When you’re evaluating a marketing program, one of the first things you may look at is the brand. But where should you start and what should you do when it comes to evaluating your brand’s effectiveness?
Now remember, brand is not just the visual identity. As mentioned in my Invest in your brand post: “A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer. It goes beyond the name, image, or phrases – it is the feeling that is felt when one thinks of the business, product, or experience.”
Think about your favorite brands: why do you like them? It could be as major as your favorite sports team to minor as the brand of toilet paper you buy.
There are clear reasons why some brands endure and others do not. Strong brands are consistent, authentic, timeless, and relevant – just to name a few traits. So when you are evaluating a marketing program, how do you know if the brand you have is working, or needs a bit of work?
Start with developing a brand assessment. It should contain the following sections:
Keep in mind that this post isn’t about doing a rebrand. It’s about how you take a look to make that decision. Therefore, if you decide that you need to update or rebrand, the next step is to put together a creative brief that incorporates the reasons for changes and explicit details as to what will be included in the new brand strategy such as attributes, visual strategy, and things to do or avoid.
How to do a brand assessment
Read on below where I lay out how you should go about your brand assessment.
Evaluate your current identity
To evaluate your current identity, you’ll have to do some information gathering.
Gather your existing brand materials
The first step in any branding exercise is to take a look at what you have. Here are some questions you can answer to start out:
Do you have a mission & vision?
Are they accurately reflected in your business – from brand to culture?
What’s your value proposition?
What makes your business unique? Are there any white spaces you occupy?
What is your positioning?
Do you have a positioning statement that clearly describes who you are? How do you tell your brand’s story in an elevator pitch?
What are your key messages?
What topics and themes do you want to own to get all of the above across?
Do you have a brand voice?
How do you speak to your customers (and internally to your employees)? Are you consistent? Do you have a persona your brand adapts, a tone you speak in, or type of language you use?
What is your brand identity?
What are your logos, fonts, color palettes, images – photography and graphics? The best way to assess this, if you don’t have a brand style guide, is to collect all of these items, plus icons, print, digital, ad units, text styles/fonts, web imagery, etc and save them in a folder. Or even copy and paste them into a doc (such as Google Docs or Slides).
Review your audience
This section should be quite easy, as it should be known from your ICP and persona work. The goal of including it here is to cross reference what you’re considering for brand with your target customers. Make sure to include details on their key characteristics, why they buy, and what they need.
Assess your competitive landscape
To help you understand where your brand sits in the landscape, you’ll have to take a look at your current and future competitors. Why are these your competitors (today) or why do you want to compete with the future ones?
Collect information on their positioning and messaging, take note of their reach and customers, and collect information on their visual brand elements.
Afterwards you’ll want to create a list of ways you currently differentiate or opportunities to differentiate. Categories to look at include value prop, messaging, logo down to even color palette or visual style.
Talk to your customers, analysts, investors, and friends
You only know what you know. So talk to people outside of your business. Your perception of your brand may be skewed because of personal preference or influence from the wider company. Only when you talk to a wider group of people will you better understand how your brand hits.
Example questions ask them:
- Describe how you feel when you think about the company.
- Describe what the company does.
- What is your general perception of the brand (favorable or unfavorable) and dig into why.
- If the brand were a person, what type of person would it be?
- Do you understand the company’s vision/mission/positioning?
Thinking about the future
You probably didn’t go through this exercise for no reason. Again, while this post isn’t about what to do for a rebrand, you are doing a brand assessment to begin to evaluate if and where you want to make changes.
Here’s a few tips on where to start.
Lay out your brand attributes – haves, wants, don’t wants
One of the simplest brand exercises is to use a list of adjectives (or phrases) that describe what your current brand looks like today. You can do this on paper, on the computer, even on stickies on a wall or whiteboard. My preference is stickies, because then you can move them around.
Then you make a second list of what you’d like your brand to be (that it doesn’t have already).
The third step is to create 3 columns somewhere with these labels:
- Keep
- Remove
- Add
I’m sure you can tell where I’m going, but start grouping the adjectives if possible. Then start moving things along to each category. When you’re done, you’ll likely be able to see what will need go into “remove” and “add” and if you’ll need a revamp.
Bonus! Determine if you need to refresh, redefine, rebrand, or recast.
Ok, I said this post wasn’t about rebrand… but who am I kidding, I love talking about this stuff. So let’s take a minute to at least lightly assess potential next steps.
Now that you’ve figured out where your brand gaps and needs are, you’ll need to determine the extend of the work you need to do to get there.
There’s 3 levels of “rebrand.” As defined by Sirius Decisions (now Forrester), here’s how you can think of them:
Level 1: Brand Refresh
Why refresh? Existing design elements don’t translate practically (e.g.: into
new production
Cost drivers: Design & production
Implications: Minor
Level 2: Brand Reposition, Redesign, or Redefine
Why reposition, redesign, or redefine?
- Need to change perception in the market
- Leadership introduces a new vision
- Acquisition of new business
- Losing market position
Note: If you decide to alter messaging and visual identity, this is a redefine.
Cost drivers:
- Reposition: Design costs may be low, but production time will be high when messaging is updated; investment in appealing to current customers to accept new positioning
- Redesign: High design & production costs; significant investment in brand launch & activation Implications
Implications:
- Need buy in from the entire company (especially leadership)
- Redesigns touches nearly all content
- Requires a lot of resources
Level 3: Recast
Why Recast?
- Changes in marketplace indicate the existing identity is outdated, misleading, or hopelessly negative
- The company changes drastically (due to acquisition, merger, etc)
- Crisis
Cost driver: Complete redevelopment of messaging & design
Implications:
- Extreme – requires balancing ambition v reality
- Requires a lot of resources and is very expensive
As mentioned previously, I cannot stress the importance of investing in your brand any more. Whatever you decide, you’ll have to list out solid reasons to invest. This isn’t an easy conversation and I wish any marketer in this position all the luck in. the world.
Header Photo by Nirmal Rajendharkumar on Unsplash