A successful brand strategy is all about telling a compelling story that leaves no room for misinterpretation. However, achieving this requires conducting a thorough brand audit from external and internal perspectives.
A brand audit is a comprehensive evaluation that assesses how your brand is perceived by those outside and inside your organization, including customers. It aims to answer the question, “Are we what we say we are?”
Why Conduct a Holistic Brand Evaluation?
The primary reason to conduct a brand audit is to confirm your brand’s intended and actual impact in the market. By evaluating your brand’s assets and understanding how they resonate with your target audience, you can measure your brand’s effectiveness and ensure that it aligns with your core values and identity. Furthermore, staying on top of your brand promise is crucial as the market evolves.
Objectives of a Holistic Brand Evaluation
There are three key objectives to this type of research.
- Measuring Strengths and Weaknesses:
Thoroughly examine your brand’s assets to ensure they align with your core values and adapt to the evolving market landscape. Understanding your brand’s position in the market enables you to identify areas for improvement and plan corrective actions. - Analyzing the Market:
By assessing your brand’s position in the market, you can determine whether you are a leader, a newcomer, or a disruptive force with a unique edge. Comparing the market landscape to your target audience helps measure your brand’s impact and devise effective strategies. - Identifying Competitors:
To remain relevant in a world of endless choices, it’s crucial to know who your direct competitors are, how you measure up against them, and what sets you apart. Remember, no brand can excel in every aspect, so identifying your key differentiators is essential.
Conducting a Holistic Brand Evaluation: the External Perspective
The external review focuses on how those outside your organization perceive and recognize your brand. It involves evaluating design elements like your logo, colours, website, social media, and physical assets like letterheads and office space. The goal is to assess whether the public can recognize your brand through packaging and materials. This review helps us understand how you present your brand to the general public and if you are resonating with them in line with your core values.
- What do they know about your brand?
- Does your brand solve a problem for them?
This gives us a collective idea of how you present yourselves to those outside of your organization and identifies whether or not you are resonating with the general public in a way that aligns with your core values.
Conducting a Holistic Brand Evaluation: the Internal Perspective
The internal review examines how your employees and customers perceive your brand. It involves analyzing internal communications such as policy changes, employee handbooks, company benefits, and customer feedback from sources like Google reviews and surveys; if you don’t currently have a mechanism to elicit customer feedback, that can easily be set up as part of this phase through real-time surveys or post-transaction surveys.
This phase ensures that your internal stakeholders understand your brand’s mission, values, and their unique role in conveying your company’s purpose. It also provides insights into how well you maintain a strong brand internally.
The internal review gets at things like:
- Can you describe the company’s mission and values?
- Can you define the company’s brand?
- What problems do you think the company’s brand solves?
- What is your unique role in conveying our company’s purpose?
This provides an in-depth overview of how you perform on the things you want to portray and whether you are holding up on the most important things to maintain a strong brand.
Unlocking the Benefits of a Holistic Brand Evaluation
In the end, a holistic brand evaluation allows you to evaluate yourself against your core values while providing both an outside and inside perspective that can clearly outline any gaps in the alignment. These gaps then create opportunities. The opportunity to engage in new ways, stay on top of the game and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Stories of Market Research: the Insightrix Podcast
Ready to supercharge your brand strategy? Don’t miss the jam-packed episode of Stories of Market Research: The Insightrix Podcast! Join host Sharday Torgerson as she engages in an enlightening conversation with Shonna Caldwell, Chief Revenue Officer of Insightrix, and Larry Anderson, Chief Relationship Officer of Chess Club Agency, where they delve into the power of brand audit research and effective brand strategies.
Discover the secrets behind successful brand auditing and its role in shaping a company’s employer branding strategy. Shonna and Larry provide real-life examples, both good and bad, illustrating the profound impact these strategies can have on organizational success. Their insights shed light on the importance of collaboration and strategic alignment between market research firms and creative agencies, elevating creative efforts and benefiting clients.
Listen here!
