The Brand Management Audit (Marketing)

A six-step approach to evaluating the business performance of any brand – and its importance to your company.

Every company has at least one brand – even if it is simply the company name. This self-assessment audit will let you examine the business performance of any brand and assess how well the brand identity is performing its function. Use it to:

• determine the brand’s role/importance within the company
• discover what values the brand suggests to your customers
• improve day-to-day brand management
• understand where the brand can be extended to include new products or stretched to access new markets.

1. Deciding what needs to be audited.
2. Choosing the audit team.
3. Setting objectives.
4. Gathering data from written sources.
5. Managing interviews.
6. Analyzing results.

Overall, the audit offers a systematic way of understanding what brands are and what added value they offer, both to the consumer and to the company. It helps to explain what implicit promises the brand is making to the consumer, and why the consumer is likely (or not) to believe them. It can be used to isolate the key elements of the business model giving the brand its commercial success and sustaining its competitive advantage.

The results of the audit can be used either to achieve more effective management of an existing brand, or to widen exploitation of the brand property, for instance through line extensions.

The audit includes a detailed guide to the audit process:

• How to set-up and staff the audit team
• How to create an audit project plan and lay the groundwork
• How to gather, analyse and share results
• How to write audit reports, make recommendations and deal with resistance to those recommendations.

The final section of the audit includes more than 20 pages of detailed questions and checklists – ready for use at each stage of the self-assessment audit.

[Note: this is a non-financial audit and does not cover current accountancy practices for attaching a monetary value to a brand]