Today I was reading an article about MySpace and was thinking about how important brand perception is and why every company, every person should care about building and maintaining a good brand perception. You see, a few years back, the brand perception about MySpace (whether or not you were ever a user) was that it was one of the hottest social networking websites on the Internet. Today, that’s all changed and Facebook has become what MySpace once was. But whether you know it or not, MySpace today is not competing head-on with Facebook and has gone through a massive redesign of it’s website and logo in attempt to rebuild and become a successful brand again. But is it too late? I think so.

Although I have nothing against MySpce and would love to see them succeed, my gut feeling is that once your brand has a negative perception to the majority of consumers, it’s hard to change that unless you either invent some revolutionary product that changes the world or change your name, rebuild and start from scratch. Personally, I don’t think you can simply redesign your site, re-design the logo (while keeping the same name) and hope to rebuild your brand. The name remains and people will connect that name to the perception that it once had. I think MySpace would have a better chance of succeeding if they’d change their name along with their redesign.

Your brand will generally fall into three areas (good, bad and not sure). And typically, it’s really easy to measure. Just go out and ask 10 random people what they think about when your brand is mentioned and see what they say. For example, if you asked 10 people about Apple, Nike, Lexus, etc. 8 if not 9 out of the 10 people would possibly say all good things about these companies. But do the same test and ask 10 people what they thought of MySpace, Tiger Woods or Enron…and 9 out of 10 would probably have something bad to say. In addition, some companies would fall in the “not sure” category. These are companies that people generally use without any strong feeling one way or the other. The “not sure” problem is somewhat easy to fix, not the bad category. Your goal is to keep your brand out of the “bad” category because once there it’s almost impossible to change.

The same thing applies to people. We’re all brands to our friends, family and co-workers. Our brand perception is always in play. Have you focused on your brand lately? Where does your brand perception stand? Just some food for thought.