Imagine a McDonald’s store that’s painted black, or a pink Uber taxi, or maybe an orange Coca-Cola bottle. The images are disturbing, right?
The consistency in how you see a brand through the years, through cities and locations, is a product of hard-core brand audits. Aspects like font and color increase brand recognition by up to 80%, costing them resources, time, evaluation, continuous monitoring of branded efforts, and so much more.
Brand managers realize it’s not a customer’s job to remember a brand. The onus and responsibility of ensuring customers don’t have a chance to forget your product is on the brand.
So whether it’s a fight between McDonald’s and Burger King or just a friendly banter between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, brands have been pouring millions into branding every year.
What is a brand audit?
A brand audit is a comprehensive analysis of a company’s brand, assets, and representation in the market. It involves studying various brand elements to ensure consistency, effectiveness, and alignment with the company’s goals. This audit aims to identify the brand’s weaknesses and strengths for further development.
For example:
- Does the customer experience match online and offline?
- Does the brand messaging align with the overall strategy?
- Are the brand colors consistent across channels?
- Does the visual strategy match the brand aesthetic?
The purpose of this audit is to address the gap that’s keeping the brand from growing or moving forward. It pinpoints issues like misleading messaging, parity in visual identity, and consistency challenges and navigates teams to internal and external weaknesses.
Core components of brand audit
The primary goal of a brand audit is to identify harmony between the brand and the branding in customers' eyes. There are various ways in which the brand is audited - analyzing the digital presence, studying the legal and ethical considerations, conducting a competitor’s analysis and so on. However, the brand audit can be categorized into three broad categories.
Internal branding
Internal branding focuses on how the brand is perceived, lived, and experienced within the organization. It includes aspects like employee’s understanding of the brand, alignment, recognition, coherence with the values, and consistency of internal communication.
| Aspects to analyse | Employee awareness, & Recognition Alignment of brand values, and internal culture Consistency in internal communication |
|---|---|
| Metrics to measure | Employee survey to gauge awareness Engagement scores related to brand values Consistency in internal communication material |
| Examples | Logos and company name in email signatures Access to updated files and brand documents |
The email signature here is designed to match company brand colors. All big or small brands urge employees to use the same signature to avoid fraudulent assumptions or activities.
External branding
As the name suggests, external branding assesses how your external audience perceives the brand. This includes customers, vendors, external stakeholders, competitors, and the general public. It contains elements such as brand visibility, messaging, and competitor analysis.
| Aspects to analyse | - Brand visibility in the market - Consistency across channels - Competitor positioning and differentiation |
|---|---|
| Metrics to measure | - Brand recall - Social media sentiment, & mentions - Competitor benchmarking |
| Examples | - Access to brand book by vendors - Consistent use of brand colors |
Microsoft shares its brand guidelines and media kit on an exhaustive web page to keep all its stakeholders aligned. This is to avoid misuse of logos or false representation by vendors.
Customer experience
Customer experience involves studying every customer interaction with the brand across various touchpoints; their journey from awareness to purchase and post-purchase experiences.
| Aspects to analyse | Customer journey mapping Satisfaction, loyalty levels Usability of the product/ service |
|---|---|
| Metrics to measure | Net promotor score (NPS) or likely to refer rate Conversation rate at different stages Customer feedback, and reviews |
| Examples | Colors consistency across touchpoints Harmony in brand messaging |
Coca-Cola calls its brand’s red color the second secret formula to its success. There is no Pantone color for Coca-Cola red, but when you see it, you know it.
Preparing for a brand audit
Coca-Cola, one of the world's biggest and most loved brands, spends an average of 4 billion a year on its advertising efforts. These branding efforts would go to waste without a goal on site. Thus, the first step in an audit is setting a goal.
These goals include assessing brand consistency, understanding customer perception, or identifying opportunities for differentiation. Can that be done without a process in place?
To conduct your brand audit, establish a framework that works every time like a charm. The process needs to be unified and holistic and know what to capture, what it expects to learn, and what it plans to review.
Setting clear objective
Your vendors accidentally printed the wrong logo on a human-size standee for an offline event. Your team visits the event and is appalled by the goof-up. The team comes back and suggests conducting an audit.
Objective: The goal here is to identify system gaps and build brand consistency.
Defining a specific goal(s) leads to a result-oriented outcome. These goals ensure that the team approaches audit with a focused mind. Furthermore, it’s also imperative to keep the goals measurable and aligned with the business objectives.
Gathering brand assets
Leonardo Da Vinci only created about 20 paintings in his lifetime, but your company probably has 1000s artworks to work with. How will you approach this if you are tasked with gathering all the brand assets?
💡Tip: Establish a cloud-based DAM system.
The most critical is working with a digital asset management(DAM) tool to store and organize logos, images, videos, and other brand elements. DAM ensures easy access, sharing, safeguarding, collaborating, and reducing the risk of working with outdated assets.
Defining key performance indicators
If your audit’s KPI is, say, understanding customer perception. However, the business needs to know customer loyalty; the audit would serve no direct purpose.
💡Tip: Select KPIs that align with the defined objectives.
When you answer questions like why we are doing the auditing, put down a KPI against it. What do you want to achieve? What’s the end goal? It’s a must to establish measurable benchmarks for practical evaluation. These metrics may include brand awareness, market differentiation, competition analysis, etc.
Conducting the brand audit
Counting a brand audit can be as exhaustive as you want. An ideal strategy is to pick one battle at a time, build a framework, and approach problems one by one. Here’s a bulletproof workflow for you to adapt.
Assessing media
Start by reviewing everything your customer, vendor, or stakeholder can see - logos, color schemes, typography, and imagery across all channels. Divide them by static, visual, and audio to leave no stone unturned.
Ensure brand consistency across mediums and bring alignment. As recommended earlier, introducing digital asset management can go a long way. It will help the team build visual consistency with all the parties.
Analyzing messaging and communication
In this phase of the brand audit, teams need to understand messaging across all channels. The motive is to align messaging with the brand's values and objectives.
- Website content
- Social media
- CRM
- Performance
- Offline mediums
A content management system at this stage can act as a boon. It allows you to maintain coherence in messaging. CMS tools are equipped with making the backend of publishing and the frontend for reading a cakewalk. Here’s an example from Miro: look at the synergy in all the blogs.
If readers come across another blog with the same theme, they’d know it’s Miro, serving in the brand recognition.
Evaluating the brand touchpoints
The last part of the audit starts with auditing every customer interaction with the brand. The idea is to assess alignment at all places where customers experience your brand.
At this point, you also want to gain insights into customer perceptions to identify areas for improvement.
A meticulous framework, checkpoints, and preparations paves the way for a successful brand audit that lets you identify the gap and work on them. What you need is clear objectives to set the right expectation, a centralized DAM system that ensures organized branded assets and relevant KPIs to measure the success.
Implementing the brand audit findings
Once you finish your brand audit, implementing changes is next. At this stage, many brand managers struggle to put things in motion - this is where the overwhelming tasks dawn on them. So here’s a plan optimized for results.
| Developing an actionable plan | |
|---|---|
| Prioritize findings | Not every detail you stumble on is useful, you need to segregate between what’s important and what needs to be prioritized. Identify the most critical issues and pick them based on their impact on brand identity, customer perception, and overall business goals. |
| Go back to your objectives | Remember we set aside objectives and KPIs at the start of the exercise. Recuperate back to them and work with them. Please be sure whatever you pick is a high priority for your business as well. |
| Create strategy | Now that you’ve tied your jobs to the KPI, the next natural progression in your task list is to begin by addressing identified issues. Many people start by refining their visual elements, while others spend time finding a DAM software that fits their needs. Go ahead, enhance customer touchpoints, or implement changes in digital presence. |
| Assign responsibilities | Assign jobs for owners for the implementation of strategy at each stage. Ensure that relevant team members are accountable. |
| Establish timeline | Have a realistic timeline in place. Consider dependencies between departments and resources. |
| Communicate | Inform all internal and external stakeholders about the changes and share the repository. This is where access to a digital asset management tool like ImageKit can help. A one-stop shop for all things assets - manage, store, edit, and share. |
Implementing action items post-brand audit is a very crucial stage for many brands. Earlier this year, when Elon Musk changed Twitter to X, they spent millions of dollars rebranding. The brand also lost anywhere between $4 billion and $20 billion in value, as claimed by Time.
Imagine if X didn’t update its stakeholders and everyone continued to use the old logo, colors, and name. It would have been a branding nightmare.
The last thread in the system is monitoring the progress. At the start of this exercise, you’ve already set aside your goal and purpose. You also have some KPIs in selection, which will help you gather data. So, let’s explore how you will monitor your progress as a brand manager.
| Monitoring progress | |
|---|---|
| Continuous measurement | Once the execution is done, the monitoring starts and never really stops. Some brands measure their social sentiment and branded conversations every month. They assess the word cloud, inspect the branded elements used and make a conscious effort to always improve where there is a gap. |
| Feedback loops | Establish an open system for feedback loops to collect insights from both internal and external stakeholders. Brand managers need to monitor social media, customer reviews, and employee feedback to gauge the real-time impact of their changes. |
| Adjustments based on the result | Be ready to make tectonic adjustments to the action plan based on your results and feedback. If certain strategies are not filling the gap or generating the desired outcome, change them and move on. |
| Iterative process | Know that brand building is a long iterative process. The market is dynamic and demanding - continuously reassess, refine, and improvise. |
Brand audit example
Example: Due to rushing customer demand, Cure.fit detached its food vertical from itself and created a separate entity. So what was eat.fit became EATFIT.In. The brand got its management, funding, and more with its transition.
On the outside, it was all the same for consumers. Therefore, the brand went under a branding rehaul to ensure a new image was created. There must have been a clear objective, KPIs, surveys, revamp of visual identity and more.
The benefit of doing this was the opportunity for the new wing to operate independently and be tied down by previous commitments under a bigger brand. This gives them the liberty to run their ads and communication and build a rapport with the customers as they deem fit.
Brand audit checklist
We’ve already touched upon the process pretty exhaustively, but here’s a quick recap of your brand audit checklist:
- Set clear objectives
- Gather brand assets
- Define your KPIs
- Conduct stakeholder interviews
- Evaluate visual identity
- Review messaging and communication
- Evaluate all branded touchpoints
- Analyze market positioning and competitors
- Assess digital presence
- Implement changes
- Monitor progress
- Iterate
How ImageKit’s DAM capabilities can help you manage your brand audits
More than 1500 businesses and over 100,00 developers have trusted ImageKit with their images and videos on the web. In the evolving landscape of brand management, Imagekit’s cloud-based digital asset management solutions offer a comprehensive suite for conducting brand audits.
When teams work with a versatile tool like ours, they can extrapolate, build conviction from past learnings, and allow all stakeholders to be on board instantly.
ImageKit helps you dynamically manage, store, share, edit, and work with images and videos.
- Efficient uploading and storage of branded elements with its media upload API
- Powerful creative asset management with tags, metadata, and asset categorization
- Dynamic image and video transformation- on-the-fly cropping, formatting, and editing
- Media Optimization for web delivery, resulting in faster loading time
- A robust content delivery network with integrated CDN capabilities and equipped with supporting brand audits
In the context of brand audit, ImageKit catalyzes bringing efficiency and precision into the system. When large teams divided by time zones, geographies, or even departments come together to work on the brand, a DAM system like ours brings consistency in visual elements.
Conclusion: Elevating Your Brand with ImageKit's DAM
A brand audit is a comprehensive exercise that requires detailed attention at multiple touchpoints. In this article, we’ve spoken at length about how critical it is for businesses of all kinds and sizes, big or small.
When you kickstart this process with your visual assets, do not sideline the need for a DAM system to hold it together. Imagekit’s DAM capabilities enhance the exercise by offering systematic storage capabilities. This powerful tool streamlines operations, allows teams to coordinate in a few clicks and makes brand management easy.