The purpose of auditing your brand is to gain a detailed understanding of how your brand is currently being used throughout your organisation. This will determine how well it adheres to the way in which it is supposed to be used both internally and externally.
Our Brand Audit process will assess how well your brand aligns with your organisation’s goals, values and market position. Finally, it will examine what processes, procedures and formal protection you have in place to safeguard your brand.
The process of auditing a brand varies from organisation to organisation so it is important for us to gain some understanding of your organisation and its brand in order to create options that are best suited to your business. We will always give you options for Auditing your Brand, along with a price for each option. Once we have agreed an appropriate auditing process and a price, we will always stick to it so that you can budget properly and won’t get any nasty surprises.
The Brand Audit examines and tests many aspects of an existing brand in order to evaluate how it is currently being used both internally and externally. This information is compared to how it should be used in order to determine well it adheres to the way in which it is supposed to be used.
The aspects of the brand that the audit will consider can be ??? into the five sections that are summarised in the list opposite.
The exact nature of a brand audit will vary from business to business and will also depend on the reason for conducting an audit.
As a result, it is important to understand the reasons for auditing your brand so that the audit can be focused on the correct areas.
Here we look at how the visual elements of the brand are being used vs with how they should be used across all forms of media. This is normally done by comparing the way the brand is being used against the brand use guide.
If you do not have a brand use guide the task becomes more difficult as we have nothing to compare the use of the brand against and need to base our assessment on comparisons among the various way the brand is being used.
Here we assess the systems and procedures that you have in place to ensure that your brand is being used in a correct and consistent manner across your organisation. This will include the brand use guide which is probably the most important document that you have in your business relating to your brand.
The way that your brand is perceived, both from an external and an internal point of view, is critical to the reputation and, therefore, the value of your brand.
A well know phrase “your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room” sums up the reality of what brand perception is. If people are speaking negatively about your business then that will have a negative impact on your brand’s reputation.
In this part of the brand audit we listen to what others are saying about your brand and use this information to suggest the future direction of your brand.
Your brand can be the most valuable asset in you business and, like any other asset, it should be protected. The problem is that a brand is something on an intangible asset so it is not always clear how to protect it.
Here, we examine the types of protection (such as trade marks, copyright, etc.) that you have in place for your brand (if any) and will make any relevant recommendations to strengthen it.
It is possible for brand to lose their appeal and impact over time – when this happens we say that the brand is ‘tired’. Here we review your current business and your goals for the future direction of the business in order to determine if your current brand fits with the future direction of the business.