, processes, or topics come to mind when you interact with my content? Question Type: Open-ended
6. If I could no longer publish, what would you miss the most? Question Type: Open-ended
7. What type of situations remind you of my content? Question Type: Open-ended
8. With which other content creator do you associate me? Question Type: Open-ended

What is the relevance of this questionnaire?

Launching this type of questionnaire and evaluating the responses provides extremely valuable data that allows us to improve the management of our brands.

If the responses frequently include words like guide, useful and practical, or adjective like fun, humorous and motivational, I could focus my creative strategies on those elements that my audience recognizes as defining traits of my brand. Conversely, the results might indicate the opposite. They could reveal that I am projecting an image that does not exactly align with what I want my audience to perceive, helping me realize that I need to make corrections and adjustments in my strategy.

Additionally, this exercise is extremely useful for understanding which areas of my content are preforming well, which should be leveraged more, and which could be improved. For instance, the elements my audience would miss the most if I stopped publishing give me an idea of what they perceive as the most valuable or relevant aspects of my content. In such cases, I could emphasize these types of posts more or adapt them to make them more dynamic, organic and engaging to further increase their impact and acceptance.

Conclusion

In summary, my dear readers, this type of technique is not so much about understanding the image we want to project, but rather about how we are actually perceived. The more data we gather about these levels of perception, the better decisions we can make and the more effective adjustments we can implement to optimize our marketing strategies and business management.

This type of regular testing helps us understand our audience, evaluate the effectiveness of our communication, strengthen our brand image, and ultimately stand out from the competition.

As always, I bid you farewell not with a goodbye, but with a “see you next week”.

If you want to learn more about the world of marketing, I invite you to read my latest post: “Fusing Fiction and Reality: element for building stronger brands”