How can you conduct brand audits and research?
Brand audits and research are essential tools for managing your brand effectively and strategically. They help you assess your brand’s performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, and uncover opportunities for improvement and innovation.
Brand Auditing Market Research has several instrumental benefits to companies, it:
- Identifies awareness and knowledge gaps that may inform marketing communications with customers, prospects, suppliers or internally.
- Allows companies to prioritise brand attributes in the purchasing decision.
Identifies strengths and weaknesses of a company’s brand that may identify key product or service improvements. - Allows companies to understand any gaps in perception between target groups.
- Allows companies to monitor perceptions of the brand over time and gauge improvements.
Your brand can play a key role in the end purchase of your product, and so we advise the following areas are carefully looked at and answered:
- Awareness – Is everybody aware of you? Are you top of their minds?
- Knowledge – What do people know about you? Are they aware of your full range?
- Liking – Would people consider you? Do you meet their needs? Do they believe in your products? Is your service good? Are you easy to work with?
- Preference/conviction/adoption – Are you a company that people want to deal with? Does your brand image compliment the product you offer? Does the offer have sufficient value to justify the price? What are the barriers to purchase?
Brand Auditing Market Research should be carried out to: increase customer understanding of your brand which, as a result, should equate to repeat purchases and greater word-of-mouth advertising; knock down barriers to purchasing; improve supplier relations and enhance internal communications which, in turn, could have a knock-on effect to employee motivation.
To conduct Brand Auditing Market Research, we would first of all hold a briefing and immersion session with our client so that we can understand more about their brand. We would then carry out an initial exploratory stage with internal staff and suppliers – this would be done qualitatively through in-depth and open interviews – to help develop and effective questionnaire for customers and prospects. Thirdly, a survey of customers and prospects will employ a semi-structured questionnaire with sufficient numbers to develop a robust base that can be monitored over time and to cover all key sectors.
How to conduct Brand Audits and Sesearch in six steps.
- Define Your Goals
Before you start your brand audit and research, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, you might want to increase your brand awareness, loyalty, or differentiation in a certain market segment or geographic area. You should also define your key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track your progress and evaluate your results.
- Gather Internal Data
The next step is to collect and analyze data from your own sources, such as your website, social media, sales, customer service, and marketing campaigns. This will help you understand how your brand is perceived and experienced by your existing and potential customers, as well as your employees and stakeholders. You can use various tools and methods to gather internal data, such as web analytics, social media listening, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and feedback forms.
- Gather External Data
After you have a good overview of your internal data, you need to complement it with external data from your competitors, industry, and market. This will help you benchmark your brand against others and identify gaps and opportunities for differentiation and innovation. You can use various tools and methods to gather external data, such as competitor analysis, market research, industry reports, and trend analysis.
- Analyze and Interpret Data
Once you have collected enough data, you need to synthesize and interpret it to draw meaningful insights and conclusions. You can use various frameworks and models to help you organize and visualize the data, such as SWOT analysis, brand positioning map, brand personality, brand archetype, brand value proposition, and brand equity. You should also look for patterns, trends, correlations, and anomalies that can reveal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your brand.
- Implement and monitor the actions
Based on your analysis and interpretation, you should develop a plan of action to address the issues and opportunities that you have identified. Your plan should include specific objectives, strategies, tactics, resources, and timelines for each action. You should also assign roles and responsibilities to your team members and stakeholders. Once you have implemented your actions, you need to monitor and measure their impact and effectiveness using your KPIs and other metrics.
- Review and update the proces
The final step is to review and update your brand audit and research process regularly. You should evaluate your results and outcomes against your goals and expectations, and identify what worked well and what did not. You should also collect feedback from your customers, employees, and stakeholders, and incorporate their suggestions and recommendations. You should also keep an eye on the changing market and industry conditions, and adapt your brand accordingly.