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#007

Brand Perception: What People See, Feel, and Remember

May 31, 2025 / Read time: 4 minutes

Your Brand Is More Than What You Build — It’s What They Perceive

Form, function, experience, and meaning—the four layers of how your brand lives in people’s minds

Beyond the Brand Tree: Enter Perception

Even the most well-built brand—rooted in purpose, blooming with identity and values—can fail if it’s not perceived as intended.

In this next phase of your brand-building journey, we move from the tree to its mirror in the mind: how your audience perceives, interprets, and stores your brand in memory. This is what ultimately defines value.

Perception is not created by your strategy alone—it’s shaped by interaction, symbolism, and emotional memory. In Chapter 4 of Árvore da Marca (Brand Tree), we define four interdependent layers of perception through a simple but powerful analogy involving a cherry, a cake, a celebration, and a gesture of love.

The Four Dimensions of Brand Perception (Through the Cherry Analogy)

These four layers reflect how your brand is understood by people—not just what you build, but how it's received.

1. Form
The cherry—the fruit of the brand tree—is the starting point. This represents form: what the brand produces in tangible terms, such as its products, services, or deliverables.

In branding, form is what people first recognize. It’s your visual identity, packaging, product shape, and design language. It’s what stands out in the market and begins the journey of perception.

Reflection: Is your brand's appearance and output aligned with your internal structure and clearly recognizable in the market?

2. Function
When the cherry becomes part of a cake, it transforms into something that serves a practical purpose. This is function: the application, utility, and usefulness of the product or service.

Function in branding means how your offering works, how it solves problems, and whether it fulfills expectations efficiently and effectively. It is a rational, result-oriented dimension.

Reflection: Is your brand delivering value through its performance and utility? Are you solving the right problems for your audience?

3. Experience
Now imagine the birthday celebration where that cherry cake is served. This is experience—the shared, emotional, and sensory context where the brand comes alive.

In branding, experience includes every interaction, message, touchpoint, and moment that adds emotional memory to the brand. It’s the way your brand is lived.

Reflection: What kind of emotional memory does your brand generate? How does it feel to engage with you?

4. Meaning
Finally, there’s the act of love behind the cake. The reason it was made. A mother baking a cherry cake to celebrate her child’s birthday—this is meaning.

In branding, meaning is the narrative people build around your brand. It’s the space you occupy in their emotional and cultural landscape. The story they tell themselves about why your brand matters.

Reflection: Does your brand transcend function? What symbolic or emotional value does it hold for those who choose it?

Why This Matters

You don’t control how your brand is perceived—you only influence it. And influence requires alignment:

Between what you build and how you communicate
Between what you promise and how you deliver
Between what people feel and what they remember

Brand perception is the sum of consistent signals over time. When all four layers—form, function, experience, and meaning—work together, your brand becomes more than a product. It becomes a presence.

Up Next: Designing the Brand Ecosystem

In the next issue of My Self Startup, we’ll move beyond the tree and perception to explore the external business forces that shape brand experience, based on Chapter 5 of Árvore da Marca (Brand Tree).

We’ll look at four real-world elements that form the brand’s operational environment:

Sun: Marketing and Sales
Water: Information and Knowledge
Soil: Culture
Air: Market Flow

These are the conditions that allow your brand to grow with meaning and adapt to the world around it.

Until then, reflect on your brand’s cherry: Is it just a fruit—or the start of a meaningful story?

For today, that's it. See you next Saturday.

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