Updated: Jun 11, 2020
Brand Audit is a full health check up of the brand's current position in the market, compared to its competitors. It is a repeated review of the brands effectiveness that helps you determine the strength of the brand along with its weaknesses and reasons for inconsistencies with your goals and opportunities for improvement and continuously monitor its growth and life cycles
BRAND AUDIT AND MANAGEMENT
The goal behind doing a brand auditand management is very simple. It is to gain an ultimate understanding of your brand position in the market place; where you stand in comparison to your competitors. Remember you are not alone in business. There are other businesses out there who are selling the same product as yours or something similar to your product. Therefore, it is imperative to make sure you always know where you stand amongst them.
One would wonder why it is important to check their brand position if they already have loyal customers and a fair share of the market. Well, here is a simple answer: every business is searching for customers and most of them will work day and night to make sure they gain customers. This is where brand audit comes in. You need to find out what your stakeholders are saying about your brand, that is, your employees, your customers, etc. in comparison to your competitors so you avoid being over-thrown by other businesses.
I am not saying that a business will automatically fail if there is no brand auditing and development done. However, what I am saying that even if you have been in the industry for many years and have a well-known brand and have acquired loyal customers over those many years, you should consider executing a brand audit at least one in a year. If not, then you are risking the success of your business.
As a business grows, it expands and a few things may change. You will find that you are getting more customers than you did a year ago, and because of that, it is natural that you might feel “secure” and believe that you own the game. This is a mistake that should be avoided at all cost. And to avoid this, you might need to:
Frequently do customer analysis to see to it that you get customer insights, have them correct you where they can and maintain the relationship you have with them. Remember there is also the digital world. Your online customers. Those too need to be examined. You need to do your wed analytics to understand your users’ behavior. For example: how many users visityour website, how long they stay, how many pages they visit, which pages they visit the most, and whether they arrive by following a link or not. If you your user visitations have declined, this should tell you that you are not doing something right and you’re at the edge of losing customers. Or maybe they found a better competitor and converted to them.
Also do your market analysis so that you understand your industry and what your potential clients want from you. You do not wish to be in the market and not understand the new trends or what the market wants. If that happens, you will fail to catch up with the market new trends and fail to deliver according to the customers’ expectations and more. This will then ruin your business.
Examine also your marketing strategies and those of your competitors so that you are able to improve if you’re left behind. Competition isn’t competition without action. As mentioned earlier, businesses don’t sleep so to get more customers and expand, they come up with new marketing strategies every now and then to win over the market. Thus, it will heavily help your business if you do brand audit to learn about their strategies so you know how to stay dominating the market share.
Logos are also very important. You might be wondering if changing your logo will be a bad idea once your customers are already used to it. That’s okay. And my answer is, No. Changing a logo will not cause you to lose customers. It should not. In fact, everyone likes new stuff. Changing your logo will only cause curiosity, and excitement on your customers minds. They will get intrigued to continue using your products. However, when you decide to change your business logo, make sure you change it to something colorful and better than your first logo. This will get people thrilled and talking about your brand and before you know it, you have attracted new customers and having your business expand.