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How does your company’s brand fare in the marketplace? Does it still rally your workforce and glue your organization together? Or is it lost in an ocean of sameness in the marketplace, getting stale in a fast changing world?
“Your brand is your business’s biggest asset — one whose health must be cultivated and monitored”, per this article.
A brand is a living and breathing thing, riding through high tide and low tide in its lifecycle. To ensure your brand’s vitality and momentum, to keep it fresh, engaging, on top of mind of your target audience and as a leader in the competitive landscape, it’s critical to audit your brand once a year.
An out-of-touch brand is a weak brand that soon leads to decreased sales and a shrinking market share. A disconnected brand threatens your business survival. If your brand is starting to feel stale and irrelevant, it may be too little, too late if you wait until your sales are going down to start a comprehensive brand audit. Doing the audit takes time. It takes even longer to implement changes based on the insights from the audit. How much time do you have at hand while your sales keep falling?
Getting timely insights from a proactive brand audit has tremendous ROI: A comprehensive brand audit can optimize your brand performance by identifying growth opportunities with current and new customers, revealing changes in customer expectations and new ways to meet them. Based on the data from a brand audit, leaders can adjust brand messaging to better resonate with employees and customers, reposition your brand to be more visible to those who need your solutions, and accomplish radical differentiation in the vast competitive landscape of similar products and services, in order to maintain growth momentum.
A brand audit helps you identify innovative opportunities, deepen and broaden customer loyalty, expand market reach, invigorate your workforce and revitalize growth.
A brand audit may or may not lead to a brand overhaul. Since a brand refresh or a rebranding is always a major undertaking, it is important to first conduct a brand audit of your company’s brand position and effectiveness in the marketplace, just like a good general who always first assesses situations, topography, battle readiness, enemy’s status, and then comes up with winning strategies and battle plans, before engaging in a battle.
In the age of AI, as products and services evolve, a brand’s connection to its customers and employees needs to evolve too. A brand audit is like a health check, it evaluates strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT Analysis), to get a holistic view of your brand in the competitive marketplace.
A brand audit assesses two areas: internal and external, i.e., if a brand is uniting and motivating the internal workforce, and externally how it is perceived by customers and what is the status of customer experience.
Internally, a brand audit assesses brand values, vision, mission, identity, to see if brand culture is in alignment with organizational culture. Is it advancing company goals – long term, mid term, and short term?
Externally, a brand audit provides a bird’s eye view over the competitive landscape, and assesses the brand power, market share, and brand position compared with similar brands in the same industry. Are all the brand amplification efforts reaching the desired audience, with messaging, advertising, marketing, PR, website, social media, email marketing, etc.? A brand audit determines, from the point of view of the end users, if their perceptions and loyalty have changed, and discovers disconnects, misalignment, and friction points related to customer experience, customer journey, sales process, customer services and support.
A brand audit is needed for a company at all stages: at birth, growth, and rebirth.
At birth:
During growth:
At re-birth:
Define your objectives: Determine first if your focus is on the internal culture, external customer perception, or both, before initiating a brand audit.
Gather information: Collect data through surveys, interviews, customer reviews, and competitors’ information. Obtain feedback from the internal workforce regarding mission, values, goals, brand culture, workplace culture, and organizational vision. Collect all marketing materials, reports, analytics, and sales data.
Analyze results: Evaluate the data and identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) for your brand.
Once the information is gathered and analyzed, the next part is taking action, such as:
Develop strategies: Based on the findings and data from the audit, develop actionable strategies to address identified issues and capitalize on opportunities, per https://www.score.org/course/building-and-growing-your-online-brand.
Formulate data-driven decisions: Leverage data analytics to inform decision-making regarding people strategy, employee satisfaction, customer sentiment, customer satisfaction, and customer experience.
Track progress: check the effectiveness of your strategies and refine them as needed.
Monitor employee satisfaction: Happy employees create happy customers who are loyal to your brand. Unhappy employees contribute to a negative work environment and can damage your brand, per this Bloomberg report.
A brand audit report presents a high level overview for the C-suite and the internal marketing team, it should be done by a third-party. It is best done by your company’s outside branding agency who has previously been involved in your branding and can provide an in-depth, objective, and independent view.
The report can reveal the gaps between the intended effect of brand messaging and the actual effect, since brand messaging consistency is key to maintaining employee and customer relationships, based on trust and credibility.
The report needs to outline the similarities and differentiating factors amongst your competition. It provides a big picture of the market landscape, upon verbal and visual identity analyses of the brand in the context of the competitive field.
More importantly, the report should present new opportunities and recommend actions for brand differentiation, as well as improvement of brand performance and its unique position in the market.
10 Plus Brand, Inc. is a premier brand building, branding, and brand marketing, full service digital agency, regarded as one of the best in the world. We have teams of experts who conduct thorough brand audits for growth companies, and we guide brands through subsequent actions to stay ahead of your competitors.
Please contact us to answer any questions you may have, or to discuss a brand audit for your brand. Thank you.
© Joanne Z. Tan All rights reserved.
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