How To Measure Brand Perception in the Aftermath of A Crisis?

  • Introduction

With the advent of social media, it is not unusual for conversations today to spread like wildfire on the internet. Social media has provided people with the technology required for the rapid dissemination of ideas. During these times, a single incident can damage brand perception in a matter of seconds. A single blunder can have a long-term impact on your brand reputation online and affect your sales.

As a result, marketers must be particularly careful in safeguarding their brand not just during, but also after a digital crisis occurs.

It’s critical to assess the crisis’s influence on your brand’s reputation using social media monitoring tools before deciding on a course of action so that you can respond accordingly. This can be accomplished by examining:

– what is being stated or searched about your brand?

– who’s discussing it?

– what are the changes in people’s perception of the brand?

  • Which indicators should you follow?

Some of the key indicators observed through a social listening tool that will shed light on the way people view your brand are as follows:

1. Volume: The number of conversations that your brand is currently creating.

2. Keywords: Identifying keywords that are used repeatedly during brand mentions. Hashtags are a great way of finding customer complaints during a crisis.  

3. Sentiment: Sometimes the volume of brand mentions may be misleading. Just because more customers are talking about you, doesn’t necessarily mean they have a complaint. Here, identifying the sentiment of the customers is more important by analyzing the kind of sentiments that are associated with the conversations.

Sentiment analysis, often known as “opinion mining,” determines how people feel about a brand. Positive, negative, or neutral opinions may all be categorised.

Thematic analysis is a method for analysing sentiment that is organised and methodical. It’s feasible to discover patterns, outliers and trends in sentiment data collected by theme events (in this case the crisis) and monitor these results over time by looking at sentiment data organised by thematic events.

  • What is a good recovery?

Here are some signs of a good recovery for brand perception after a crisis:

  1. If your company has emerged unharmed from the crisis or recovered from it and customers have moved on 
  2. If it feels like the right time to launch new content or branding campaign without your public relations team needs to address the situation again
  3. Conversations about the crisis have generally calmed down or halted
  4. The issue is no longer one of your brand’s top search terms.
  • What is a Crisis Report?

It’s critical to prepare a crisis report in which you assess and describe the plan you put in place to mitigate the situation through brand reputation management services. This will assist you in achieving the following objectives:

  1. Determine which influencers have defended your brand and could serve as advocates for your post-crisis campaign.
  2. Identify major issues that need to be addressed in official communications.
  3. Based on the number of conversation keywords, crisis-related discussions and brand sentiment, determine whether you need to improve communication by taking corrective measures.
  • What’s next?

Brand perception can shift from day to day, and while it’s impossible to predict when and where every potential danger will arise, it’s critical to review your reputation frequently.

Monitor your social media accounts as well as other relevant business pages to remain on top of the content around your company. Online brand reputation management services such as Germin8 make it easier to track and monitor conversations affecting your company and its services.