The Feeling of Your Brand: Perception Over Positioning

Most founders believe they know how their brand is perceived. They’ve spent the time crafting their messaging, defining their audience, and positioning themselves in the market. They might even run customer surveys or collect feedback from their team.

But the truth is that your perception of your brand is not the same as your customer’s experience of it.

The only way to truly understand how your brand lands is to talk to the people engaging with it—not just in controlled environments and through quick surveys but in real conversations that go deeper than demographics and data points.

Your Brand Is an Energetic Experience

We experience brands the same way we experience people.

• Some have a magnetic pull—they instantly resonate, feeling familiar yet compelling.

• Others seem strategically put together, but they don’t create an emotional connection.

• Some brands radiate clarity and alignment, while others feel scattered or out of sync.

This is because brands have energy—a presence beyond visuals and messaging. And just like with people, this energy isn’t just about what’s being said—it’s about what’s being felt.

What shapes that energy?

• Tone of voice—not just what you say but how you say it

• Consistency—does your brand show up the same way across every touchpoint?

• Emotional resonance—the subconscious signals that make people trust, engage, or move on. Authenticity plays a huge role here. Those deeply attuned to their intuition, values, or even cultural shifts—especially Gen Z—can sense when something feels off, even if they can’t consciously articulate why.

This is where magnetism vs. mechanics comes in. A brand can have all the right mechanics—the strategy, the visuals, the messaging—but if its energetic foundation isn’t aligned, it won’t attract the right people.

The Root of Alignment: Understanding Perception

Many brands struggle because they assume they know what their audience thinks. They craft their messaging based on internal narratives rather than external realities.

But perception isn’t something you dictate—it’s something you uncover.

That’s why the most effective brands don’t just guess. They listen. They go beyond market research and actually engage with their customers as real people. They ask:

• What type of experience do you associate with our brand?

• How does it make you feel?

• When you think about us, what comes to mind first?

Most importantly, they follow up each question with a simple: “Why?”

Without pausing to understand why someone feels the way they feel, your takeaway will remain surface-level. Customers’ behaviors and perceptions aren’t random—they are shaped by their culture, experiences, and belief systems. The deeper you go, the clearer the insights become.

The gap between what you believe your brand stands for and how your customers actually experience it is where real alignment work happens.

Your Brand’s Chakra System

Just like in the body, a brand has an energetic system—one that needs to be aligned for it to thrive. For example,

• If the foundation isn’t solid (Root Chakra), everything else is unstable.

• If creativity and flow are blocked (Sacral Chakra), innovation stalls.

• If identity and confidence are unclear (Solar Plexus Chakra), messaging feels weak.

A brand in alignment doesn’t just look good on the outside—it feels right at every level, for both the founder and the audience. This is the foundation of Brand Somatics, a framework I’ve developed to help founders tune into their brand’s energy and bring it back into alignment.

Where to Start

If your brand feels misaligned, or if you’re not sure how your audience truly perceives you, start by talking to them.

Listen not just for feedback but for patterns in emotion, expectation, and experience.

And if you’re ready for a more structured approach, I offer a Brand Health Assessment that helps uncover these insights and distill them into actionable clarity. You can learn more about it here.

But no matter what, remember this: your brand isn’t just a logo, a website, or a tagline. It’s a feeling. And the only way to understand that feeling is to ask.