By Danica Kwon, Data Analyst, Polaris Marketing Research

Do You Need a Brand Audit? Three Questions you need to ask of your Brand.

It’s almost the end of the year with 2012 quickly approaching, and now is the perfect time to reflect and re-evaluate your brand. You might be asking yourself, “Why do I need to re-evaluate my brand? I know what my brand stands for!” But do you know how your customers and prospects perceive it? As Marty Neumeier wrote in The Brand Gap, “A brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.”

A brand audit will give you insight on where your brand stands today, so you understand how to take it into the future. After all, especially in a fickle economy, you can’t just build your brand where the market is now, but where the market is going to be in the future. 

Ask yourself these three questions and start your brand audit right now!

1. How well is your current brand strategy working? Knowing your brand strategy is most important because this is what defines your brand’s character and personality. Brand strategy provides information to help you make key decisions in targeting the right business market and knowing what the market wants and needs from your brand.
2. What are your established resource strengths and weaknesses? Knowing your business’ strengths and weaknesses is a critical piece of information because these are elements that enhance its competitiveness. A business’ strength or weakness can exist in several forms. For example: skilled expertise of employees, valuable physical assets, organizational assets, achievements, etc. Are your resources strengths or liabilities?
3. How strong is your business’ competitive position? Answering this question will ensure that your brand maintains a unique competence that allows it to build and reinforce its competitiveness

Answering these three questions is a good start to your brand audit, but without the proper research it’s risky. Don’t ever guess answering these questions. If you need help with your brand audit contact Polaris!

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Danica Kwon is a Data Analyst in the analytics department at Polaris Marketing Research Inc., where she handles a variety of data manipulation tasks involved in survey research. She graduated from Georgia State University with a BA in Sociology.