The Business of Image: Why Perception Has Value

Image is often treated as something superficial.

We associate it with clothing, beauty, aesthetics, photography, or presentation. In business, however, I believe image deserves a much broader conversation. Not because appearance can tell us everything about a person, company, or product. It cannot.

What makes image interesting from a business perspective is that people continuously interpret signals and form perceptions from them.

And perception can have value.

We Form Impressions Quickly

One of the most frequently cited studies on first impressions comes from psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov.

Across five experiments, participants viewed unfamiliar faces for different lengths of time and evaluated them on attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness. Judgments made after only 100 milliseconds were highly correlated with judgments made without time constraints. Increasing exposure time did not significantly increase those correlations for the five traits studied (Willis & Todorov, 2006).

That finding deserves to be interpreted carefully. The researchers did not demonstrate that a 100-millisecond impression accurately reveals someone's personality, professional ability, or character. Their study examined how quickly participants formed trait impressions from facial appearance.

That distinction matters. The value of this research for a conversation about image is not that appearances tell us who someone is. It is that human beings can begin forming impressions with remarkably little visual information.

For professionals and brands, that raises an interesting business question: What are people interpreting before we have the opportunity to explain ourselves?

Perception Exists in Business Too

The relationship between perception and value becomes clearer when we move from interpersonal impressions into branding.

Brand equity has been studied from several perspectives. Simon and Sullivan (1993), for example, approached it financially. They defined brand equity as the incremental cash flows accruing to branded products compared with unbranded products and developed a method for estimating brand equity from a firm's financial market value.

Their work is important because it places something that may initially feel intangible within a financial framework.

A brand name, and the value associated with it, can represent an economic asset.

Later research has examined brand equity through consumer perceptions.

Mizik (2014) studied brand equity using customer mindset metrics and its relationship with financial performance. At the aggregate level, the analysis found that brand equity measured through these metrics had a positive effect on current financial performance.

The study also found a larger effect on future financial performance, with only a relatively small portion of the total profitability impact appearing in current-year profits.

That does not mean every investment in branding automatically produces financial returns.

It does provide evidence that consumer-based brand equity can be associated with financial consequences that extend beyond the immediate period.

This is where perception becomes particularly relevant to business.

Reputation Enters the Purchase Decision

Reputation gives us another way to look at the subject.

In research conducted across 31 countries, Ipsos reported that 87% of consumers surveyed said they take the reputation of the company behind a brand into account when purchasing a product or service (Ipsos, 2018).

Notice what that statistic says and what it does not say.

It does not mean reputation determines 87% of purchases. It means 87% of the consumers surveyed reported considering company reputation to some degree when making purchase decisions.

More recent research from Edelman points in a similar direction.

In its 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, respondents across 15 markets were asked to classify different brand attributes according to whether they were important, critical deal breakers, or merely nice to have.

Eighty-eight percent classified trust in the brand as important or a critical deal breaker. The same percentage was reported for best quality and good value for the money. Eighty-five percent said the same about a brand having a good reputation (Edelman, 2025).

Again, these are self-reported purchase considerations. They should not be interpreted as evidence that trust alone causes someone to purchase.

What they do show is that consumers themselves place trust and reputation among the factors they consider important when evaluating brands.

That has strategic value.

Image Is Bigger Than Aesthetics

This is where my own interpretation of image becomes broader.

I do not see image simply as what someone wears or how a brand looks.

Image is also created through communication, behavior, visual language, customer experience, reputation, content, service, environments, and the many signals that people encounter over time.

• A logo participates in image.

• So does the way an email is written.

• Photography participates in image.

• So does the experience someone has after purchasing.

• Personal style communicates something.

• So do the words used in a presentation, the quality of the work, the way someone enters a room, and the way they treat people once they are there.

These elements are not interchangeable, and research on facial impressions should not be used as evidence for the effectiveness of a logo, an outfit, or a marketing campaign.

They do, however, belong to a larger conversation about how information is perceived, interpreted, and remembered.

For me, that is where image becomes a business subject.

Perceived Value Can Reach Pricing

The relationship becomes even more interesting when we consider price.

Kantar defines its Pricing Power metric as a brand's ability to command a premium price, measured through the extent to which consumers perceive the brand as worth paying more for. According to Kantar's analysis of BrandZ data across thousands of brands, brands with greater Pricing Power show lower price elasticity, meaning they tend to lose less volume when prices increase (Kantar, n.d.).

This is Kantar's proprietary research and framework, rather than an independent peer-reviewed academic study, so I would treat it accordingly.

Still, it provides an interesting business illustration of the relationship between consumer perception and pricing.

Price is not interpreted in isolation.

The meaning consumers attach to a brand matters too.

So, What Is Image Worth?

I do not think there is one universal number.

Image is too complex to reduce to an outfit, a logo, or a social media feed. Its business value is better understood through the different mechanisms surrounding it: perception, recognition, reputation, trust, brand equity, positioning, experience, and, in some contexts, pricing power.

Research gives us evidence for several of those relationships.

It does not give us permission to claim that looking better automatically makes someone more successful, that a strong visual identity guarantees sales, or that perception is always accurate.

Those claims would oversimplify the subject. What the evidence does allow us to say is much more interesting.

People can form impressions rapidly from limited visual information (Willis & Todorov, 2006). Consumers report considering corporate reputation in purchase decisions (Ipsos, 2018). Trust and reputation rank among the attributes consumers say matter when deciding which brands to buy or use (Edelman, 2025). Academic research has also established methods for treating brand equity as an economic asset and has documented relationships between customer-based brand equity and financial performance (Mizik, 2014; Simon & Sullivan, 1993).

That gives us enough reason to take perception seriously.

This is what interests me about The Business of Image.

As a Fashion Stylist, Business Doctorate and Communicator, I can study visual communication. Through marketing, I can examine positioning and consumer perception. Through public relations, I can look at reputation and trust. Through business, I can ask what these elements contribute to value.

For me, these disciplines were never meant to live in separate rooms.

They meet at perception.

Because before image becomes aesthetic, it communicates.

Before reputation becomes measurable, it is built through experiences.

Before a brand becomes valuable, people have to attach meaning to it.

Image is not the entire business. But it is part of how the business is perceived. And perception deserves a seat at the business table.

References

Edelman. (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer special report: Brand trust, from we to me. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2025-06/2025%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Special%20Report%20Brand%20Trust%2C%20From%20We%20to%20Me_FINAL_0.pdf

Ipsos. (2018). How reputation and trust affect purchase decisions and marketing efficiency. https://www.ipsos.com/en/how-reputation-and-trust-affect-purchase-decisions-and-marketing-efficiency

Kantar. (n.d.). How to make pricing work: The business case for your brand. https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/brands/how-to-make-pricing-work-for-your-brand

Mizik, N. (2014). Assessing the total financial performance impact of brand equity with limited time-series data. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(6), 691–706. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0431

Simon, C. J., & Sullivan, M. W. (1993). The measurement and determinants of brand equity: A financial approach. Marketing Science, 12(1), 28–52. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.12.1.28

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x