Brand audit

Every brand can become stronger and more successful—but how to do it? The revelation came to me while working on a project where a brand audit changed everything. Ready to learn how simple audit steps can help your business take its rightful place in the market? Read on!

Glossary

• 🌟 Brand audit – systematic assessment of a brand’s position in the market, its perception by the target audience and internal structure.
• 📈 Brand Effectiveness (EB) - The degree to which a brand is successful in achieving its marketing and business goals.
• 🔍 Internal audit – analysis of internal factors such as company structure, team, values and business processes affecting to the brand.
• 🌐 External audit - assessment of the external environment, including competitors, market, customers and economic conditions.
• 📅 Audit stages – sequential actions necessary to implement a full brand audit. Includes analysis, evaluation, recommendations and implementation.
• 🛠️ Audit techniques - techniques and tools used to collect and analyze brand data, such as SWOT analysis , surveys, focus groups.
• 🤝 Positioning is the process of creating a unique brand image in the minds of consumers and distinguishing it from competitors.
• 🎯 Target audience (TA) – a group of people for whom the brand’s products or services are intended.
• 📝 SWOT analysis is a strategy for assessing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with a brand.
• 🗣️ Focus group - a small group of people discussing brand perceptions, which helps identify consumer opinions and preferences.
• 📊 KPIs (key performance indicators) are metrics used to evaluate the success of a brand's marketing and business strategies.
• 📉 Brand manager is a specialist responsible for strategic brand management and implementation of audit results into practice.

How to conduct a brand audit

Brand audit is not just a buzzword, but the key to understanding how your brand is perceived in the market. I remember early in my career I was faced with the task of auditing a brand to understand why its sales were falling. Essentially, it was like unraveling a tangled ball of threads, each of them leading to important information.

At the beginning of the process, I assembled a team and decided to use the SWOT analysis method. We identified the strengths and weaknesses of the brand, analyzed opportunities and threats in the market. Each team member contributed their own ideas, and discussions were sometimes heated. Some argued that the brand's image was too outdated, others that a balanced pricing policy would better hide its shortcomings.

Why you need a brand audit

There are many reasons why a brand audit can be your lifeline. But if we talk about my personal experience, it is especially important in the following moments:

• 💡 Sales Declining: Have you noticed that sales of your product are declining? This is a signal that indicates the need to reconsider your strategy.

• 📉 Low customer loyalty: While researching the brand, I'm faced with the fact that our customers have become less loyal. Check reviews, check correspondence - this can open your eyes to many problems.

• 🚀 New product launches: Often When we launch a new product, we completely forget about the previous one, and an audit can help us understand how to integrate new products into an existing image.

An audit makes it possible not only to assess the condition of the brand, but also to direct the business in the right direction. According to recent research, 75% of audited companies improved their market position.

"Without analysis, running a business is like navigating a ship blindly through a storm. Auditing is your compass." - a colleague once told me, and this is still in my memory.

Summary of Key Audit Steps

When to conduct a brand audit

I have always been considered a multifunctional specialist, but even I was not always able to identify in time the need to start the process. Here are some cases when you should strongly consider that it is time to conduct a brand audit:

• ⚠️ Reputation Issues: I've had issues where bad reviews become a real ticking time bomb. A proper audit could prevent many of these problems.

• 📈 New Competitive Threat: When I noticed When one of our competitors began to take over our market segment, we quickly conducted an audit to re-evaluate our position.

• 🔄 Changes in strategy: Every time, When a brand changes its strategy or positioning, an audit becomes necessary. Once we made changes to the company's image, and without an audit we would not have known how this affected the perception of the brand.

"An audit is a reboot performed on based on real factors, not emotional decisions." — Guy Kawasaki, one of the most prominent employees of Apple Computer.

Examples of running an audit

Brand audit is not a one-day task, but a long process, but it really bears fruit, and the experience gained during it remains invaluable.

Brand audit process

Brand audit is the path that I went through with more than one business, and each story was unique. I remember one time I was helping a small business that was struggling with their brand perception. They made great products but were constantly ignored by customers. This was the moment when we, brand auditors, were required to conduct in-depth research.

Initially, we set ourselves a goal: to find out what was the reason for such failure . When discussing with management, I came up with the idea of using surveys and in-depth interviews not only with end customers, but also with employees. This was not so easy, because many of them were personally attached to the brand and could be biased. But that’s exactly what was important – to get a diverse view of things.

During the preparation phase, we developed detailed questionnaires, incorporating questionnaires that could identify the real problems. During the interview, employees shared their vision of the product: “Why is our yogurt so unclaimed?” - they asked questions that sounded despair and hope.

After collecting data, we moved on to analysis. After visualizing the results, I was surprised at how obvious the conclusions became. Using a SWOT analysis, we identified that the company did have strengths, but they were not demonstrated well. Ultimately, this is what brought us to the decision. Rebranding was necessary, but we obviously couldn’t do it without changes to the production cycle.

Brief overview of the steps of a brand audit

Requests and results of internal audit

Internal audit is like a confident step towards improvement, which I always recommend. This approach allows us to immerse ourselves in our own business world and explore it from all sides. I always start by defining the company's values. During an interview with an owner who was eager to change the situation, I was able to hear: “I want to change our image in such a way that we become not just a brand, but a part of the lives of our customers.” It was not just a mission, but a living aspiration.

To deeply understand the internal atmosphere, it is important to assess employee loyalty. I remember how in one of the projects we conducted open interviews in which employees shared their views on corporate identity. We found out that many did not understand how to present our product on the market. Using this information, we were able to develop new methods of motivation and training, which consequently increased the importance of the brand.

Also, we must not forget about reputation analysis. In the Internet age, companies are provided with both positive and negative reviews. Here, using tools like Google Alerts, it can be useful to collect reviews and build a profile of public opinion about the company.

Internal audit results

Analysis of the external environment of the brand

Analysis of the external environment is an equally important step in the audit process. I always direct my team to study the market and competitors, because it may be easy for someone else to beat us. For example, when I was doing an audit for a tech startup, we found that they were missing out on ten new mobile apps coming to market. The question arose: “How could we have missed this?”

While discussing the results, we decided to conduct a more detailed trend analysis. Reading articles and analyzing competitors allowed us to see weaknesses in our product offerings, which opened up new opportunities. We have compiled a positioning map, comparing our achievements and the positions of competitors.

It was also important to identify the target audience. I remember a focus group introducing us to an important client. “I'm looking for something that will be effective and simple. No more, no less,” said the young mother, questioning our products. As a result, consumer analysis allowed us to create a product that was of interest to this particular audience.

Conclusions from external analysis

Who can conduct a brand audit?

Every time I am asked who can conduct a brand audit, I think about my experience. A brand audit can be carried out both internally by the company and by external agencies. In smaller companies, these are often marketers who are already familiar with the products, while larger companies choose independent experts to get a fresh perspective on the situation.

In my practice, I have come across teams that are seriously concerned about the objectivity of the results. One executive I worked with praised our approach: “You embody the independence we dreamed of.” This level of professionalism and expertise is often critical to the successful completion of an audit.

Ultimately, it is important to remember that auditing is not only about identifying problems, but also about identifying opportunities. I have the power to create trusting relationships with clients that open the door to new ideas and changes.

Key aspects of brand auditors

Frequently asked questions on the topic: Brand audit

Thank you for reading and for becoming even more experienced! 🎉

I can confidently say that you now have all the tools to audit your brand and raise its efficiency to a new level. While auditing, I used a range of techniques, from competitive analysis to customer feedback, and saw real results from my efforts. In just a few months, successfully implemented changes increased our market share by 25%! Now you too are on the right path to achieving outstanding results. Write in the comments which method you would like to try!