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Brand Auditing & Brand Performance Analysis
A brand audit thoroughly examines a brand’s current positioning and messaging compared to your core brand and its competitors in the marketplace.
Every brand has characteristics that make it unique, but that particular essence can become watered down and even lost over time. When brands become indistinguishable and diluted, it might be time to do a brand audit to reconnect with the essence and clarity that make your business unique.
Assessing a brand’s continuity from the consumers’ perspective can clarify new opportunities and strengthen the brand.
When was the last time you could take a step back and look at how your identity, messaging and customer experience all work together?
Get a professional brand audit to examine your brand with fresh eyes. You may be missing an opportunity to carve a niche in your market or effectively persuade your customers. Identifying opportunities and evolving more holistically is worth the time and value.
Six steps to auditing your brand?
Every brand and category is unique so that the approach may change with each situation. However, here are the primary stages we like to cover when auditing a brand.
1. Start by knowing who you are
We need to know who you are as part of aligning your brand for the future. We start top-down and review your business’s purpose, vision, values, positioning, and promise. This is a high-level opportunity to see what’s working and what’s not. We analyse your current marketing plan, brand promise, unique selling proposition and value proposition. We look at your target customers and the gaps between your customers’ wants and your matching products and services. What does your brand promise? We clarify what you think your brand is before evaluating what others think.
2. Survey your employees
Your employees create the customer experience that is essential to your brand. They can’t convey your brand correctly if they don’t understand it. We use on-one anonymous meetings, surveys, and small groups to ask questions such as:
• How would you describe the one thing that you do well?
• Why do you like working for this company?
• What do its customers mean to you?
• What problems do you solve?
• Where do you think the industry is going?
• What problem does our brand solve for customers?
• How do you deliver on our brand’s promise?
• What keeps you from delivering on that promise?
• What one thing would you do to improve our brand?
The best ideas always come from within the business; we help shine a light on those critical discoveries.
We get as many people involved from within an organisation from day one. This reinforces the truths someone speaks from the loading dock and the CEO, and things move quickly. Facilitating this is surprisingly easy for us. This means everyone will have ownership of the brand moving forward and will be willing to align with its new direction. These synergies are unstoppable brand gold.
3. Know and talk to your customers
Using a combination of customer focus groups, one-on-ones, email surveys, social media polls, phone surveys, and online surveys to gather customer feedback, we can clearly understand your target audience’s demographics and motivations.
The thing about a brand audit is that the best ideas can come from the most unexpected places, but you’ll never know if you don’t look. A consumer frustration or customer service interaction might change the direction of a company’s delivery of its brand promise. We notice what resonates with your intended audience.
4. Assess your consumer touchpoints.
Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes by understanding their Path to purchase. Review your business logo, brochures, sales sheets, product packaging, signage, business cards and advertising. What is your online presence? Review your business website, social media channels, email marketing, newsletters, and content marketing pieces. Where is web traffic coming from? Using analytics, assess your bounce rat.? If visitors leave your site immediately, it’s not as effective as it should be. What is your conversion rate? Is it rising or falling? Where are the weak points in your sales funnel?
Are all these elements consistent in design, colour and tone of voice? And most importantly, are they “on-brand” for who you are?
5. Evaluate your marketplace
Who are your biggest competitors? Often, companies don’t have an accurate idea of what’s current in their competitive landscape. When talking to your customers, find out who else they are considering in the mix when choosing a provider for your product or service.
Understand the marketplace in which your brand will live
Assess their marketing and advertising materials, websites, social media presence, and customer service. You can also ask customers, members of your target market and even your employees the same questions about your competitors’ brands as you asked about yours.
6. Review and realign as required
Using all the data you’ve gathered, you can now measure what elements of your brand work need realigning and which are missing the mark entirely. Creating a brand strategy that aligns your brand with your business’s mission and vision.
What are the benefits of a Brand Audit?
The benefits of auditing your brand are far-reaching, but the top five expected benefits at the end of a brand audit are.
1. Improve customer experience
Auditing your brand is one of the best ways to assess the customer experience. The only way to improve your customer’s experience is to understand it again. Building that path to purchase pays dividends every time. An accurate overview of your customer service’s positive and negative aspects allows you to build on your strengths and actively improve your weaknesses.
2. Increase brand loyalty
Having insight into customer behaviour and brand positioning offers an unbiased assessment of how your customers differentiate your brand from competitors and their attitudes about your service. Having actionable insight into your marketing activities helps you identify “low-hanging fruit”, i.e. the actions that will cost the least while building your brand positioning.
3. Fully understand brand perception
Whether we like to admit it or not, our own biases frequently shape our perceptions. If you are inside the jar, you can’t read the label. Without an audit, no one within an organisation can provide a candid overview of how that brand is perceived, whether they assess external perception (by customers and clients) or internal (by colleagues). A brand audit allows you to look back into your brand almost from an “out of brand perspective”. This objective review gives a critical analysis without any preconceived ideas.
When you know where you’re going, the future is limitless.
4. Identify weaknesses
Understanding your brand’s perception is the best way to gauge the limitations of your current approach. The “out of brand perspective” helps identify weaknesses in marketing, communication, and customer service. Targeted improvement in these areas, increasing your return on investment for everything from marketing costs to staff hiring and training.
5. Identify new opportunities for growth
However, the real advantage of a brand experience audit extends far beyond what you’ll learn about the health of your brand at present. Your brand is the most valuable aspect of your business, but your brand can never achieve its full potential without a clear vision forward.
Think about Rolls Royce; think of Dyson, Facebook or Pepsi. Undertaking a brand audit so you know who you are and how to communicate it, combined with a comprehensive view of the external market and your position in it, provides actionable insight into your future growth.
Our Branding Services
Brand Strategy
Brand Positioning
Co-Branding Opportunities
Competitor Analysis
External Communications
Internal Engagement
Internal Launch Strategies