Brand audit
Ambitious businesses change faster than their brands do. A brand audit tells you whether the brand that got you here can deliver the future you want to achieve.
Who it's for
Businesses stepping into new territory
A new market, a new category, a move from product to solution, from regional to global. Ambition has moved on and the brand hasn't been asked to keep up.
Leadership weighing a change and unsure how far to take it
Refine, evolve or replace. That's a costly decision to make on gut feel, and an expensive one to get wrong in either direction.
Businesses that sense a gap between what they've become and how they show up
The company has grown into something the current identity no longer quite describes, and everyone can feel it before anyone can name it.
Leadership handed a brand through a merger, a restructure or a change at the top
You didn't build it, you're now answerable for it, and you need an objective read on whether it's an asset or a liability before you decide anything.
What it answers
Whether who you are still fits where you're going, and if not, how much needs to change
This is the decision most businesses reach for a rebrand to make, and reach for it too early, before anyone's established whether change is actually warranted or how far it needs to go. The audit comes first. It puts evidence under the question so the answer isn't a matter of whoever argues hardest in the room.
It looks in two directions at once. Outward, at how the market actually sees you, how you sit against the businesses you're really measured against, and whether your brand reads the way you think it does. Inward, at whether your own people share one idea of what the business is, or several competing ones nobody's reconciled. The most costly gaps almost always sit between those two views, and you can only see them by looking at both.
At the end you know one of three things: the brand is sound and the work is to use it more sharply, it needs evolving in specific ways, or it needs more fundamental change. Whichever it is, you'll know why, and you'll have the evidence to defend the call.
What you find out
The approach
The advantage of clarity
The majority of brand decisions start with the conclusion and go looking for evidence later. I work the other way round: build the picture first, inside and out and let the recommendation be the last thing that happens, not the first. The shape below is typical. The depth is scoped to what you're actually deciding.
Frame the question
Get specific about what's really being decided and what evidence would settle it. Most of the value is won or lost here.
Build the internal picture
Interviews, and where useful a survey, to surface what your own people believe and where they quietly disagree.
Read the outside
How the market sees you, how competitors position, and where you genuinely stand against them.
Bring the two together
Internal belief against external reality, so the gaps become impossible to ignore.
Land on a recommendation
A clear, defensible call, keep, evolve or replace, delivered in person, not left on a slide to decode.
Where the stakes are high or the decision is heading for a board, external research can be widened to give the recommendation more weight. We agree that at the outset.
What you leave with
Where the audit points to change, its findings become the foundation for that work rather than something you pay to establish twice.
A clear read on the current brand's strengths and the places it's working against you
An honest picture of where internal belief and external reality diverge
A view on how you stand against the competitors that actually matter
A direct recommendation: keep, evolve or replace, with the reasoning to back it
The evidence base to take that recommendation forward with confidence, whatever it turns out to be
Get in touch
Ready to get clear?
Get in touch and we'll talk through where the business is heading, what's brought the question to the surface and what it would take to answer it properly.
Prefer email? hello@adamarnold.me
Questions?
Is this just a check on my logo and guidelines?
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No. Consistency is one small input. The real question this answers is whether your brand still fits where the business is going, and what, if anything, to change.
We think we need a rebrand. Why start here?
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How fixed is the process?
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Who inside the business needs to be involved?
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Can it stand alone, or does it lead into other work?
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