I've been asked a lot lately about brand positioning.
Executives and owner/operators want a point of view on their perceived position in the market. One request came from a telecom client, another from a university, and another from a distiller. Not a lot in common among them, yet the implicit question seems to be: “Is our brand correctly positioned for the coming economic recovery?”
It's good to see businesses looking ahead again.
It's hard to understand how to shift a brand without a solid grasp of where the brand is positioned now. A brand audit is a good tool to employ.
A brand audit is a holistic way of looking at a business, and more specifically a company's value proposition married to the way it interfaces with the world. The orientation is definitely around the brand/messaging/promise portrayed inside and outside the firm. The audit involves putting together a framework that allows the right questions to be asked of everyone involved, from employees to customers to suppliers.
Brand audits are designed to sort out perceptions around what a brand stands for and the perceived value proposition. They also end up touching on internal culture, customer experience and host of other related issues. For example, a brand audit on a premium furniture manufacturer might turn up concerns over production quality and showroom presentation, in addition to uncovering positive perceptions of the position of the brand relative to competitors.
A thorough brand audit compares internal and external perspectives. There are inherent objectivity risks tied to brand audits, so mitigating these risks is important. The most obvious option is to get outside help by hiring an independent third party to design and conduct the study. This eliminates bias. For some businesses, this can be cumbersome and/or cost prohibitive. A second means of eliminating or at least minimizing objectivity risk is to conduct the audit in-house, but around a well designed and rigorous process.
Who should be involved?
The owner/operator/business-leader should be involved, but not head the study. There is too much risk of personal opinion clouding any questions or analyses then undertaken. The project leader should come from the ranks or the management team.
What should the process look like?
It principally involves asking a lot of questions. Questions about “how are we doing on…?” will be asked repeatedly. Many groups need to be engaged to get maximum perspective. Each of the groups must be asked the same set of questions, so that answers can be compared. The questions should be designed by more than one person, and then vetted by many stakeholders in the business – looking for leading questions.
For example: a leading question would be “how valuable are our services to you?” An unbiased version would be “on a scale of one to 10, where one = poor and 10 = excellent, what rating would you put on the value of our services?”
What are the components of a basic brand audit, and how they are deployed?
1. Metric design. An old engineering adage is: it is a bad idea to measure without the right measuring stick. This is the stage to build the measuring stick – to decide what is going to be included in scope and what is going to be left out. These elements will be central to all aspects of the audit, so that results can be compared later. Some good elements to include and measure are:
• Clarity of value proposition
• Clarity of strengths and differentiators
• Brand recognition
• Effectiveness of sales and marketing materials
• Appropriateness of pricing
• Perception of quality
• Corporate image effectiveness
2. Study/question design. The next step is to design study areas and questions that will yield data. A good study design includes six areas:
• Internal analysis
• Competitive assessment
• Supplier perspective
• Current customer analysis
• Past customer analysis
• Potential customer assessment
