A Brand Monitoring Software is a digital tool used by businesses to track and scrutinize their brand’s online presence. It continually monitors the internet to find mentions and perceptions related to their brand on various platforms like websites, blogs, news sites and social networks. This software not only helps in assessing a brand’s reputation but also in acquiring customer feedback, managing corporate and brand identity, understanding customer needs and preferences, evaluating marketing campaigns, tracking competitors, and identifying potential risks and opportunities. It is pivotal in shaping marketing strategies, enhancing customer relationships, and improving products or services, thereby contributing immensely to a business’s growth and success.
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The 10 Best Brand Monitoring Software Tools
The 10 Best Brand Monitoring Software Tools provide businesses with a platform to track, analyze, and respond to how their brand is being perceived online, with top features including social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, real-time alerts, and comprehensive reporting.
Table of Contents
In this hyper-connected, digital age, your brand’s reputation is heavily dictated by online public opinion. Tracking these sentiments is a monumental task, but, fortunately, technology has stepped up to render the job more manageable. Our blog post “The 10 Best Brand Monitoring Software Tools” introduces a curated list of the finest digital solutions that help businesses keep a stern finger on the pulse of their brand’s public image. These tools enable you to track across multiple platforms, identify outreach opportunities, measure user engagement and much more. Stay ahead of the game by effectively monitoring the perception of your brand in real-time and harness it to strategize for future success.
What Is A Brand Monitoring Software?
Brand Monitoring Software: Our Recommendations
Pick #1
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a tool that works as a brand monitoring software, allowing individuals and businesses to monitor their online presence in real time. It is essentially a content change detection and notification service. You can set up specific search terms, like your business name, products, or even competitors, and Google Alerts will send you an email notification each time it finds new results on those topics across blogs, forums, news sites, and other online platforms. This proactive approach enables businesses to manage their reputation, understand consumer sentiment, respond to customer queries effectively, and gain critical insights into their brand positioning and potential industry trends.
Real-time Information – Google Alerts provide real-time notifications when your brand is mentioned online. This allows you to immediately respond to any positive or negative attention your brand is receiving.
Wide Reach - Google Alerts has the ability to monitor the entire web which includes blogs, news sites, forums, and web pages giving you a comprehensive view of your brand's online presence.
Customizable - The tool provides you with the ability to set specific parameters around your brand name, products, or industry keywords to ensure you're only receiving relevant alerts.
Competitive Analysis - By setting alerts for your competitors' names, you can constantly monitor their online activities and reputation, therefore, giving you the ability to benchmark and strategize accordingly.
Damage Control - With instant notifications, you can immediately attend to any negative mention or crisis allowing for real-time damage control for your brand's reputation.
Limited Customisation Options: Google Alerts doesn't offer much flexibility or options when it comes to customizing your alerts such as specifying desired frequency of alerts, excluding certain sources, or filtering by geographic reach or demographic data.
Incomplete Coverage: Google Alerts does not scour all the web sources, it primarily searches for web pages, blogs, news, and some forums. Many other forms of online mentions (including many social media platforms) are not within Google Alerts' purview.
Lack of Sentiment Analysis: Google Alerts does not provide a sentiment analysis, which is important for branding as it helps a company understand the general sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of the mentions regarding their brand.
Delay in Alerts: The alerts from Google are not always immediate and can sometimes be significantly delayed. For a brand trying to monitor their reputation, responsiveness to issues is important and delays can be a problem in managing or controlling a situation.
Lack of Comprehensive Reporting: Google Alerts does not offer detailed analytics or reporting tools that would help you to analyze trends, measure impact and overall perceptions of your brand in the digital landscape.
Pick #2
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a cutting-edge brand monitoring software designed to help businesses track their brand health in the digital realm. It offers advanced social media analytics, audience insights, and data visualization tools to aid organizations in understanding their brand’s online footprint. It operates by tracking real-time conversations, mentions, and trends across various social platforms and millions of online sources to provide businesses with actionable insights. These insights help companies manage their reputation, craft data-driven strategies, identify influential voices in their industry, and understand customer sentiment, thereby greatly enhancing their ability to make informed business decisions.
Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring: Brandwatch's ability to monitor across various social media platforms, blogs, and forums, provides businesses with a comprehensive understanding of their brand's online presence and reputation.
Customizable Dashboards: Brandwatch's interface offers customizable dashboards for the specific needs of your business, allowing for a tailored approach to monitoring and responding to mentions, sentiment, and customer feedback.
Advanced Analytics: With powerful analytical capabilities, Brandwatch allows brands to dig deep into data, get insights on audience behavior, track trends, map their customers’ journey, and measure their online influence effectively.
Image Recognition: Brandwatch’s image recognition feature allows brands to track their logo or product images shared across online platforms even when their brand name hasn't been mentioned, making it a useful tool for measuring complete brand exposure.
Trusted by Large Organizations: Brandwatch is trusted by large organizations, providing confidence in its scalability and ability to manage large volumes of data. It confirms that the software would remain efficient even when your business grows or your monitoring needs expand.
Steep Learning Curve: Brandwatch has a multitude of features that can make it overwhelming to first-time users. The platform's interface isn't as intuitive, contributing to a significant learning curve.
Inflexible Query Definition: Brandwatch's query definition can be quite strict. Users usually need to have a precise idea of which search keywords they want to use. A more casual or flexible search function might be more user-friendly.
Poor Social Media Integration: Brandwatch has reported issues related to integrating with a few social media platforms. Although Brandwatch is excellent for monitoring different web sources, clients have reported issues when gathering data from platforms like Instagram, due to changing API access rules.
Real-Time Reporting Limitation: Brandwatch doesn't offer real-time reporting feature. Data are updated every several hours, and thus, it's not ideal for those who need instant data analysis and results.
Limited Visualizations Options: Although Brandwatch does provide several visualisation options, they are rather basic and limited in comparison to some of its competitors. It doesn't provide a customizable dashboard where users can tailor pieces of data.Visual representations for data such as infographics and charts are relatively standard and may not cater to different users' unique preferences.
Pick #3
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a comprehensive brand monitoring software that allows businesses to manage and track their social media presence across various platforms. It helps companies monitor mentions of their brand, industry trends, and relevant conversations. Functions include scheduling posts, analyzing social media traffic, tracking conversions, managing customer engagement, and more. This tool can also evaluate the impressions and reach of the posted content, enabling businesses to adjust their strategy to boost their online reputation and visibility. Its compatibility with a wide range of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more makes Hootsuite an efficient tool for comprehensive social media brand monitoring.
Comprehensive Social Media Coverage - Hootsuite monitors various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, giving brands a comprehensive look at their online presence and the ability to effectively monitor their reputation across platforms.
Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts - Hootsuite provides real-time updates and alerts about brand mentions, allowing companies to respond to customer queries, feedback, or complaints rapidly and prevent minor issues from escalating.
Advanced Analytics - Hootsuite offers advanced analytics that can provide brands with insights about their audience demographics, social media performance, and the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, thus enabling brands to make informed decisions and adjustments.
Efficient Management of Online Interactions - With Hootsuite, brands can handle all their social media interactions in one place. This includes managing conversations, scheduling posts, and even monitoring competitor activities, reducing the need to constantly switch between different platforms.
Collaborative Effort - Hootsuite allows teams to collaborate efficiently on social media management. Multiple users can have access to the platform, each with their own tasks and permissions, making it easy to coordinate and monitor brand reputation management efforts.
Limited Social Media Platforms: Hootsuite supports a wide range of social media platforms but it does not cover all of them. There are many other less popular or newer social media sites that it does not track, which could be a drawback if your brand has a significant presence on these sites.
Inefficient Sentiment Analysis: Hootsuite's sentiment analysis often requires user input and manual coding to accurately reflect brand sentiment. This can be tedious and time-consuming, especially for larger brands with a lot of mention data.
Lack of In-Depth Analytics: Hootsuite does provide basic analytics but it lacks the depth of data and insights provided by more specialised brand monitoring software. For example, it does not offer deep semantic or psycholinguistic analysis, which can be crucial for understanding complex brand perceptions and sentiments.
Not Real-Time Monitoring: Another key limitation is that Hootsuite does not offer real-time monitoring. Its updates may have a slight delay which could mean slower response times or missing out on time-sensitive opportunities for engagement during trending discussions.
Interface Customization Limitations: Hootsuite's user interface may not be fully suitable for all users' needs. While it offers a good degree of customization, it still lacks some advanced features for tailoring the dashboard and reports to specific user preferences and brand monitoring goals.
Pick #4
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a highly effective brand monitoring software that offers a suite of advanced solutions for businesses to manage their social media marketing activities. It provides tools for management, analytics, and reporting across multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This software aids brands in understanding their audience better, by monitoring brand mentions, analyzing social media engagement, tracking competitors, and listening to relevant topics or trends. Thus, Sprout Social helps brands to enhance their social presence and effectively interact with customers, improving their overall brand reputation and customer engagement.
Comprehensive Insights: Sprout Social offers detailed reports and real-time monitoring to enhance a brand's understanding of its online presence. You can access social media data to understand how your brand is being perceived and interacted with.
Social Listening Capabilities: With its robust Social Listening feature, Sprout Social allows brands to track and analyze conversations around specific topics, competitors, or industries. This is vital for businesses to stay ahead of any potential issues, see what's trending in their niche, and leverage this information for marketing strategies.
Competitive Analysis: Sprout Social offers a feature to compare your brand's performance to your competitors'. It provides side-by-side comparisons, allowing your brand to understand its positioning in the market and make suitable adjustments.
Engage Directly: Another advantage of Sprout Social as a Brand Monitoring Software is its integrated messaging feature. With this, brands can directly engage with their followers or users who are talking about them, helping to create a personal connection.
Synergy with other Tools: Sprout Social seamlessly integrates with other marketing tools or customer service software, making it a central base for handling all aspects of brand management. This benefits brands by creating efficient workflow and unifying all necessary actions under a single platform.
Limited Social Network Coverage: Sprout Social is focused on a few primary social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For brand monitoring, this could mean missing out on emerging platforms or forums where conversations about a brand could still be happening.
Absence of Sentiment Analysis: While Sprout Social does provide raw data on brand mentions, it doesn't automatically analyze the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of those mentions. This functionality is essential in gauging the public's perception and reaction to the brand.
Lack of Competitive Analysis: The software has very limited ability to monitor competitors' activities and profiles. This function is crucial for strategic decision-making in brand monitoring and positioning.
Limited Geographical Filtering: If a brand wants to monitor, track and analyze data from specific regional markets, Sprout Social's capabilities in this area are quite limited. It would be less effective for brands operating in multiple markets or wanting specific location-based insights.
Limited Reporting Customization: Sprout Social's reporting functions are mostly template-based. If brands have specific reporting needs or formats, they might find the software's lack of flexibility on this front frustrating. Brand monitoring often requires tailored reporting systems which might not be supported by Sprout Social.
Pick #5
Mention
Mention is a comprehensive brand monitoring software that allows businesses to track, analyze, and manage their brand identity across various online platforms. It functions by scanning millions of sources in real-time, like blogs, forums, social media platforms, and distinguished news sites, to provide alert updates whenever a brand or a particular keyword is mentioned. This helps companies to monitor their online reputation, engage with their audience promptly, track their competitors, and gain valuable insights into market trends. Thus, Mention aids in creating effective strategies for positive brand awareness and reputation management.
Real-Time Monitoring: Mention allows brands to keep track of their reputation in real-time. This helps businesses to respond quickly and effectively to any positive or negative impressions before they escalate.
Comprehensive Coverage: Mention does not only monitor social media platforms but also covers blogs, forums, news and the entire web. This allows for a wider scope in tracking a brand's mention, thereby ensuring a comprehensive reputation management.
Competitor Analysis: It's not just about tracking your own brand, Mention also enables businesses to monitor their competitors. This insight helps in staying updated on competitor's strategies and innovation, which could be key for decision making and strategy formulation.
Collaborative Platform: Mention offers collaborative features such as task assignment and shared alerts. This means the entire team can be engaged in the brand monitoring process, increasing efficiency and ensuring everyone is kept in the loop.
Insightful Reports: Mention provides detailed analytics reports that help to understand the brand's online performance. These reports can measure key metrics such as reach, sentiment analysis, and source location, giving a comprehensive understanding of a brand's online reputation status.
Lack of Historical Data: Mention does not provide historical data which is a major limitation when you want to make a year-on-year or a month-on-month comparison. Therefore, for first-time users, they need to wait over a period of time to accumulate enough comprehensive data for better analysis.
Limitations in the Sentiment Analysis Feature: Mention's sentiment analysis feature can sometimes be inaccurate, and it's limited in that it may not detect sarcasm or mixed feelings well, potentially leading to misleading interpretations of brand sentiment.
Limited Customization: The platform doesn't allow much customization, unlike other similar tools. There's a lack of flexibility with alert settings, making it challenging for brands or companies to adjust the tool according to their specific needs.
Limited Social Media Platforms Coverage: Mention does not cover all social media platforms, most notably, it lacks integration with Instagram and LinkedIn. This is disadvantageous for brands who have a significant presence or target audience on these platforms.
No Translation Feature: If your brand is international and you receive mentions in languages that you don't understand, Mention doesn't offer a translation feature. This means you might miss out on important feedback or discussions about your brand happening in other languages.
Pick #6
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a highly intuitive and efficient brand monitoring software that allows businesses to explore and navigate through the social web for gaining insights into trending content, industry influencers, competitor activity, and audience interests. Its key features include content discovery, strategy formulation based on data analysis, performance reports generation, and alerts for brand mentions, links or keyword activities. It simplifies digital marketing by providing detailed data-driven insights, thereby helping brands to optimize their content strategy, engage effectively with their target audience and monitor their online reputation effectively.
Comprehensive Content Analysis: BuzzSumo offers detailed content analysis that lets brands understand what types of content are gaining the most traction in their respective industries. This helps in planning and creating more effective and targeted content.
Influencer Identification: BuzzSumo's feature of identifying key influencers in specific fields allows brands to connect with those who have a significant reach and impact, creating potential opportunities for promotion and partnerships.
Alerts on Brand Mention: BuzzSumo sends real time alerts every time a brand or its desired keywords are mentioned online. These mentions can be across articles, blogs, forums, and social media, ensuring that brand managers can respond promptly.
Competitor Analysis: BuzzSumo allows brands to analyze their competitor's content and understand what strategies are working for them, providing useful insights to outperform them.
Social Media Performance Metrics: BuzzSumo offers a feature that lets brands measure the performance of their social media content. This enables in understanding which post generated more engagement and why.
Limited Data Reach: BuzzSumo primarily scans blogs, forums, and news websites, but has limitations in tracking social media platforms. This could exclude valuable input from users who primarily engage via social networks.
Restricted Advanced Filtering: While BuzzSumo does well in gathering large volumes of data, it does not offer the in-depth filtering capabilities available in some competing brand monitoring tools. This can make it challenging to sift through and find the most relevant information.
Lag in Real-Time Updates: Though BuzzSumo does work to provide real-time updates, there can sometimes be delays between when content is posted online and when it appears within the BuzzSumo Dashboard. This can hamper timely response and strategy changes.
Limited Sentiment Analysis: While BuzzSumo does provide some sentiment analysis, its capabilities in this area are limited. This can make it difficult to really understand the tone and context within which your brand is being discussed.
No Visual Data Representation: In the present time, visual representation of data helps in understanding and interpreting data quickly. However, BuzzSumo does not provide this facility which might make it difficult for brands to digest the information easily.
Pick #7
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive Brand Monitoring Software that provides businesses with the tools necessary to track the visibility and performance of their brand across various digital platforms. It particularly excels in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), providing invaluable analytics on organic and paid searches, and assists with keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor tracking. This multifaceted software allows brands to monitor their reputation, track social media activity, and analyze website traffic, helping them gauge their digital footprint and devise effective marketing strategies.
Comprehensive Brand Monitoring: SEMRush provides a robust platform to monitor your brand's online presence across different channels including websites, social media platforms, and online news sources. This lets you understand how your brand is perceived and talked about in the digital space.
Real-Time Alerts: With SEMRush, you can receive real-time notifications about any new mentions or changes in sentiment about your brand, allowing you to react immediately to any potential crises or to simply get involved in the conversations.
Competitor Analysis: SEMRush lets you not only monitor your own brand but also your competitors'. This information is invaluable for understanding their strategies and adapting your own for a competitive edge.
Integrated SEO and PPC Tools: SEMRush is not just a brand monitoring tool - it also provides a suite of SEO and PPC tools that work synergistically with brand monitoring. This means you can gauge how your brand's online visibility affects your SEO and PPC efforts, and vice versa.
Sentiment Analysis: SEMRush's brand monitoring features include sentiment analysis, which helps you to understand the emotions and opinions behind brand mentions. This can guide your response strategy and help you manage your brand reputation more effectively.
Limited Historical Data: SEMRush does not provide long historical data for brand monitoring. This might restrict businesses in doing trend analysis or understanding the progress made over a certain period of time.
Complex Interface: For new users, navigating through SEMRush's interface can be complex and overwhelming. Its wide-ranging features require learning and might not be suitable for beginners or those looking for a simple solution.
Display of Irrelevant Results: When used for brand monitoring, SEMRush sometimes delivers results that are not relevant to your brand or industry, making it necessary to sort through the data to find useful insights.
Limited Customisation: SEMRush offers limited customization options for its reports, which can be a disadvantage for businesses wanting detailed and tailored reports regarding their brand's performance
No Real-time Updates: While SEMRush offers updated data, it does not provide real-time updates or alerts when your brand is mentioned online. This could hinder immediate engagement or response to brand-related issues.
Pick #9
Awario
Awario is a multifaceted brand monitoring software designed to track and analyze online mentions of brands, products, or any specified keywords across various social media platforms, news sites, blogs, and the web at large. Leveraging real-time data and social listening tools, Awario provides insights about brand reputation, facilitates competition analysis, customer engagement, and identifying potential influencers. It empowers businesses to be proactive with their online presence, deliver prompt responses to customer feedback, and tailor marketing strategy based on audience sentiments.
Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring: Awario offers exhaustive social media coverage. It monitors all key social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and the web in general to ensure that you do not miss any mention of your brand.
Real-Time Data Analysis: Awario monitors the web in real time, providing you with immediate access to mentions about your brand so you can respond as swiftly as possible to customer queries, complaints, or potential crises.
Lead Generation: With its Leads feature, Awario can predict when social media users might be interested in your product or service. This way, it doesn't just monitor your brand, it also helps you find potential customers.
Sentiment Analysis: Awario can automatically assess whether a mention of your brand is positive, negative, or neutral. This allows for deeper understanding of customer sentiment and can inform strategic changes.
Influencer Awareness: Awario identifies top influencers in your niche, this allows you to build partnerships with them and increase the reach and credibility of your brand.
Awario's algorithm as a brand monitoring software has been reported to sometimes generate false positives, catching irrelevant mentions which can waste users time filtering through them.
While Awario does cover several platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, it lacks the capacity to monitor mentions on LinkedIn which is a significant platform for businesses and professionals.
Responding to social mentions from within the platform is not seamless in Awario, leading to disjointed and slow response processes.
Awario’s sentiment analysis capability is not as sophisticated as some of its competitors. Sometimes, it incorrectly designates the sentiment of mentions, thereby impacting the overall accuracy of the analysis.
There is no translation feature in Awario, brands that are international may have difficulty understanding what clients from different countries are saying about their brand in other languages.
Pick #10
NetBase
NetBase is an advanced social media analytics and brand monitoring software used by businesses to understand and engage with their customers in real time by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. The platform provides tools to conduct image analytics, measure campaign performance, determine audience sentiment, and identify key influencers, thereby enabling companies to make data-driven decisions around brand strategy. It also offers features for market research and competitive benchmarking, helping businesses to stay ahead of industry trends and monitor their overall brand health.
Real-Time Monitoring - NetBase provides real-time brand monitoring capabilities. This allows businesses to immediately have insight into public perception and sentiment, and swiftly react, which is crucial in protecting their reputation.
Advanced Sentiment Analysis - It utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology for sentiment analysis. This allows accurate understanding of consumer opinions, feelings, and attitudes towards a brand that are spread across various social platforms.
Visualization of Data - It offers engaging ways to visually present the collected data from various sources, making it easier to interpret and understand. This aids in transforming complex data into valuable insights for decision making.
Comprehensive Social Media Coverage - NetBase has an extensive range of social media channel coverage, going beyond typical platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This allows brands to extend their monitoring efforts across various online platforms for a more holistic understanding.
Competitive Analysis - It provides the feature to track competitors, compare social performance, and discern market trends. This is essential in providing comprehensive market insights and helping to develop effective marketing strategies.
Limited integration capabilities. NetBase lacks seamless integrations with many popular third-party platforms and tools that businesses usually have in their marketing stack, such as CRM systems, data visualization tools, and other marketing automation software.
Complex user interface. For first-time users or those with less technical experience, NetBase's interface can be overwhelming. Navigating the interface and fully understanding all the features can take time.
Limitations in real-time monitoring. With fast-paced digital world, real-time updates are crucial, but NetBase sometimes falls short. There could be delays in data updates, which can impede the real-time decision-making process.
Difficulty with topic classification. NetBase sometimes struggles with accurately categorizing sentiments or topics, especially with more complex or nuanced discussions. This could lead to misconstrued social sentiment analysis.
Scalability constraints. Although NetBase offers a variety of plans, when it comes to larger teams with diverse needs, the scalability can be limited. Businesses may need to purchase additional features to cater to all their monitoring needs, making it less efficient for large scale operations.
Conclusion
The rapidly advancing digital era demands efficient brand monitoring software tools, and out of the myriad of choices available, we’ve narrowed it down to these top 10 solutions. Whether you are a startup seeking to shape your brand’s image or a well-established company wanting to keep a keen eye on your brand’s digital footprint, these software tools provide robust features and invaluable insights. Ultimately, your choice depends on specific needs, scalability, and budget. With the proper software, you’ll boost your brand’s vitality, relevance, and influence in today’s volatile market.
FAQs
What is Brand Monitoring Software?
Brand Monitoring Software is a tool that businesses use to track and analyze their brand's online presence. It helps in understanding what is being said about the brand across different platforms, identify trends, monitor brand reputation, and measure brand's performance based on various metrics.
Why is Brand Monitoring Software important for a business?
Brand Monitoring Software is important because it helps businesses to understand the public perception of their brand. It allows them to track customer feedback, comments, reviews, and mentions of their brand across different online platforms. This can inform their marketing strategy, identify areas for improvement, manage potential crises, and ultimately build a stronger brand reputation.
Can Brand Monitoring Software track mentions across all platforms?
Most Brand Monitoring Software can track mentions across a wide range of online platforms including social media, blogs, forums, news sites, and review sites. However, the extent can vary depending on the software. It is always advisable to check the specific capabilities of each software before making a decision.
Can Brand Monitoring Software help in identifying influencers for my brand?
Yes, many brand monitoring tools have features that can identify key influencers talking about your brand or industry. It can help you pinpoint potential partnerships or collaboration opportunities to further amplify your brand's message and reach.
How expensive is Brand Monitoring Software?
The cost of Brand Monitoring Software can vary widely depending on the complexity, capabilities, and the number of users or tracked keywords. Some tools offer free or budget-friendly options with limited capabilities, while others offer more advanced features at a higher price. It's important to consider your budget and specific needs when choosing a tool. Trial versions are often available for businesses to assess if a particular software fits their requirements.
Pick #8
SocialMention
SocialMention is a web-based brand monitoring software that allows businesses to track and analyze their online presence comprehensively across various social media platforms. It operates as a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. With its ability to track both direct mentions of a brand and contextual references, it provides businesses with a complete picture of their social media footprint. In addition, SocialMention also provides quantitative data like “sentiment” and “passion” to help evaluate the public’s perception and emotional response towards a brand.