Brand image

Brand image is the set of associations, perceptions and judgments that customers hold in memory when they think about a brand. A company does not write its brand image directly: customers form it themselves from the product, the price, the ads, the staff, online reviews and what their friends say.

Where brand image comes from

In his paper Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity (Journal of Marketing, January 1993), Kevin Lane Keller splits what customers know about a brand into two parts: brand awareness and brand image, meaning the set of associations attached to the name. Each association is judged on three criteria:

• Strength: how quickly and clearly customers think of that association.
• Favorability: whether the association helps or hurts with respect to their needs.
• Uniqueness: whether competitors share the same association.

An association with “cheap” can be both strong and unique, yet work against you when a customer is choosing a gift. The same association has different effects depending on the customer group and the buying situation.

How to measure brand image

There is no single number. Large companies usually run continuous brand health tracking surveys. The YouGov BrandIndex platform, which the research firm Decision Lab uses in Vietnam, calculates its Index score as the average of 6 metrics: Impression, Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Recommend and Reputation.

Smaller businesses without a survey budget have two cheaper options. The first is a free association exercise: ask 30 to 50 customers “When you hear this name, what word comes to mind?” and count how often each answer comes up. The second is to read your 100 most recent reviews on Google Maps or an e-commerce marketplace and group the words customers keep repeating.

A Vietnam example: banks in 2026

According to Decision Lab’s Best Bank Rankings 2026 (January 2026), based on more than 10,000 consumer interviews a year, MB overtook Vietcombank on brand health for the first time in 10 years of tracking, with an Index score of 32.2 against 31.1. The same firm’s Bank Satisfaction Rankings 2026 (August 2026), which measures satisfaction only, put Vietcombank first with a Net Satisfaction Score of 86.8, ahead of Techcombank (85.9) and MB (85.6).

The two results do not contradict each other. Brand image has several dimensions: one bank can lead on satisfaction while another scores higher once impression, quality, value and reputation are counted together. A marketing team needs to know which dimension its brand is strong on before deciding where to put money.

Brand image vs similar terms

High awareness does not mean a good image. A brand caught in a PR crisis can see its awareness jump within a week. When the image drifts far from what the company wants, the thing to revisit is usually the brand strategy and the real customer experience, rarely the logo.

Frequently asked questions

Can brand image be changed quickly?

A bad image can form after a single incident, while improving it usually takes several quarters, because customers need new experiences to replace old memories.

Is brand image the same as brand equity?

No. In Keller’s definition, brand equity is the difference in how customers respond to a brand’s marketing because of what they already know about it. Brand image is one of the two sources of that difference.

If you want to know what customers really think of your brand before you plan communications, Adtek’s Brand Strategy team can help design the survey and measurement. Contact Adtek.