We almost always start our client relationships with a brand audit. We complete it before creative or media planning, or website development, or media relations even gets started. Why? The insight and information it provides helps each subject matter expert do their job faster and easier.
But still, clients are often confused about what it is and – in full transparency – why they should pay for it. Sometimes the work is referred to as “desk research” or “discovery,” which, quite frankly, doesn’t sound like something I’d want to pay for either.
If clients are confused, it’s because there isn’t a single definition or a widely adopted and recognized best-practices approach to a brand audit. And, let’s face it, clients want speed to market. They can be impatient waiting for the proverbial steaks to come off the grill!
As a brand planner with more than 20 years of experience, however, I assure you it is important to take the pause and complete the brand audit. It’s worth the investment, and now with AI, we can do it with greater speed and efficiency.
What is a brand audit
In simple terms, a brand audit is a series of activities that looks at the industry your brand operates in, your business (sales and profitability by product line, by geography, by type of customer), your brand and marketing materials, your customer, and your competition. This analysis helps define marketing objectives and can uncover where the hidden opportunities lie for your brand.
Conversely, it presents the threats and challenges your brand faces, so you can address them. It also provides a baseline in an early relationship with a client so you can establish realistic goals and track progress over time. In short, the brand audit helps improve your marketing communications and branding effectiveness. The business value is maximizing your return on marketing investment.
Performing the brand audit ensures the subject matter experts on your integrated marketing communications team get smart fast. They aren’t hindered by flying blind as they start their planning and development processes. It gives them a clear view of goals, a deep understanding of the buyer, the business’ strengths and weaknesses, and how the brand is positioned relative to its competitors. It also ensures that your team is rowing in the same direction. This creates true marketing synergy.
Is a brand audit the same as a brand health assessment?
In essence, the brand audit is an assessment of brand health. You’re looking at a brand’s key vitals – the metrics that matter, or indicators of the brand’s ability to succeed, and flags that could become obstacles to success.
While I’m not suggesting that brand planners are physicians, neglecting a brand audit could be analogous to a physician starting work on a patient without any more consideration than a quick look. While good providers can tell an awful lot just by looking at a patient, that’s only part of a much larger picture. How can you know a patient’s complete health story without taking blood pressure, listening to their heart and lungs, and analyzing blood work, just to start? How can you be sure you’re leading the patient on the best wellness journey possible?
While the consequences are not as dire if we don’t assess a brand’s health properly, it can indeed be detrimental to your business. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Forging ahead because you want to get into the market fast can backfire. If you have defined your target audience incorrectly, at least a portion of your media plan investment will be wasted reaching the wrong folks. If you haven’t invested in a deep understanding of your buyer’s wants and needs, hopes and dreams, you can’t be sure your brand position and subsequent marketing messaging will resonate and motivate the right behavior. In this case, you may have targeted the right people, but you don’t have the right message.
The brand audit helps avoid this wasteful marketing spend and improves the odds that marketing communications will have the desired effect. It’s all about risk reduction and improving the odds of your marketing investment being effective.
True value: The awareness, attitudes and Usage Study
Some practitioners refer to a brand audit as an assessment of “brand health.”
One way we measure this health is through an Awareness, Attitudes, and Usage (AAU) study—if we’re lucky, the client already has one or is open to conducting one. An AAU study gives us a clear picture of how a brand is performing over time. It tracks key indicators like brand awareness relative to competitors, share of market (usage), and brand associations—what consumers believe or feel about the brand.
For example, in the instant hand sanitizer category, brand associations often include attributes like best price, convenient packaging, safety, trustworthiness, germ-killing power, gentleness on skin, and more. We had the pleasure of working on the PURELL® brand for many years and used AAU studies to monitor how it was perceived in the market. Over time, we noticed a shift. While PURELL, as the premium-priced option in mass retail channels, was most associated with trust, and Germ-X (a Walmart store brand) was known for strongest germ kill, a new player entered the category: Bath & Body Works. Through the AAU study, we saw Bath & Body Works carve out a unique space in the market by emphasizing a fresh scent—and along with it, an emotional association of feeling refreshed. This insight opened the door for our teams to think differently about product development, marketing strategies, and the emotional benefits we wanted to own. It expanded our understanding of what customers valued and which new opportunities existed in the category.
See how a brand audit—and tools like an AAU study—can deliver real business value?
6 aspects of a brand audit
While a brand audit is defined and executed differently by different practitioners, and it’s customized to the needs of different kinds of clients, if you’re looking for an easy framework to follow for conducting a brand audit, below are six aspects it should include. Because branding is a business strategy, we start with defining objectives.
- Look at the business and define the objectives that marketing must support. Support could include sales or profitability goals. i. It also prompts a discussion about what’s more important – creating brand awareness or improving customer retention. Having a clear and focused definition helps ensure marketing success. If you don’t have unlimited funds (and most clients don’t), a brand audit helps identify the opportunities and then prioritize. It’s about making hard, but smart choices and today there’s more data available than ever to guide us.
- Assess current brand health measures such as awareness, usage and attribute association relative to competitors. This gives a current state view and establishes a baseline from which to measure effectiveness post-marketing campaign execution. It also helps inform goal setting. For example, if awareness is high but usage is low, then perhaps focus on driving conversion. We may also see the attributes that are most important to buyers are not highly associated with our brand. This tells us that stronger calls to action may also need to be accompanied by telling a stronger story – one that creates better alignment between what the brand offers and what customers really value.
- Review any research or data available on who buys the brand and profile them demographically and psychologically to better understand what will capture their attention, create an emotional connection and motivate them to choose your brand over the competition. If you don’t have any primary quantitative or qualitative research, you can look at sales data, scrape ratings and reviews, use AI to create hypothetical personas, access consulting firm industry reports, or use trade journal annual studies on vertical industry buyers.
- Review existing marketing materials and map them to the buyer journey. This helps us identify gaps in the marketing plan. It guides us on where to invest marketing funds to ensure they are aligned with the objectives established.
- For example, if a client has broad awareness, they really need to mine existing customers. We’d focus on using things like database marketing materials that express the breadth and depth of a client’s offering to improve the odds of gaining a larger share of the wallet, so to speak, with existing customers.
- If, on the other hand, the client is introducing a new product or brand, they need to ensure they are creating awareness and consideration and are doing things like paid advertising and/or media relations to capture attention and create awareness and interest. It means their website must be search optimized so the new brand can get into the customer’s considered set. SEM (or paid search) can buy it. Great content can reduce the cost of new customer acquisition because it attracts buyers to the client’s website organically. That’s why at Falls & Co. our brand audit includes a content audit.
- Review the competition. At Falls & Co. we use Kantar data so we can track the media spending for clients and their competitors and see the creative so we can conduct brand positioning and key messaging analysis. This helps show where the “white space” is for brand positioning, and it guides us in our messaging development so we can be differentiated from competitors. The spending analysis helps guide paid media planning and buying teams.
- Conduct an environment scan. We scour the internet, read consulting firm and think-tank industry trend reports, review trade journal articles and press releases, attend trade shows and virtual conferences, and use AI to get an overview of the macro and micro trends affecting our client’s brands and their businesses. For example, at Falls & Co. we have several building materials brands as clients. We stay abreast of both consumer housing, and commercial building starts and remodeling activity, as well as the things that affect these clients — such as interest rates and government policy and economic trends. We monitor broad generational trends, such as aging Boomers who want to age in place and Millennial home interior and exterior color and plumbing fixture style preferences. We track smart-home technology adoption and integration. All these direct us to where the threats and opportunities are in the market, so we are better prepared to make smart marketing recommendations for our clients. These are just a few of the exciting developments we keep our eyes on, and the brand audit is the discipline that helps ensure we do it.
In conclusion, a brand audit isn’t just a starting point — it’s a strategic advantage. By taking the time to assess where your brand stands, you gain the necessary clarity to shape its future with confidence. Skipping this step is like setting sail without a map; you might move forward, but not necessarily in the right direction.
If you are interested in learning more about brand audit at your organization, contact us.
