Brand Audit

The health of a brand needs to be critically maintained and managed if it’s to contribute sustained value to customers and brand owners over the long term. Of the many tools available for brand owners and managers to assess the well being of their brands, the brand audit is the most widely used and misunderstood.

When brands reach the inflection point where revenues begin to slide because customers no longer resonate with the brand’s value proposition, it’s time to put your finger on the pulse of your brand and determine the long-term outlook for brand health.

Conducting a comprehensive brand audit is how brand owners determine the health of their brand. Yet for some brand owners and managers, the insights gathered from brand audits can be much like reading tea leaves or making faces out of cloud formations. The results of such an effort are extremely insightful, often surprising, and even difficult to accept.

The value of a brand audit is not in the data collected, but in the action taken as a result of the insight gained. Like any navigational device, to have a sense of where the brand fits into what’s happening around it, brand audits require a triangulation of the brand’s original purpose, relevance, and resonance. A brand audit is a diagnostic process that informs a current location rather than a particular direction for brand strategy and marketing tactics. To get real value from the process, it must be a rigorous, objective and engaging process involving every discipline within the business organisation.

That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a brand audit in collaboration with an experienced brand consultant. This will bring a lot more objectivity to the process, and the most effective method for communicating and integrating the insights into the various disciplines within the brand owner organisation.