How to Audit Your Brand
There are four areas to audit when it comes to your brand.
The first is your brand profile.
What are your brand's factory settings?
This includes:
Your Category: Consumers turn brands into nouns because it’s easier. The human brain is hard-wired to filter out all but the most useful terms.
Your Purpose: Beyond the economics - why do you exist? If your organization was wiped off the face of Earth tomorrow, what would be missing?
Your Positioning: What space do ONLY you occupy in the mind of your customer.
Complete this thought: My business serves WHO to create WHAT IMPACT so that X RESULTS are generated. We do that by YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE in the way that ONLY YOU CAN.
What is your Motto or Tagline - do you make a promise and keep it to customers?
Where are you in the Competitive Lifecycle? Are you an up-and-comer, a behemoth, or somewhere in between?
What is your baseline brand architecture style: A branded house, a house of brands, or a hybrid?
Secondly, you need to do a culture audit.
How does your decision-making work?
How is authority distributed?
What methods do you use to make decisions?
How do you get together and collaborate?
How do you clarify behaviors that are rewarded and punished without hindering autonomy?
What are the behaviors you punish?
What are the behaviors you reward?
Do you have any rituals?
What are your peculiar ways of starting, managing, celebrating, or mourning your work?
How do you help each other learn and grow through feedback?
Is there psychological safety? Do you encourage everyone to speak up? How so? How do you promote participation and candor or group-think and silence?
What are some signature stories about your company?
What are the proclivities of your company?
Next, a personality Audit.
Have you determined your organization’s Archetype? If not, you can find the link in the Workbook to our organization-wide Archetype Discovery tool.
Determine and articulate your defining personality traits. Include the traits you are NOT, too.
What is your tone of voice? Serious? Witty? Fun? Authoritative? We? I/me/my?
Then, perform a style Audit. The best way to look at your style is to organize a broad medley of your brand expressions: Website, advertising, packaging, social posts, etc., onto a single mood board.
What conclusions can you draw about the way you are visually expressing yourself?
Is it tranquil, turbulent, consistent, fast, slow, friendly, or authoritative?
What does the science of color tell you?
What do the shapes, patterns, and textures evoke?
Is the overall brand identity memorable? Here’s a good test, show it to an 8-year-old for a minute and ask them to draw it from memory. Did they get close?
Understanding what your current brand expressions are saying is an important step to knowing if they will continue that way, pivot, or be completely overhauled.
Lastly, a brand audit is incomplete without vivid and captivating conclusions.
These are the insights you draw from reading between the lines.
These are the implications of this work.
What is the impact to be created? The next level of success is WHAT?
Frame this for your conclusions: A distillation in the form of the what, why, and therefore.
An example might answer the question: What should happen next? OR what should we be aware of that we weren’t before?
Write it in a way that is understood by your leadership and managers, and you’ll be well on your way to understanding where you are and where you want to go.
At pivotal moments, rebranding is the most effective way for leaders to signal significant change. Are you at a pivotal moment? Drop us a line, and we'll be in touch.