The benefits of a brand audit are fairly obvious to anyone who has ever done one. If you haven’t (I imagine that’s why you’re reading this), the benefits can be easily summarized in two words: lightbulb moments.
In fact, a brand audit is top of the heap when it comes to delivering a-ha moments, unearthing insights, confirming hunches, and generally giving you perspective on your business.
I’ve broken that down into four concrete benefits, and served up a few examples below.
Four benefits of a brand audit
You discover real brand issues and inconsistencies
Brands are built organically. They don’t pop out of the ether. That means a brand can begin as a relatively simple, clear entity… but as time passes, fixes and tweaks often dilute, distort, or confuse the original brand. One of the most powerful benefits of a brand audit is the ability to expose issues like these:
- Sub brands with identities that don’t reinforce the master brand,
- Brand graphics that have been creatively interpreted, and wandered into design territory that clashes, and
- Language that sounds like it came from different people – probably because it did.
You receive an honest, unbiased third party perception of your brand
A brand is comprised of two things:
- Your promise of what your product will deliver, and
- Your customers’ expectations of what your product will deliver.
Because you’re closer to your brand than customers are (and hence are more apt to tweak and reinterpret it) it’s very common that the original promise you made wanders off course. As a result, what you promise and what customers expect… diverge.
An experienced brand builder (or sometimes even a business-savvy outsider) can quickly see where the promise and expectation diverge, including:
- Your emphasis on features or benefits that customers don’t find important,
- A customer journey missing bits that customers expect, and
- Your misread (or worse, dismissal) of what the competition is providing.
You gain insights into employee and customer perceptions of the brand
Brands are like our children: try as we might, we always regard them through the subjective (and usually sympathetic) eyes of a parent.
Customers and employees have no such bias. They’re like neighbours looking at your children. Their relative objectivity enables them to spot flaws far more quickly.
Think about it: a customer using your product has a refreshingly candid perspective when it comes to:
- Performance shortcomings,
- Alignment of performance and claims, and
- Language, graphics or experiences that feel somehow off-character.
The same applies to employees. Certainly, they want to see the brand do well. But they’re also less vested than the founder, and thus far better at pointing out inconsistencies between the public-facing brand, and the actual personality and culture of the company.
You get clarity of which areas of your business need attention
There is no such thing as a flawless brand. The problem is, every brand has flaws in different places.
A good brand audit will enable you to focus in on problem areas, without rethinking the areas of your brand that are doing just fine.
There’s real power in this. If your brand isn’t delivering, your first instinct might be to fix the bits you believe are underperforming. Or the areas a few friends have suggested could be better. There’s no shortage of subjective feedback, if you go looking for it.
If the areas you fix weren’t underperforming in the first place, you’ve just wasted time, money, and bandwidth you could’ve devoted to other issues.
Far better to take a look at your brand with the rigour and objectivity of a brand audit, to ensure you fix the elements of your brand that actually need fixing.
Try this brand audit
I’ve been auditing brands for over 30 years. Experience has taught me that a brand audit needn’t be lengthy to deliver powerful insights.
I developed a free brand audit based on the process that delivered the best results.
Best part is, it’s free – and qualified prospects work directly with me on it.
So you can add that to the benefits of a brand audit.