What are the best practices for conducting a brand audit?

1 What is a brand audit?

A brand audit is a comprehensive analysis of your brand's current performance, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It helps you evaluate how well your brand aligns with your goals, vision, and target audience. A brand audit also helps you identify any gaps, inconsistencies, or issues in your brand identity, strategy, communication, and experience. By doing a brand audit, you can gain valuable insights into your brand's position, value proposition, and competitive advantage.

2 Why do you need a brand audit?

A brand audit is essential for keeping your brand up-to-date, consistent, and unique. It can help you gain insight into your customers' needs, preferences, and expectations, as well as assess your brand's awareness, recognition, and loyalty. Additionally, it can measure your brand's performance and return on investment, identify your brand's strengths and weaknesses, discover opportunities and threats, align your brand's identity, strategy, communication, and experience, create a clear and compelling brand story, differentiate your brand from competitors, enhance your brand's reputation and credibility, and improve customer satisfaction and retention.

3 How to conduct a brand audit?

When deciding to conduct a brand audit, the resources, budget, and objectives should be taken into consideration to determine whether it should be done internally or externally. Generally, the steps involve defining the goals and scope, collecting and analyzing data from customer feedback, market research, competitor analysis, social media, website, and sales, evaluating the brand's identity, strategy, communication, and experience across all touchpoints, channels, and platforms, identifying and prioritizing any gaps, inconsistencies, or issues, developing and implementing a brand update plan based on the findings and recommendations, and finally, monitoring and measuring the results and impact of the brand update.

4 How to update your brand image?

Updating your brand image is an ongoing process of improvement and adaptation that should be tailored to the results of your brand audit. This could involve making minor or major changes to your brand elements, such as your name, logo, slogan, colors, fonts, icons, graphics, voice, tone, style, message, story, value proposition, strategy, positioning, differentiation, communication, content, campaigns, experience, service, or delivery. When making these updates, it is important to keep your brand goals, vision, and target audience in mind, as well as to test and validate the changes with customers and stakeholders before launching. Additionally, it is essential to communicate the brand update clearly and consistently across all touchpoints, channels, and platforms.

5 How to refresh your brand image?

Reinforcing your brand's essence and value is essential to keeping it fresh, relevant, and engaging for customers and prospects. To achieve this, you can add new features, benefits, or offers to your products or services, create content, stories, or campaigns that showcase your brand's personality and purpose, expand your brand's reach, exposure, or influence to new markets, segments, or audiences, partner with other brands, influencers, or causes that share your brand's values and vision, and innovate your brand's experience, service, or delivery to exceed your customers' expectations and delight them. However, it is important to maintain your brand's consistency and credibility throughout the process, and to monitor and measure your brand's feedback and results to ensure that your brand refresh is effective and successful.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?