Whether you have an in-house marketing team or you’re outsourcing to a third party, creating or updating a brand identity is key. A good brand identity is what you communicate to your customers, whether you’re a sole proprietorship or an enterprise-level corporation. It tells people who you are, what you do, and even how you do it. Creating a comprehensive brand questionnaire ensures you get the feedback you need to refine and improve your brand.
In turn, the key to creating a good branding questionnaire is asking the right questions. Your brand identity questionnaire should ask relevant, open-ended questions. The following questions will help you develop the right branding for your product or services.
Prepare your brand identity questionnaire by asking the following questions
To get started, consider asking these questions in your brand design questionnaire.
Who are your customers?
With the proliferation of social media and influencers, your customers are extremely influential on your brand. It’s crucial that their perceptions of your product works with your brand identity. For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z consumers, you need to know which traits, habits, and other factors influence their wants and needs. This will look very different from people targeting Gen X and Boomer populations, who are more likely to be established and experienced.
In turn, you should also consider your ideal customer. Does that person match your current branding? Knowing who you’re trying to attract—and whom you want to “represent” your brand online—will help you refine your brand further.
What’s the story behind your brand?
Marketing and advertising have a strong storytelling component. Whether you’re airing a spot during the Super Bowl or connecting with customers on Instagram, your company’s story is central to your branding.
There are plenty of sub-questions to ask in this vein when creating your brand questionnaire:
- How did your company start out?
- Who are the founders?
- What is your mission statement, and what are your values?
- If your brand were a person, what would their personality be like?
- What’s the purpose of your company and brand?
- How has the company or product changed along the way?
- What do you offer customers?
Who are your main competitors?
Knowing your competition is key. Most industries, products, and services have at least one direct competitor. This can provide great insight into your brand identity. What makes them successful or unsuccessful? Which parts of their branding are appealing? What kind of customers do they attract?
The answers to these questions provide great insight into what’s working for other people, what the “rules” of the industry are, and what your customers might expect from your brand.
What’s your unique selling point?
The answers to the questions above will help you decide what sets your company and brand apart from competitors. For example, are you trying to make an impersonal, stressful process easier and more personal? Have you made a completely innovative new product, or solved the issues with an old one? Are you the modern answer to a long-established brand?
Dive deep into specifics: sometimes your unique selling point is a small detail that makes a big difference to the consumer.
Unique selling points can also be intangible things, like your company values. You might have a nearly-identical product to a competitor, but your focus on sustainability sets you apart from the rest.
What do you like or dislike about your current brand identity?
When refining or defining your brand, it’s important to first determine which factors work. What do you like? What incites a positive response in your current customers? Remember to differentiate between what you like versus what your customers like (although both answers can be insightful). This question can help you identify the major values and long-term brand identity, versus what you might need to refine to attract your ideal customers.
Similarly, it’s important to figure out what you and your customers dislike about the current brand identity. It might be a perfectly good brand identity, but not for your brand. In turn, it might be great branding that’s attracting the wrong type of customers. Identifying what’s not working will help direct your strategy.
What’s your long-term vision for the brand?
Depending on how long you’ve been in business, you may still be on your very first brand identity. Few brands stay completely consistent over time, although it can happen. The majority of companies, however, tend to change their branding when images, values, styles, and products change.
How do you envision your brand in the long run? Do you want to develop completely new identities as trends change? Do you plan to build upon your existing identity over time? Having an idea of where you hope your company will be in five, 10, or even 20 years will help you develop a brand identity that’s as stable or flexible as you prefer.
Are there any terms you associate with your brand?
Whether you have a defined list of terms and descriptors for your brand, or you need to try a little free association, think about the words you associate with your brand and what that says about its identity. They can be used to convey powerful concepts, like:
- Trustworthiness
- Prestige
- Modernity
- Simplicity
- Eco-friendliness
These terms can be general, like your values, or industry-specific. For example, litigation firms may want to center their brand around “solutions” and “zealous representation.”
What do your logo, font, and color choice communicate about your brand?
Finally, looks matter. Once you and your team have answered the questions above, you should have a pretty good idea of what you want to communicate and who you want to target. Now look at your current branding. What do your logo, font, and color choice say about you? Are you sleek, modern, and efficient, or traditional, stable, and trustworthy—and does your current branding reflect that?
Use Voiceform to develop your brand questionnaire
Voiceform makes creating brand questionnaires easy—and our multimedia data collection tools make it easy for your team members to respond. You’ll get richer answers when you use our intuitive multimedia survey tools. Sign up for free.
