Brand audits: what's the point?

I recently had a client question the value of the brand and marketing audit I had proposed - wondering why they should pay for me to “do my homework.” 

It’s a totally valid question, and the error was mine - I wasn’t clear enough about the value of a thorough audit. So for anyone else wondering if it’s worth the time and investment, here goes…

What is it? 

A brand and marketing audit is an objective review of your brand and marketing efforts. It looks at your business through the eyes of an outsider (albeit one particular attuned to marketing effectiveness…) highlighting the challenges and opportunities facing your business, so you have the wide-angled view you need to make decisions and prioritise your resources. 

What does it cover? 

A great audit will cover the three components critical to developing a strong market positioning: your Company, your Customers, and your Competitors. 

The content can vary hugely depending on your business and its needs - and the strategist you partner with - but I generally incorporate the following: 

Your Company/ 

• Touchpoint review, across all key channels (digital, physical, print, spatial)

• Brand identity and tone of voice, with guidance on where it is under-developed or under-delivering

• Content and comms, investigating whether it is both on-brand and effective

• Product pricing review, understanding where you sit in the market for cost/value

• Brand and product architecture challenges and opportunities

Your Customers/ 

• Summary of audiences based on demographic data

• Point of view on audience targeting opportunities

• Industry shifts or trends shaping your customers expectations

• Points for improvement in your CX / service journey

Your Competitors/ 

• Brand and marketing deep-dive, including customer experience across digital channels, with clear take-aways of what you can learn from each competitor

• Positioning map, placing you against your competitors for the attributes that count

• Benchmarks, highlighting what best-in-class looks like (often looking outside of your sector, industry or geographic market)

• Share of search and relative following across social platforms.

Why is it worth doing? 

From my perspective, it's a cost and time effective way to invite objectivity, efficiency and innovation into your brand and marketing process. Here's how:

1. Remove the blinkers

A great audit will give you a much clearer sense of how your audiences see you. While you think you may be telling a clear and compelling story, objectivity is critical to understand your brand through your customer’s eyes. And unfortunately once you’re embedded in a business, there’s literally no way for you to see things from your customer’s perspective. 

2. Check your strategy works in the wild

A good audit gives you a holistic overview of what positioning you’re (intentionally or otherwise) putting into the world. Understanding what handful of features, values and brand codes you want to be known for - and making sure those are consistently embedded - is foundational to solid brand building. Brands can feel like they are repeating themselves ad nauseam, assume they’re boring their market, decide to mix things up, and then realise too late no-one knows who they are or what the hell they stand for. An audit is a great way to sense-check if those key ideas are coming through loud and clear, and are attributable to you. 

3. Mitigate competitive threats

No-one should be looking over their shoulder constantly at the competition, but a semi-regular review of your competitor mix can help to identify shifts or threats before they become a problem. If you’re the market leader, you’ll have copy-cats chasing your approach, and if you’re a new-comer it’s critical your difference is clear. Reviewing how you sit against competitors ensures you look and sound uniquely like you, and helps to ensure your product offering is still meeting market needs. 

4. Learn from the best

Often the most sector-disrupting ideas aren’t brand new, they’re just lifted and reshaped from a different industry. Taking learnings from businesses doing brilliant things from outside your sector, or from those targeting a different audience or based in a different geographic market, can provide game-changing results for your business. 

5. Focus resources

A marketers to-do list is never-ending, but unfortunately resources are not. Battling  the expectations of your C-suite or customers, and feeling pressure from competitors (or your latest industry trend report) can make it hard to prioritise. An audit can help give you a ‘zoomed out’ view of your organisation so you can spot the big priorities and shape the approach forward, rather than allocating your resources to reactive, disjointed projects. 

Who is it for?

Often a solid brand and marketing audit is the first thing I’ll deliver for a new client. Sure, it helps to ensure I can be the expert partner they need, but the feedback I’ve had is that it delivers so much more value to their business than just me ‘getting up to speed.’ 

For clients that have marketing teams in house, an audit can be a great tool to support their planning process, establishing where to invest time and budget in the year ahead. And for the creative agencies I partner with, an audit can get time-poor teams up to speed on a client, prove the robustness of their approach, and help them to identify valuable future partnership opportunities across brand, comms, strategy, product and CX workstreams. 

Convinced?

Always keen to hear: In your experience - as a client, strategist or creative - what's valuable in an audit, and what's not? What am I missing?

See + add to the conversation over on Linkedin.