Where Do You Stand? Comparing Your Brand Perception to the Market
March 17, 2026 | Michelle Mulder
One of the most effective ways to keep your campus prepared for what’s next is to strengthen your brand. Understanding your brand equity—the value your brand holds in the minds of your audiences—is how you understand and strengthen it over time. Brand perception is a key element of brand equity. A person’s perception is generally their reality, and your brand is determined not just by what you say about yourself, but by how your audience’s view compares to the institution’s they’re weighing you against. Brands with a high perceived value can influence desired behaviors across the consumer lifecycle.
Brand Perception
Brand perception is what audiences generally think about your brand—and how that compares to the competitors they’re considering alongside you. It provides insight into your market position and brand health, comparing your public perception with both your institution’s self-presentation and your competitors’ positioning, and informs your messaging, positioning, and differentiation strategy.
Aspects of Brand Perception
Top-of-mind sentiment. An audience’s view or attitude toward your brand, often positive, negative, or neutral—assessed alongside the sentiment for the competitors they’re evaluating you against.
Characteristics, topics, or themes. The attributes, issues, and ideas associated with your brand, benchmarked against the messaging your competitors are putting forward.
Competitive context. Which institutions your audience mentions most often alongside you, and how those associations shape your positioning.
Why Brand Perception Matters
Strong brand perception—especially relative to your competitors—influences audience behavior from application to enrollment to donations. The data and insights indicate how the marketplace feels about your institution compared to the schools it’s weighing against you and inform brand strategy over time.
Social Intelligence Identifies Narrative Elements that Elevate
Using social intelligence to assess perception enables you to understand the top-of-mind sentiment, characteristics, topics, and themes that represent your brand relative to a defined set of competitors. It also answers what your brand is in the mind of your audience—and how that compares to the campuses you’re up against.
Top-of-mind sentiment. Examines how people think about your brand—and your competitors—their initial thoughts and opinions, and whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.
Institutional characteristics, topics, or themes. The features, topics, and themes associated with your brand, compared with the same set of competitors. Are you known for what you want to be known for—or are your competitors owning that territory instead? The insights determine if narrative building or narrative change is needed and identify the risks of shifting the narrative.
Competitive context. Evaluates which campuses are mentioned most often in the same conversations as yours, and how those associations shape your positioning. This helps identify brand-aligned conversations and points toward audience-defined differentiators worth exploring further.
Perception Insights Drive Action
Understand Where You Stand Against the Competition
A small private university in the Midwest wanted to understand how the public perceived them, confirm brand strengths and weaknesses, and see how that perception stacked up against the handful of schools they competed with most often for students. Comparing their own story to their audience’s perception—and to how their named competitors were being talked about—surfaced a gap between what the university aspired to be known for and what audiences actually associated with them.
The assessment gave the university’s marketing, enrollment, and advancement audiences a shared, evidence-based understanding of where they stood relative to their competitive set, and a strategy brief they used to prioritize which parts of their story to lean into and where their named competitors already owned the territory.
Leverage Athletics to Differentiate from the Competitive Set
A medium-sized private college in the East learned the primary way individuals perceive their brand is through an athletics lens—and that this was true for several of the institutions prospective students considered alongside them. Athletic events tended to generate more positive sentiment and fewer negative reactions than non-athletic topics, both for this college and for its closest competitors.
Recognizing that athletics-driven sentiment was common across their competitive set, the college looked for openings where they could stand apart: highlighting student-athletes’ academic success, engaging audiences at athletic events, and using gameday experiences to build brand affinity in ways their named competitors weren’t emphasizing. They also sharpened their value proposition and return-on-investment messaging, using testimonials and student ambassadors to differentiate their story from the pack in non-athletic contexts.
Brand Equity Framework
Broader knowledge and understanding of your brand awareness prepares you to examine the rest of your brand equity and build a brand strategy aligned with your future vision.