When it comes to brands and ‘branding’ there’s a great deal of confusion regarding what those terms actually mean, and are often misused interchangeably.

For many business owners and entrepreneurs, the thought of branding is typically defined by marketing elements such as a logo or other visuals. But the true definition of any brand is created by the perceptions held by your customers.

Shaping perceptions

While the true definition of any brand is in the hands of the customer, their interpretations are shaped by their interactions with your company and the motivations that influence their engagement with you.

Some of theses interpretations can be influenced by external messaging efforts such as advertising, public relations or social media. These are generally the perceptions companies want their customers to have.

The influences companies have less control over are the regular interactions with the brand that might seem secondary to marketing, but have a greater affect on lasting impressions. These can be experiences with sales, customer service, online reviews and other third-party comments or criticisms that usual create better recall in the minds of customers because they have an inherent credibility that can’t be achieved by marketing messages or company-generated campaigns.

Being able to monitor and manage these interactions is sometimes referred to as the ‘customer journey.’ Having more control over all customer touch-points has a direct affect on sales and customer retention, particularly if the sales process can take many interactions before a conversion is achieved.

How social perceptions influence sales

Whether your product or service is considered an impulse buy or if it’s a larger investment by the customer that can take days or weeks to convert to a sale, first impressions are typically lasting impressions.

Consumers today are much more savvy when it comes to technology, and as a result, brands have invested significant efforts in social media and ‘social proofing.’

The idea of social proofing is increasingly important for online brands, as they’ve realized the importance of having third-party credibility for their products. This has gone beyond simply having product reviews (although those are still critically important), and has extended to the use of ‘influencers’ to help promote their brands to different audiences.

These social influences can have vast numbers of highly engaged followers, so being able to reach those audiences in a more targeted way—with more authority—can have huge impacts on sales.

Authenticity is everything

In addition to consumers being technologically savvy, they’re also smart enough to see when a brand is being authentic, or if it’s simply pushing contrived messages only for the sake of sales.

Younger audiences today tend to show better brand loyalty if they see themselves aligned with the core mission or identity of a brand. Association with a brand for purposes of status has started to fade with younger generations who are more concerned with how a company gives back, helps their communities, or how their policies and actions directly affect social or environmental issues they care about.

Being inauthentic in today’s face-paced social media environment can quickly spell disaster and can sometimes be impossible to recover from.

Be proactive

The worst thing any brand can do is ignore negative perceptions or fail to address issues head-on. Allowing a negative situation to gain momentum, especially on social media, can create a situation that leaves a lasting bad feeling. Further, issuing a meaningless PR statement, making excuses or trying to deflect and change the narrative always ends in disaster only compounding the matter.

No one is perfect, and that goes for global brands as well. People make mistakes and sometimes do things with unintended consequences. Smart brands recognize this and the importance of being transparent or taking responsibility for the screw up. This proactive approach has a way of diffusing the issue and getting the topic out of the news cycle.

Don’t wait to check in

Another way brands can be proactive is to regularly survey their customers to get a ‘temperature check’ on how they’re doing. This can be as simple as an email survey, social media poll, or in-store incentives for providing feedback or opinions.

This tactic can sometimes reveal emerging issues long before they become a public crisis, and also has the added benefit of communicating to customers that they care about their input.

Customer service matters

While there are many ways to gauge the perceptions of your brand and gather customer sentiment, the most important is customer service. The chief complaint we all hear these days about any company is how the customer service experience is terrible.

Reasons for poor customer service these days can have many factors, ranging from economic conditions and staffing challenges, to simply prioritizing other departments or services. But universally, almost every complaint about a company or brand today has to do with poor customer service.

Being a customer service representative in any organization can be a thankless job and no one wants to spend the majority of their day hearing people complain.

However, CSRs are often the front-line—and sometimes the only interaction that happens directly between companies and their customers. And this experience, whether good or bad, will always be the key interaction that permanently shapes a customers perception. It also acts as a direct catalyst for social proofing by either amplifying positive OR negative feelings.

Stay engaged

How your customer or potential customer perceives your brand can’t be controlled. However, the single most important thing any company can do is to stay engaged. Actively making efforts to generate dialogue with your customer shows them you care about what they think.

Don’t be afraid of criticism, embrace it. Showing that you care about your customers can quickly turn negative perceptions into positive feelings and help you build an army of advocates for your brand.