As a small business in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, the only way you will stay ahead of your competition is to differentiate yourself through branding. The first step in establishing your brand is to determine how your business is performing in the mind of your customers and employees. To accomplish this, it is necessary to perform a brand audit.
A brand audit provides a detailed examination of your brand’s current position in the market. It makes comparisons to your competitors, and reviews the effectiveness of your brand. When the audit is complete, it will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, as well as identify opportunities for improvement.
An effective brand audit will clearly define internal and external branding, as well as the company’s communication systems and infrastructure. It is important to get to know your brand inside and out. Doing so ensures your brand is in alignment internally and externally. What you say/do internally, should be the same thing you say/do externally.
Below are the fundamental elements of a brand audit that must be explored.
Brand Audit: Internal Branding
Internal branding encourages employees to become more customer and business focused. Companies whose workforce understands how the company operates, and how they generate revenue, consistently deliver better performance. If executed properly, internal branding allows employees to transition from being “informed,” to “understanding,” to “committed.” This approach encourages staff members to independently adjust their behavior to support the company’s goals.
Effective internal branding offers huge benefits. Committed employees provide stronger performance and deliver higher customer satisfaction. In addition, internal branding increases brand equity, customer focus, and shareholder value.
Brand Positioning
It is very important that you have a positioning statement. Your brand’s positioning – sometimes referred to as a brand strategy, is the process of placing something specific and desirable about your brand, into the mind of consumers. It is constantly promoting the benefit you want consumers to recall, when they think of your brand. It should be one or two sentence that articulates your brand’s exclusive value to consumers.
Your brand positioning statement should clearly communicate what makes your product or service better than any other in the marketplace.
Brand Values
Brand values are the starting point for everything. They are the foundation of a business. These values should be seen throughout your organization and be reflected in how you market your business and handle your customers. People connect to a value’s underlying, deeper purpose. If you do not align your values with those of your target consumer, they will not buy your product or service.
Examples of brand values are dependability, quality, efficiency, and accountability.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Communicating the unique selling proposition (USP), also known as brand promise or brand essence, is a key element of branding your business. To effectively convey your unique selling proposition you must be able to articulate the value your product brings to the market. Your proposition must give consumers a reason to choose you over your competition. That is the question you need to address, when formulating your unique selling proposition.
Without differentiation, your product/service risks being seen as a commodity and easily replaced by the consumer. In this event, the value potential drops significantly. This emphasizes the importance of identifying a unique selling point that addresses current and future competition.
If you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity.
– Philip Kotler
In the book Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves, the author shares three ingredients a unique selling proposition must include to be regarded as something more than simply creative branding:
- Each marketing message must say to the consumer: “buy this product, for this specific benefit.”
- The proposition must be one the competition cannot or does not offer.
- The proposition must be strong enough to move the masses, i.e., attract new customers.
Having a unique selling point, even one that excludes some prospective customers, is a competitive advantage that allows you to avoid trying to please everyone.
Brand Voice
An effective brand voice is the result of purposeful, consistent expression through carefully chosen words and prose styles. When communicating with your audience you must be consistent with the voice and vocabulary you are using. It is not what you say, but how you say it.
There is a strong link between familiarity and trust. Because something familiar requires little effort to process mentally, consumers are more likely to feel at ease around it. A consistent, distinctive, and recognizable tone of communications and writing style breeds familiarity and trust with an audience, and lends authenticity to your brand.
Brand Culture
The culture within your company should be representative of your brand.
A company’s brand culture promotes an environment where employees “live” the brand’s values. Adhering to these corporate values, employees solve problems and make decisions internally, which deliver a consistently branded customer experience externally.
Everything the company does, including the business decisions it makes, must be consistently demonstrated within the brand’s culture. This builds a strong sense of identification between front-line employees and the brand’s customers.
If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.
– Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks
Product/Service Positioning
The goal of product positioning is to determine how to communicate your products’ attributes in a way that conveys the differentiating, value-added aspects of your product or service, to your target audience.
Product positioning refers to consumers’ perceptions of a product’s attributes, uses, quality, and advantages and disadvantages relative to competing brands.
– Louis E. Boone and David L. Kurtz, Contemporary Marketing
Effective product positioning ensures that your marketing messages will be received by targeted consumers and compel them to take action.
Brand Audit: External Branding
Using external sources to communicate your brand message is an important part of branding your business. External branding combines all marketing activities used to influence the mind-set and purchasing behavior of customers, as well as to entice prospective customers to use your company’s product or service.
Corporate Identity
A business makes itself distinct through the image that it presents to the world, primarily through its corporate identity on business cards, letterheads, brochures, etc. This physical expression of the company’s brand is an extension of the brand culture that is already expressed through the brand’s communication style and behavior.
A corporate identity is a set of multi-sensory elements that are employed to communicate a visual statement about a brand to consumers. Generally speaking, this includes a company’s name, logo, slogan, buildings, décor, uniforms, and company colors, which are commonly assembled within a set of brand guidelines. These detailed guidelines include approved color palettes, typefaces, page layouts, etc., and will govern how the corporate identity is applied in advertising and public relations campaigns.
Brand Collateral
Brand Collateral is the collection of media you use to promote your brand. Designed to support your brand’s core values and personality, it plays an important role in supporting the sales and marketing of your product or service.
Your business’ brand collateral includes printed items like business cards, brochures, direct mail, letterhead, envelopes and fliers. It also includes your company’s digital assets like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter profile pictures, websites, landing pages, mobile apps, and videos.
Social Media
Social data can help provide an overview of your brand and provide valuable insight. The demographic information available through social media allows you to better understand who your audience is. In doing so, you will be able to create content that really appeals to your fans, friends, and followers.
In addition, using your social media assets to perform a sentiment analysis allows you to gain an overview of the wider public opinion around your brand. Nurturing and monitoring online interactions will allow your company to collect the honest, straightforward opinion of the consumer audience.
Website
Branding must be consistent across all media types. This also applies to web design. When website visitors come into contact with your brand, the web page they visit must awaken the associations and experiences they 1) previously had with your brand, or 2) have seen in traditional or digital advertising.
To ensure your website projects a uniform image, keep colors, visuals and typography consistent throughout your website.
Branding helps people differentiate between competition and quickly judge quality.
– @DesignDepot
Brand Advertising
Brand advertising is the process that you use to keep the public aware of your brand, so they continue to buy your products or services. Generating this brand awareness will improve the consumer’s ability to recall or recognize your brand from a brand element, like a logo, jingle, or slogan.
When advertising your brand you must deliver a clear message about your brand’s identity; more specifically, the character and personality of your brand. This is important because, good brand advertising builds brand credibility; it inspires trust.
Brand advertising also works to establish your brand as a leader in its industry. This positioning allows you to out-compete other brands.
Making Changes To Your Branding
If, based on your brand audit, you decide to make changes to your brand, you’ll need to put together a full action plan for rolling out the changes. This must include an extended timeline and clear delegation of responsibilities, both inside and outside your company.
When a brand identity changes, it’s confusing to consumers. So, everywhere the name of your company appears, your branding should be immediately identifiable. The fonts, colors, and logo should always be consistent.
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