Keller’s definition of a brand audit, from 2003:
A brand audit is a comprehensive examination of a brand, involving activities to assess the health of a brand, uncover its sources of equity, and suggest ways to improve and leverage that equity.
Today, in 2021, brand audits can be carried out entirely online. Based on thousands of feedback and responses from in-market customers, it is possible to measure what people think about a brand. Since brand and marketing communications have moved almost entirely online, the internet is the best platform to measure the public opinion of a company, its products, and unique differentiation.
What insights a good brand audit will reveal?
In a nutshell, brand audits are a snapshot of what people think about your company. Such audits can be focused on almost any aspect of brand management, including positioning, perceived benefits, social values, or more technical topics such a website user experience or social media marketing communications.
Great brand audits are created to provide valuable, and reliable insights regarding what in-market customers think about your company. Poor brand audits will tell you what an individual consultant or “branding expert” thinks about your company.
What are the key items to analyze in a brand audit?
Possibly the best approach to conduct a brand audit is to evaluate each element of brand and marketing management, that can influence customers either positively or negatively. Typically, these key points are product features, product presentation, positioning, and pricing. These elements will not only impact sales and revenue performance, but will also create an image in the mind of potential customers.
Uninspiring, or not practical product features will possibly kill the business before even getting started. Inadequate product presentation negatively impacts sales and overall marketing ROI, while developing a wrong brand image. Wrong positioning will confuse potential customers, who will end up comparing your product or solution with irrelevant competitors, without understanding the core values of your company. Pricing has a key impact on the perceived value of your products. Low prices might suggest that your products are low value. High prices might not be justified with your product presentation, differentiation, or product features. In these cases, sales will suffer.
Data sources, market research practices and audit quality
It is extremely important to have accurate and unbiased feedback regarding the previously discussed aspects of your branding and marketing, as the often biased judgment of marketing managers can lead to serious mismanagement of the brand.
Branding, and especially evaluating the effectiveness of brand management is a complex task. Each company has different opportunities and challenges. One cannot approach every company with the same template.
At Brand Auditor, we have developed a framework that builds on data collection from your target audience, collecting up to hundreds of thousands of feedback – both quantitative and qualitative insights. Building on the same framework, we have dozens of specialized audits, that can be further customized by choosing your industry, line of business, geographical locations of the market research, and even respondent demographics.
Specialized brand audits
These specialized audits include business concept audits, personal brand audits, brand audits for hotels and resorts, and a lot more.
Besides the specialized reports, we also offer the option to configure your very own audit from scratch, choosing the aspects you wish to analyze, as well as the size and location of your market research.
These responses will be summarized into straightforward audit reports. We invite you to browse around on our website to discover our audit solutions – and of course, we welcome any questions.