APPENDIX A
Brand Audits
A brand audit provides an analysis of an organization’s brand and its brand management and marketing effectiveness. It assesses a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It identifies brand growth opportunities, including those achieved by brand repositioning and brand extension. The audit should result in recommendations to improve brand equity, brand positioning, and brand management and marketing effectiveness.
Brand Audit Components
The following are typical components of a brand audit:
• Strategy Review:
- Business plans
- Marketing plans
- Brand positioning statement
- Brand plans
- Creative (or agency) briefs
- Media plans
• Marketing Research Review:
- Brand positioning research
- Brand asset studies
- Brand equity measurement system (to gauge awareness, preference, usage, value, accessibility, relevance, differentiation, vitality, emotional connection, loyalty, associations, personality)
- Brand extension research
- Product/service concept testing
- Logo recall and recognition testing
• Communications Review:
- Advertising and promotion materials
- Other brand marketing elements, including pricing, packaging, merchandising, distribution, direct marketing, sponsorships, and flagship stores
- Press kit
- Press releases
- Sales collateral materials
- Internal communications
- Business cards and letterheads
- Website
- Intranet site
- Other online presence
- Employee training programs
- Employee orientation
- Manager training
- Sales force training
• External Information Source Review:
- Competitors’ press releases, advertising, and promotion
- Industry analyst reports
- Customer comments
- Business partner comments
- Marketing vendor interviews
• Employee Interviews:
- Corporate officer interviews
- Marketing employee interviews
- Sales force interviews
- Customer service employee interviews
- Frontline customer contact interviews
- General employee interviews
• Human Resource Systems Review:
- Organization charts
- Department mission/vision statements
- Department objectives
- Common objectives
- Recruiting criteria
- Individual competency dictionary
- Succession planning criteria
- Planning and resource allocation systems/processes
• Proprietary Brand Research (conducted by the company performing the brand audit, if required):
- Brand asset research
- Brand equity research
- Brand positioning research (qualitative and quantitative)
Brand Management Audit
A qualified brand audit company will investigate the following areas of brand management:
• Brand Research:
- Does this company have a deep understanding of its consumers’ values, attitudes, needs, desires, hopes, aspirations, fears, and concerns?
- Has this company rigorously analyzed its competition?
- Which of the following types of brand research has the company conducted: qualitative and quantitative brand positioning, brand asset studies, brand equity measurement and monitoring, brand extension, logo recall and recognition?
- How robust is each of these research studies?
- How are the company and each of its competitors positioned in the marketplace?
• Brand Strategy:
- Is there a marketing plan?
- Is there a brand plan?
- Are those plans aligned with and integrated into company business plans?
- Does the company have a future vision and a well-thought-out plan to get there?
- Is it clear which marketing objectives, actions, and vehicles will provide the greatest leverage in achieving the long-term vision?
• Brand Positioning:
- Is there a brand positioning statement? Does it include the target consumer, differentiating brand benefit, brand essence, brand archetype, and brand personality?
- Do most employees know the brand’s positioning (verbatim or paraphrased)?
- Was the brand’s key differentiating benefit based on an analysis of consumer needs, organizational strengths (core competencies), and competitive weaknesses?
- Does the brand own a benefit that is highly differentiated, compelling, and believable?
- What are the brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
• Brand Identity System and Standards:
- How robust is the company’s brand identity system?
- How easy is it for the company’s employees and business partners to use?
- What brand identity controls does the company have in place?
- Is the company’s brand architecture simple and understandable?
- Which of the following brand identity components does the company use in its system: name, logo, icon, tagline, typestyle, colors, shapes, symbols, visual style, mnemonic (sound) device, brand voice, music, animation?
- Does the company have cobranding standards?
- How accurately and consistently have these standards been applied across all internal and external communications?
- Does the brand’s website accurately reflect its architecture?
• Brand Advertising:
- Do the ads break through the marketplace clutter?
- Do they powerfully communicate the brand’s promise and personality?
- Do they include the “reasons why” (differentiating benefit proof points)?
- Do they connect with the target consumer on an emotional level?
- Do they tap into the consumers’ beliefs, values, aspirations, hopes, and fears?
- Do they include components that are “ownable”?
• Organization Design and Internal Brand Building:
- Is the company market-driven or does it have a traditional manufacturing company design?
- Does the company’s culture support the brand’s essence, promise, and personality?
- Is the company’s marketing function centralized or distributed?
- What mechanisms has the company put in place to integrate its marketing?
- Are all the required marketing functions present?
- Are brand objectives integrated into company and common objectives?
- Do the company’s recruiting, training, performance management, compensation, succession planning, business planning, budgeting, resource allocation, and other systems support brand building? Are they designed to help the company deliver its brand’s promise?
- Does the company screen job applicants for their alignment with the brand’s essence, promise, and personality?
- Is the organization a “learning organization”?
• Brand Extension:
- What are the brand’s assets?
- Is the brand over- or underextended (or both)?
- What are the most promising areas for brand extension?
- What processes does the organization have in place for brand extension? How does it safeguard against inappropriate extension?
• Marketing Employee Competency:
- How competent are the company’s marketers?
- Which skill sets do they possess and which ones are missing?
- Has the company augmented internal skill sets that it is lacking with external sources?
- What are its external marketing vendors’ strengths and weaknesses?
- Do the company’s marketing employees (and also its senior managers and the rest of its employees) exhibit a marketing mindset? That is, do they profoundly understand the company’s customers and sincerely and passionately strive to meet their wants and needs?
Brand Positioning Investigation
Brand auditors should assess the strength of an organization’s mission and vision and the strength of its brand’s essence, promise, archetype, and personality (especially in relationship to the organization’s stakeholders and their perceptions of the organization). As part of the process, the auditor should investigate how congruently each of the following groups or sources articulate or manifest these organizational and brand attributes:
• Official documents
• Internal and external communications
• Marketers
• Salespeople
• Customer service employees
• Other employees
• Business partners
• Each and every point of contact the brand makes with its clients/customers
Who Performs the Audit?
BRAND AUDITOR SKILL SET
Ideally, the company performing the audit has broad and deep experience (as line managers and as consultants) in each of the following areas:
• Brand research
• Brand strategy and positioning
• Brand identity system and standards
• Brand advertising
• Organization design
SIZE OF AUDIT TEAM
Audits will vary from company to company based on the company’s unique needs, organizational complexity, marketing competency, and other factors. Given the large amount of work required to complete the audit in a reasonable period of time, the audit team should consist of at least three people. The more marketing experience each team member has, the better.
A CAUTION
Weaknesses to look out for in self-proclaimed brand auditors are:
• Strength in other areas of marketing (e.g., advertising, promotion), but not in brand management
• Primary focus on brand research, strategy, and positioning, but little knowledge of how to design an organization to deliver on the brand promise
• Strong knowledge of brand management but little understanding of organization design
• Lack of brand research experience
COST AND DURATION OF A BRAND AUDIT
Audit Cost. Audit costs may vary from a low of $150,000 to more than $1 million depending on the global reach of the business, complexity of the brand and product structure, amount of proprietary research required, project’s duration, number of people assigned, and the audit firm’s profit margin and billing rate, among other factors. If an audit company provides an estimate much lower than that, it indicates a lack of understanding of the scope and complexity of this type of project.
Audit Duration. The project may last anywhere from a month (fast track with concentrated interviews and little to no additional research) to six months.
AREAS INVESTIGATED IN A BRAND AUDIT
A brand audit should identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the following areas:
• Brand strategy and positioning
• Brand equity
• Ability to leverage the brand for business growth
• Capacity of the organization to manage and market the brand effectively
• Alignment of the organization’s structure and systems to deliver the brand’s promise
Bottom-Line Questions
Here are some questions that a strong brand auditor will attempt to answer:
• Does this company have a profound understanding of its consumers?
• Is the brand well positioned in its marketplace? Does it own a relevant and compelling point of difference?
• Do the leaders of this company have a vision for their brand(s)?
• Is this company’s marketing staff competent?
• Is the organization mobilized to deliver on its brand’s promise?
• Does the corporate culture reinforce the brand essence, promise, and personality?
• Are the brand identity system and standards simple, robust, and powerful?
• Does this organization accurately and consistently reinforce its brand’s identity and positioning in internal and external communication?
• Does the brand create an emotional connection with its consumers?