You're Being Brand Audited!

Yeah, that fearful word. Audit. Imagine volunteering to get audited. Crazy, right?

But not for your taxes. For your brand.

Does the idea of a brand audit also strike fear into your heart? Having someone look in all the dark corners, or even the shortcuts taken in plain sight. Having to explain why your brand might have said something over there, but something quite different over here. Representing something as one thing, but in reality knowing it’s something quite different.

And hoping no one finds out.

The truth is, your customers audit your brand every day. They see around the dark corners, spot shortcuts, and can tell when the brand’s being a bit two-faced. Shouldn’t you audit the brand yourself?

Unlike tax audits, brand audits shouldn’t strike fear. You won’t “owe” anything afterwards, other than an investment in making things more cohesive. But that’s an investment, not a penalty.

A lot of brand audits merely look at all your communications and see whether there are inconsistencies, or poor messaging, or if the dreaded brand guideline book is being followed. (I once had a junior role where my entire job was to monitor whether our various agencies and internal creative teams were following our Brand Book. Guess how popular I was?) These are all necessary assessments in a brand audit.

But there’s more.

Brand Unison has a very specific approach to doing a brand audit. It’s about as 360 as you can get, but efficient. I won’t describe it in detail. Our competitors read our blogs. I’m pretty sure. Don’t they?

We begin with a Brand Platform. It’s a one-page articulation of the brand – its most valuable customers, their needs, how the brand positions itself against these needs, and the attributes it embraces to support the positioning.

And then we see how well all the brand’s moving parts reinforce this brand platform. Do they acknowledge all customer segments, putting greater weight on the most valuable? Does the messaging focus on customer needs, and not just product or service features? Does the brand have multiple personalities, or does it present a single strong and differentiated personality?

And how is the brand presented across channels? I once worked with a global consumer brand with an equally strong bricks-and-mortar and online presence. My audit revealed some subtle but important differences in how the brand was expressed in each channel. But our research showed that a significant share of customers shopped both channels.

There was a great danger of consumers becoming confused. When they saw a different vibe on the website than in stores, did they feel the brand was going in a different direction? Did they feel that one channel wasn’t for them? And while it used to be the case that the younger, cooler customers shopped online while the more traditional customers favored bricks-and-mortar stores, this dynamic has disappeared.

And the dichotomy between the two channels’ could have been predicted. Each channel was run very autonomously, with separate marketing and creative teams, and even separate agencies. By not having a unified brand platform, each channel developed its own brand.

The saying “we were just too close to see it” is a common refrain following a brand audit. The marketing and creative teams and the agency are locked into day-to-day activations with seemingly non-stop deadlines. Having an outside expert take a fresh, objective look at your brand expression makes sense.

It’s an audit that you shouldn’t fear.