Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, once said, “A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”
One such gesture is a brand audit. Just as you may visit the doctor yearly for a checkup, your business can periodically conduct a brand audit to ensure your brand direction and perception are where you want them to be.
Here’s how to conduct a thorough brand assessment to help you identify opportunities to strengthen your market position and public perception.
What is a brand audit?
A brand audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your brand’s performance and market position, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. The goal is to ensure brand consistency and that your brand’s identity is visible throughout all marketing materials and customer interactions.
Brand audits offer unbiased, valuable insights into the customer experience, revealing how audiences perceive your branding. You can then use this data to increase brand awareness, identify gaps in your brand strategy, highlight your competitive advantage, and foster positive consumer sentiment.
The primary factors to consider in a brand audit are your customer service experience, internal company culture and brand values, and external branding like your social media presence, marketing campaigns, and visual identity.
How to conduct a brand audit
- Build a brand audit checklist
- Revisit your brand mission
- Gather data
- Align your external branding
- Examine your company culture
- Evaluate your customer experience
- Identify your market position
- Develop and implement steps for improvement
A thorough brand audit requires a close look at all brand elements and customer service practices. Here’s a brand audit framework to help you optimize your brand strategies one step at a time:
1. Build a brand audit checklist
A brand audit checklist serves as a valuable evaluation tool, ensuring you cover every relevant aspect of the branding process. To gather all of the branding materials, it can be beneficial to categorize your list into three sections:
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Internal culture: Brand voice in onboarding materials, hiring outreach, job descriptions, and company-wide communications all influence your brand perception.
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External branding: Social media channels, website design, email newsletters, fonts, photos, and videos are common external branding elements.
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Customer experience: Website navigation, FAQ sections, customer service practices, delivery times, and return policies all factor into customer experience.
An effective brand audit meticulously evaluates each element to ensure your brand is effectively connecting with your target audience, employees, and customers.
2. Revisit your brand mission
Your brand mission defines your organization’s purpose, goals, and core values. Revisiting your brand’s values and mission statement provides context for gauging how well your brand aligns with your business direction, audience, and values. Think of your mission as a set of guidelines ensuring consistency across internal and external materials and marketing strategies.
Look for outdated language, and changes in your offerings, tone, or market positioning. Revise to make sure your mission reflects your current identity and unique selling proposition, resonates with internal and external stakeholders, and is clear, relevant, and forward-looking. If your mission no longer represents your evolution or vision, make adjustments.
Hiut Denim is a prime example of a company that aligns its mission with every aspect of its products, marketing, and customer service. “Do One Thing Well” serves as both a tagline and brand promise, signifying its unwavering commitment to craftsmanship. Its branding strategy emphasizes the quality of its garments, a customer service team ready to assist with detailed inquiries or custom hemming, and an internal culture that honors heritage and hard work.
3. Gather data
Gathering data is crucial for a comprehensive brand audit, as it provides the necessary insights to assess your overall business strategy. Key areas to explore include website analytics, sales data, social media analytics, and customer feedback analysis.
As a Shopify store owner, you can access key metrics and data like conversion rates, search demand, and visitor behavior in your analytics dashboard, all updated in real time. Social media platforms offer valuable engagement and demographic data, while brand monitoring tools track brand perception through audience reactions and brand mentions, significantly speeding up the process.
4. Align your external branding
External branding plays a key role in shaping public perception, so your brand’s visual identity, voice, and other assets must align with your business strategy. Regardless of how your audience interacts with your brand, the experience should be consistent across all touchpoints, including social media channels, websites, tone of voice, and design choices—all of which influence your position in your target market.
Boutique women’s clothing brand, Adored Vintage, is a great example of a brand that leverages attention to detail from color palettes to fonts to ensure its social media marketing and website design are visually aligned. This allows its audience to easily identify Adored Vintage branding regardless of the platform, leading to strong brand awareness and a sense of trust.
5. Examine your company culture
Keep internal branding—including onboarding materials and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—top of mind to support a positive workplace, ensure your employees align with your business, and increase employee retention.
Gallup research shows that a strong workplace culture contributes to business success. Companies with high employee engagement and well-being see higher productivity and retention, with up to 50% higher engagement and 25% better retention over three years.
6. Evaluate your customer experience
Customer experience is a defining factor in shaping brand perception. Carefully review your customer service policies, delivery times, and FAQ sections to identify pain points that could negatively affect your target customers. For example, you can collect customer feedback through tools like surveys, Net Promoter Scores, and recorded service interactions.
Pet lifestyle brand FunnyFuzzy identified gaps in its customer experience due to supply chain issues, delivery delays, and shifting consumer demographics amid rapid growth. To better serve diverse global customers, it upgraded to Shopify Plus, with user-centric features that can significantly boost the overall customer experience.
7. Identify your market position
Conduct a competitive analysis to assess your brand’s current position and understand how you stack up against others in your sector. A SWOT—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—analysis can help objectively evaluate your brand performance and market positioning and identify areas for improvement. Or you might analyze a competitor for insights into what direction your brand should take.
Take note of how competitors capture market share and build brand awareness, then brainstorm opportunities to gain a competitive advantage. For example, if you sell running shoes online, studying brands like Nike and On Running can inspire your marketing strategies.
8. Develop and implement steps for improvement
After analyzing your data and understanding your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, focus on the areas that need improvement. Refine your marketing efforts, visual assets, and customer experience to increase brand awareness, strengthen connections with your target audience, and foster customer loyalty.
If your audit shows low engagement on social media, you can shift to a more interactive content strategy. Or if you find your website is not getting enough traffic, explore your user journey and find ways to increase visits through advertising or search engine optimization (SEO).
Brand audit FAQ
What are the steps of a brand audit?
The brand audit process involves reviewing your brand mission, gathering data, assessing external branding, examining your company culture, evaluating your customer experience, conducting competitor analysis, and outlining steps for improvement.
How long does it take to do a brand audit?
From start to finish, conducting a brand audit can take anywhere from six weeks to a few months, depending on the size of your business and how many platforms you share brand messaging on regularly.
How do you measure brand equity?
Brand equity reflects how the public perceives a brand. A brand audit helps evaluate the equity of your own brand by assessing perceived value, brand associations, and customer experience.