What's your brand's secret to standing out?

In a crowded and competitive market, how can your brand stand out from the rest? What makes your brand unique, memorable, and valuable to your customers? The answer lies in your brand strategy, the process of defining and communicating your brand's identity, personality, and promise. In this article, you'll learn how to conduct a brand audit and analysis, the first step in creating a powerful brand strategy that will help you differentiate your brand and attract loyal fans.

1 What is a brand audit and analysis?

A brand audit and analysis is a comprehensive and systematic examination of your brand's current position, performance, and perception in the market. It involves collecting and analyzing data from various sources, such as customer feedback, competitor research, market trends, and internal documents. The goal is to identify your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as to evaluate how well your brand aligns with your vision, mission, and values.

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Arnab Karmakar

AVP Strategic Planning - at Digitas
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It is imperative to marry the mechanical aspects of data collection with an emotive lens of investigation for the analysis to be insightful. Start with a hypothesis like 'My brand is X but we want it to be Y' and let the analysis refute or validate the 'X' and 'Y'. Couple it with the questions - 'Who is all this for?’ and 'What is stopping us or helping us get there?’ While quantitative and factual information helps us stick to our realities, their impact and emotional relevance on internal and external stakeholders shows us true opportunity for Innovation.

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2 Why do you need a brand audit and analysis?

A brand audit and analysis can provide you with the secret to standing out, uncovering what makes your brand unique, relevant, and consistent. It can help you understand your value proposition and how it solves customers' problems. You can also gain insights into your brand's personality, tone of voice, visual elements, and how it compares to competitors. Additionally, it can reveal how your brand performs across different channels and touchpoints, allowing you to optimize the customer experience. Through these findings, you can identify areas for improvement and innovation to make your brand stand out.

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Arnab Karmakar

AVP Strategic Planning - at Digitas
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In a nutshell, a thoughtfully carried out Brand audit and analysis with due diligence towards brand introspection can not only highlight possible areas of 'differentiation' but also point towards opportunities of true 'distinction'. After the audit, try and answer - What can my brand tangibly or intangibly provide that no one else can, taking our current internal and external realities in account?

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3 How to conduct a brand audit and analysis?

A brand audit and analysis can be conducted in various ways, depending on resources, objectives, and scope. Generally, the process involves four steps: defining brand goals and objectives, gathering data and information, analyzing and interpreting the data, and reporting and recommending. To assess your brand's position, performance, and perception, you should consider surveys, interviews, focus groups, online reviews, social media analytics, website analytics, sales reports, marketing materials, etc. From the data collected you can discover patterns, trends, gaps, and insights that relate to your brand's goals and objectives as well as affect your brand's SWOT analysis. Finally, you must present your findings and recommendations to stakeholders while prioritizing and implementing actions that will improve your brand strategy.

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4 What are the benefits of a brand audit and analysis?

A brand audit and analysis can provide you with many advantages, such as clarifying your brand's identity, personality, and promise. It can also enhance your brand's relevance, consistency, and credibility, as well as increase its awareness, recognition, and loyalty. Moreover, it can help you improve your brand's competitive advantage and market share, optimize its customer experience and satisfaction, and ensure that its internal and external communication and culture are aligned.

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5 What are the challenges of a brand audit and analysis?

A brand audit and analysis can present some challenges, such as finding reliable data and information, balancing quantitative and qualitative data and methods, and avoiding biases and assumptions. Additionally, managing time and resources, communicating with stakeholders, and adapting to changing customer needs and market conditions can be difficult. To overcome these challenges, it is important to plan ahead, define your scope and criteria, use multiple sources and tools, validate your data, involve different perspectives and feedback, and remain flexible.

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Arnab Karmakar

AVP Strategic Planning - at Digitas
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In my experience, I've noticed that a hard focus on SWOT can also cloud our vision with the 'Weakness' and 'Threat', thus limiting our appetite for Innovation. Try doing a SOAR analysis along with SWOT, i. e. also consider Aspirations - 'Where we want to be' and Results - 'How do we know we have arrived' to arrive at more fruitful results

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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What's your brand's secret to standing out?

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1 What is a brand audit and analysis?

2 Why do you need a brand audit and analysis?

3 How to conduct a brand audit and analysis?

4 What are the benefits of a brand audit and analysis?

5 What are the challenges of a brand audit and analysis?

6 Here’s what else to consider

Brand Strategy

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What's your brand's secret to standing out?

1

2

3

4

5

6

1 What is a brand audit and analysis?

2 Why do you need a brand audit and analysis?

3 How to conduct a brand audit and analysis?

4 What are the benefits of a brand audit and analysis?

5 What are the challenges of a brand audit and analysis?

6 Here’s what else to consider

Brand Strategy

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