Your brand image.  It’s how people view your brand.  It’s what they think about it.  It’s things like trust, value, quality, features, performance, assurance, status, service, and more.  It’s not static, but ideally it’s not constantly changing either.  It determines whether prospects become your customers, or move on to the next guy.  It holds the key to your success.  It’s important.

But do you know what yours is?  Are you proactively managing it?

Think about your personal brand image: it’s formed by your family, friends and associates as a direct result of how you conduct yourself in their presence, and by the things they see and hear about you directly and indirectly. 

It’s the same for business brands.  Customers and prospects will form an impression — an image — about your brand based on their direct and indirect experiences with it.  These experiences are your brand touchpoints — individual instances of interactions with your brand that lead to the formation of an image of the brand. 

A couple of weeks ago, a local heating & air conditioning company service truck almost ran me off the road.  I swore to myself I’d never do business with that company, given the driver’s carelessness which I assumed would carry over into how they serviced my system. 

Like many, my image of BP was completly changed as a result of the cavalier attitude of that company’s leadership during the gulf oil disaster.

While BP or the local heating & air company can’t tell me what image I should have about them, they can control how they deliver their brand touchpoints which lead to the formation of a brand image by people like you and me.

How you deliver your brand touchpoints is prescribed as a component of your brand identity – a strategic platform which is created to define how you want your brand to be presented to the world.  This includes:

• Vision and values statement where you define your core, unshakable view and values for the brand   
• Value proposition where you define the benefits of your brand on multiple levels
• Brand positioning platform where you define how you’re decisively different from your competitors
• Brand messaging where you define the core brand messages you’ll actively reinforce to your audiences
• Brand touchpoint plan where you identify, prioritize, and then proactively manage the various brand interactions so they’re aligned with and reinforce the brand identity

The final step is to maintain a constant pulse on your brand image.  Depending on your business this may involve monitoring social media sites and reviews, conducting formal research, utilizing sales personnel to report on the word on the street, and many other tactics. 

If you have a handle on how you want your audiences to view your brand compared to what the actual brand image is, and if you have an effective management plan to ensure the delivery of your brand touchpoints are consistently aligned with that desired view, then you’re in tall cotton, my friend.