Echo Mirror compares how a brand describes itself with how the public actually perceives it. Eight dimensions of reflection — archetype mapping, personality drift, attribute clouds, emotional halo, trust markers, perception gap, reputational risk. Built on Jung archetypes (Mark & Pearson), Aaker brand personality, validated sentiment frameworks.
What this tool is. Echo Mirror compares two text corpora — a brand's self-description and aggregated public perception — across eight dimensions: brand archetypes (Jung-influenced framework formalized by Mark & Pearson, 2001), brand personality (Aaker's five-dimension scale, 1997), attribute associations (lexical co-occurrence), emotional halo (Plutchik's eight primary emotions), trust markers (sentiment-of-credibility lexicon), and perception gap (composite alignment metric).
What this tool is not. Not a brand audit. Not a substitute for proper market research, focus groups, or quantitative brand-tracking studies. Not a predictor of brand health or future trajectory. The output is descriptive — what these two specific text samples contain — not prescriptive about what the brand should do. Brand health depends on far more than language: product quality, distribution, pricing, competitive context, macroeconomic conditions.
How to read the scores. Treat the Perception Gap as a diagnostic prompt, not a verdict. A large gap doesn't necessarily mean the brand is failing — sometimes brands deliberately reposition, sometimes the market lags reality, sometimes the perception sample is biased. A small gap doesn't guarantee success — perfect alignment between self-image and a niche audience can still mean low overall awareness. Use the scores to ask better questions, not to declare answers.
Sample quality determines signal quality. The single biggest source of error is a biased perception sample — for instance, only collecting negative reviews while ignoring positive ones, or scraping a single channel that over-indexes one demographic. The minimum useful perception sample is ~500 words drawn from at least 3 distinct public source types. Diverse, balanced, multi-source samples produce trustworthy reflections.
Ethical use. Echo Mirror is designed for brand entities — companies, products, organizations, public-facing brands. It is not designed for, and should not be used for, analyzing the public perception of identifiable private individuals, monitoring private communications, or any application targeting specific persons. Public figures in their professional capacity (CEOs, politicians, public intellectuals) may be analyzed when the discussion concerns their public roles, never their private lives.