Visual Elicitation of Brand Perception

Understanding how consumers perceive brands is at the core of effective brand management. In this paper, we present the Brand Visual Elicitation Platform (B-VEP), an electronic tool we developed that allows consumers to create online collages of images that represent how they view a brand. Respondents select images for the collage from a searchable repository of tens of thousands of images. We implement an unsupervised machine-learning approach to analyze the collages and elicit the associations they describe. We demonstrate the platform’s operation by collecting large, unaided, directly elicited data for 303 large US brands from 1,851 respondents. Using machine learning and image-processing approaches to extract from these images systematic content associations, we obtain a rich set of associations for each brand. We combine the collage-making task with well-established brand-perception measures such as brand personality and brand equity, and suggest various applications for brand management.