How to coordinate your brand perception survey ⋅ EV #018

On Monday we covered WHY and WHAT of researching your brand reputation. Today, let's get to action.

When is the right time to run this survey?

• Before active fundraising. Because this survey will surface brand gaps that may slow down your fundraising efforts.
• Before launching a new or relaunching an existing product. Because big relaunches get more attention when packaged together with a brand refresh, for which you need this survey.
• If you've been operation on the market for a while but noticed a sudden decay in the growth. Because this survey may give you a few answers why it's happening. Although the reason for the issue is most likely elsewhere.

Who to survey?

• Existing active users. Churned users need to be reactivated first for such an ask.
  Partners, because their perception of your brand reflects the likelihood of further referrals and future partnerships.
• Community, because they are your cheerleaders and unsung brand ambassadors. Asking their opinion is a way to show you value them.
• Funders (if you can). Especially if you are VC-backed.
• Internal team. Depending on how much your team has grown since you started your project, you'll get two types of responses:

1. responses that reflect employees' or contributors' perception of a brand as of now. You need to know what they think because at some point, especially when raising Series B, employee branding will become a hot task for you.
2. opinions from founding team members who built the product from the ground up with you. Their opinions deserve extra attention because they can still reflect not the current state — which is the goal of this survey — but the ideal image they wanted to have in the past.

Survey design

Ideally, you want to cover all aspects of your brand — from product offering and promise to the feelings your brand evokes.

I'll share 14 questions worth asking with you on Friday. It will be the first for-subscribers-only post.

What is the best way to distribute the survey?

Active users — in-app notification or newsletter. For contacting B2B enterprise-scale customers use the approach for partners.
Partners — individually. Ideally, this should be done by a brand consultant or Head of Brand, or CMO, with the founder on cc. Involving partners in the rebranding is a strategic move, and not investing time in personal outreach would be a mistake.
Community — Discord, Telegram, Matrix or your community platform.
Internal team — via whatever comms tool you use.

How many responses are enough?

Depends on the stage of your product. These are the numbers that would make me confident enough to move forward:

• 40-50 end users for B2C, fewer for B2B enterprise-scale customers.
• 4-6 partners or 15-20% of them
• 20-30 community members
• 50% of the internal team, which must include all of leadership, dev rel, marketing, sales and community organizers.

What to keep in mind when choosing a platform or tool?

Privacy requirements and the response limits. I use Formbricks.

How long should this survey be live?

Two weeks is enough. Share the survey. Remind people about it in a week. Send another reminder in another 4 days.

That’s all for today. A list of 14 copy-paste questions will arrive in your inbox on Friday. Until then, think about:

1. Who would you survey?
2. What did you want people to think about your project when you launched it months or years ago?
3. If your brand was a person, what personality traits would best describe it? Read this articleSeries. We will use it for some questions from Friday’s list.

Yours,
Ira

P.S. Do you have any questions? Ask them by replying to this email.