Introduction
A brand audit gives you an elevated view of all aspects of the brand, which includes its present vision, goals, the services they provide, the value they offer, the 4Ps, and the range of its customers.
You want to have a sense of where your company is and how the brand is helping its customers through the products and services. It also defines what is your brand positioning of the company in terms of how the customers view the brand and how the brand makes space for them in the market.
It allows you to step back a little to get a bigger picture of the brand, in return helps the brand make a long term plan for the brand.
Brand audits are mostly conducted to look at the brand from a new perspective for brand refreshment, when new heads are inducted to manage the brand and when there are shifts in the market trends.
What is a Brand Audit?
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a brand audit is a detailed examination of all the activities relating to successfully marketing a brand.
There are two types of brand audits:
Internal Brand Audit: An internal brand audit is a comprehensive review of how a company’s brand is perceived and experienced by its employees and internal stakeholders. This majorly focuses on the culture of the company, the engagement of the employees and how everyone in the company understands and embodies the brand.
External Brand Audit: An external brand audit is the comprehensive review of how a company’s brand is perceived by the target audience and the market. This focuses on factors which are outside the company’s direct control.
When and why does a brand need an audit?
A brand should be audited when they see a decline in sales, there brand shows low engagement, when the messaging of the brand to the customers is inconsistent or when they do not know where and how to position the brand in the market or when the founders think that a rebrand is required to align the brand with its core, or just merely when you are getting a free opportunity like the one MADnext is offering just to get a check done.
Just like your body needs yearly health checkups, your brand needs one too to see if everything is set in its place and what the shortcomings are and how one can improve those.
Goals of a Brand Audit
Goals of a brand audit include:
- Maintain brand consistency: Brand audits look into how the brand’s visual identity, message and experience is consistently being provided across all customer touch points.
- Align company goals with brand strategy: A brand audit helps maintain alignment in terms of the goals the company has, and the strategy they are following to achieve them.
- Improve the Customer Experience: Brand audits also focus on how the customer experience can be improved. A brand audit can identify what is not being done right in order to meet the expectations of the customers.
- Determining SWOT: A brand audit’s goal is to identify the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities and threats the company sees and was seeing.
- Directing future growth and strategy: The goal is to identify key issues and problems to fix those which will lead to future growth and a strategy as to how to move forward while taking the company into a new horizon.
- Boosting Brand Value: The brand audit is done with the idea that by identifying core issues, the brand resolves those which will help increase the brand value and overall increase the brand equity.
The brand perception can be identified internally and externally. The internal perception is how the people working or operating the brand view it. The external perception is how the customers perceive and understand the brand.
What’s Included in a Brand Audit?
A brand audit is not just restricted to the perception; it includes all aspects of a brand, which are:
Brand Visuals: When a company starts a brand with just a core message they often choose the logo the typography and the color palette of the branbased onof liking but when a company grows there messaging changes they have evolved with that evolution all of these things seem outdated or they don’t align with the company anymore. So, a brand audit helps in identifying these gaps concerning the brand visuals.
Brand Messaging: A brand audit includes a deep dive into the message it is delivering to its customers. Is the mission they started with still a mission, or have they delved into something new entirely? The tone and voice of the company is looked upon as to is it aligns with what the company is really about and what they want to put forward, and how they want to put that forward.
Customer Touchpoints: There are a few touchpoints with respect to customers like the website, social media, advertisements and packaging. All of these are seen, heard, viewed and judged by the customers. A brand audit helps identify the sore subject to make it appealing to the customers.
Competitor Analysis: a brand audit includes comparing our brand with a brand in the same segment so that we can analyse where we are lacking and what we can do to make it better for us.
Internal Brand Alignment: Sometimes, the employees of a certain brand and the stakeholders have different viewpoints as to what the brand is really about. A brand audit helps in communicating the same brand messaging across the company with the renewed version.
How to Conduct a Brand Audit?
- Define your objectives
Start with the question Why are we doing this audit? Is it for a rebrand or to launch something new? Are the customers losing trust in your brand?
These goals will assist you in deciding what information to gather and how thorough your audit should be. Whether it’s performance, corporate alignment, or customer impression, the brand must be clear about what it hopes to learn.
- Collect internal Brand Materials
Gather everything that represents your brand from the inside:
- Brand guidelines
- Mission and vision statements
- Marketing materials
- Website
- Internal communications
- Review External Touchpoints
This includes auditing how the brand shows up in the outside world:
- Website and SEO presence
- Social media platforms
- Packaging, advertising, PR
- Customer service experience
The brand needs to check for consistency, clarity and an emotional connection.
- Gather Customer Feedback
A brand audit entails using surveys, reviews, focus groups and social listening to understand what people think about the brand and the company.
- Analyze Competitors
Audit 2–3 competitors to see how you compare. Look at their tone, visuals, positioning, strengths, and customer engagement. This helps you spot opportunities to differentiate and uncover market expectations.
- Compile Findings and create an Action Plan
Summarise everything. Include what’s working and what’s not working out. What is missing?
Organise it into a clear audit report with recommendations and build a roadmap for fixes.
Tools and Templates
There are many tools such as:
- SWOT analysis: A SWOT analysis involves identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the company.
- Brand audit checklists: A brand audit checklist is a detailed list that highlights the important areas and questions to evaluate a company’s brand health and performance.
- Surveys: Surveys are a tool which can be used to see what the audience is thinking. In a brand’s case, it is the customer.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
There are some mistakes one should avoid while performing a brand audit.
A company is working with so many divisions and teams, and sometimes the audit loses out on analysing the cross-functional team aspect in auditing. A brand auditor must not skip customer feedback. The brand auditor should not only focus on the brand image, like visuals.
The brand audit must use findings to come to conclusions and make improvements.
What happens after the audit?
A brand audit report is created with all the information about the brand, the competitors, the shortcomings and where the improvements are to be made. This report is shared with the founders of the brand to come up with solutions that will eventually help you grow.
The findings of this report help you devise a strategy to run things ahead and for a smooth sail. These brand audits are not just supposed to be done once; they have to be periodically repeated for the growth and prosperity of the brand.
Final Thoughts
To stay connected and relevant to your audience, conducting audits on your brand is crucial in this case and cannot be skipped. It is stepping back and asking: Do we deliver what we promise? Is our audience’s expectation met? How does our brand aid in growth? Does it assist or limit progress?
Without a doubt, every business or organisation seeks to grow. The process of audits helps build the foundation by removing obstacles in the way of success, such as blind spots. Audits help align the brand with business expectations, which ultimately helps in achieving goals. The way wishes to be accessed by the target audience will shape and define the relationship customers have with the company’s services. This is exactly why audits are a crucial step. Audit is a self-check after a certain period or checkpoint—this is a rebrand, shift towards growth or progress of any other nature. All can be catalysts towards the desire to re-check and re-do further growth targets. A reminder serves to say that despite all the distractions, silence and noise demanding attention, strong brands go hand in hand with diligence and focus.
