As the primary communicators of a firm's brand identity, marketing teams often take a lead role in brand management and maintenance. On occasion, it's a good practice to step away from the day-to-day and take a look at the big picture. In this episode, Wendy Simmons and Rachel West explore the components of a successful brand audit. From competitor analysis and visuals assessments, to looking at language and brand personality across digital marketing platforms—the audit can help you identify the areas that are on point and those that are falling short.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 5
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we have Rachel West back with us, and we're gonna talk through the process of conducting a brand audit and really evaluating your brand so you know if you wanna make a change, or have it evolve, or answer questions for people who think it might need to evolve.
We're gonna dig into that conversation.
Hey, Rachel.
Hey, Wendy.
You love branding, you love brand management.
That's been a part of your role in the past.
Brand audits.
Why would we want to talk about this?
Why would this be an important thing for a marketer to do?
Let's dig into it.
So a brand audit is a really wonderful opportunity to determine what's working for our brand.
And ultimately, we want to ensure that our brand values and messaging and tone and visual identity are in alignment with the direction our firm is going, you know, what we envision for the future, who our team is today, who we're hoping to bring on to our teams.
It's just a really important step in ensuring that we continue to grow in a sustainable way, if that is our goal to grow, of course.
Yeah, right.
That's a good point.
It's not always the business goal to grow.
It can be to maintain or to develop deeper expertise in an area or whatever it might be.
So that's really smart.
And it's not just thinking, you know, the brand audit isn't like, let's look at the logo and think, does it look dated or whatever?
I mean, sure, that could be one part of it, but there's way, way more considerations when you think about a brand audit.
Off the top of my head, there's the part which is looking at your competitors.
What are they doing?
A competitor analysis can be super deep.
You know, there can be a lot of components to it.
I like to think about it even just looking at their visuals, right?
What are their logos?
Have you ever done the exercise, Rachel, where you put all the logos on a sheet and you kind of see how your firm looks?
Oh, yes.
Right?
Oh, I've done that quite a few times, and it's...
It's telling.
It's always very...
It is very telling.
Nothing like having your logo at a field of others to be like, oh, wait a second.
Hold on, I never noticed that before.
For architecture and construction, there's a lot of red.
Mm-hmm, a lot of red.
And a lot of boxes and a lot of letters in boxes.
A lot of triangles.
A lot of triangles, that's true.
With landscape architecture, I mean, I'm sure anyone would imagine, but a lot of green in the logos and the word marks.
Oh, yep.
You see that quite a bit.
A leaf.
A leaf.
The green square.
And some of that is hard to avoid, and it actually doesn't mean that your logo is wrong in any way.
Right, absolutely.
But we, especially as marketers, so often we're looking at our logo on our own branded stuff.
We just see it there all the time, and we're not thinking about how a lot of the greater world gets to see it.
It's probably like as part of a sponsorship in a field of logos, or when a pile of RFPs in there, you're seeing all of the contractors all stacked up next to each other.
And just kind of nice to see that.
That's so true.
I think it can really be a point of differentiation.
A really distinctive brand or visual brand identity can really stand out and can really differentiate you from your competition.
Of course, thinking about it more holistically, we would consider the brand personality and brand values and messaging and brand voice with all of those pieces.
But yeah, there are really a lot of elements that we can evaluate when we're conducting a brand audit.
Keeping on that tract of the competitor analysis, there are other things to look at.
We recently were working with a general contractor and looking at safety messages.
An important part of us auditing their branding related to safety was looking at the competitor's safety messages.
So those were specific tag lines just to see like, what is everyone saying?
Is there a common word that literally everyone is saying?
Is that a good thing?
Is that a bad thing?
You want to do that research and honestly, it's so easy to do.
We have the internet, right?
So it's a quick search.
You pull up your top competitors.
Maybe you want to look at some people in a totally different market.
So you're getting a very fresh companies that you're not always being compared to.
But looking at those and seeing like, what are the similarities?
What are they saying about themselves?
What feels kind of special or has resonance that might be different than what you're seeing in your market?
I mean, honestly, pull any amount of information from just doing a deeper dive into your competitors.
And it can also be just such an interesting exercise in giving you ideas of how people are or how firms are ensuring that their brand values are being reflected in all of their different elements.
So, you know, with this GC, we want to ensure that their safety messages feel really authentic and don't feel like simply a marketing, salesy kind of pitch for prioritizing safety.
We want to see that the GC is like living and breathing that.
And if they really do prioritize safety, we want to see how they're doing that.
And it's great when that is reflected on their website and across brand touch points.
Right.
It's an external message in a lot of ways, but honestly with safety, very much an internal message too.
You want it to be authentic so that your team believes it and feels like they have some ownership of their role in that, in this case, safety.
It cannot be so slick that it just loses connection with your team.
Right.
So that's where looking at what other firms are saying in that area can potentially inspire or redirect you to find something that is much more aligned with your brand as a whole instead of just looking at that one initiative.
I've done many competitor analysis for different clients over the years, and often it's as simple as an Excel spreadsheet.
And you can vary the columns and the rows to whatever degree you want, and maybe it's a living document that you continually update, maybe even once a year in a retreat setting or something.
Let's just talk through some of those items that you might want to look at when you're doing competitor analysis related to brand.
Some super basic things that are easy to find on LinkedIn or on the internet is often like number of offices, a location, kind of confirming their geographical reach, how many employees they have, how they're promoting their team.
Are they large and can do everything or are they small and really focused?
And either way can be awesome, but how are they promoting that?
One crucial piece that I always look for when I'm conducting a competitor audit is I want to ensure that we can find the message, their mission, vision, purpose, really clearly.
It shouldn't be something that we have to hunt for because our audience isn't going to want to hunt for it.
We want to make this information as accessible and as consistent and relatable as possible.
So when I go on to a firm's website, I want to see who they are, what they're about, what services they offer, and I want that to all be really easily accessible.
You're doing a couple of things by putting it into the spreadsheet is that you're seeing and understanding, absorbing what they're saying about themselves, seeing any trends, summarizing it there, because obviously, we can't have the whole website.
And then eventually, looking for differentiators for your own firm to say, well, if everyone is saying that they are integrated, whether we are or not, how can we communicate what we bring that's going to matter to our clients and also not sound exactly like everyone else?
Highlighting some of those words will be pretty helpful.
Some simple things that could be part of this competitor audit or analysis document is just what are their colors?
It seems really straightforward, but is everyone blue?
Is everyone red?
What are you seeing there?
Can you find that there are secondary tertiary colors as part of their brand to understand where your company is going to fit in that visual component as well?
That's so true.
Color can be just such a fascinating element of thinking about brand.
I know we're working right now with a client and we're doing a website redesign, and there's a lot of blue.
And it's interesting to think about the psychology of blue.
What does it mean?
A lot of times, it instills trust, it's bold, it can mean so many different things to so many different companies, but there's an interesting psychology to it.
And those are things that we look for as well when we're conducting these both competitive analyses and brand audits.
If blue is your brand color and your firm feels really good about that because it embodies everything that you stand for as a company and you like that, but you're also in a sea of blue, then you're going to want to find some other visual elements to help communicate what makes you different.
And it doesn't feel like you're just another blue banner on a job site, right?
We're going to show some variety there.
Right.
And many other things that can be part of this analysis spreadsheet, but the reason why you're kind of tracking it, and it doesn't have to be in Excel, it could be in beautifully designed and in design, but you can pull content from and share with your leadership team as you are making decisions and deciding like, we need to provide some evidence here or we need to show some points.
This is going to help illustrate the recommendations eventually you might be providing to your team as part of a brand audit.
Let's talk about some other things that we would look at when evaluating the brand besides the competitors, because that's one element, and it's almost kind of off on the side on its own, because you want to also be looking inwardly at your stuff.
So, your brand positioning, that component is like how you are communicating what you offer to the marketplace, right?
And you might think that it is clearly communicated, but a great place to start is looking at your website and understanding like, would a stranger or someone who's new to the company be able to understand what we do in what, two seconds?
I'm not sure what the rule of thumb is, but it better be pretty quick.
It better be pretty quick.
Yeah.
And we've looked at some brands and some websites where even after a deeper dive, the question is, what do they do?
I don't understand.
And well, no, it's not the most exciting, sexiest way of presenting yourself or to list what your services are.
It is so important that somewhere really easily accessible on that website, you are clearly explaining what it is that you're offering to your audience.
Yes.
And then this extra level of positioning is what makes your firm additionally special and how they offer that.
Positioning your firm as now the expert or the leader or the go-to or the ultimate best choice, right?
So it's kind of like dialing in the position.
So first of all, you have to know, you have to clearly communicate what you do, and then why someone should select you over all of the other choices.
None of us are standing alone.
There are other choices no matter what industry you're in.
So you want to make sure that brand positioning is solid.
The brand promise, we've talked about this in other episodes about evaluating your brand.
But what is your firm saying and committing to your clients?
Is that clearly communicated through all of your external messaging?
Rachel, as a brand manager, you're in charge of communicating the brand promise in big and small ways, in all of these different ways that you're doing in communications.
You want to make sure that's really clear.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And you want to make sure there's follow through.
So I think one thing that is really important to consider is not only is this message, this promise clearly communicated across touch points, but you need to know that your team is acting on it.
You know, if stakeholder experience and delivering a superlative customer client experience is a priority for your firm, you want to ensure that every interaction with your stakeholders is supporting that.
From your project designers to your HR team, you want to ensure that everyone is contributing to this positive client experience.
Yeah, and one of the ways that gets demonstrated externally is, you know, making sure you've captured client testimonials that support what you're putting out there as your brand promise, or in a longer format, maybe a case study that proves that you delivered on what you said you would or brought even, you know, that higher level of value.
So the marketing team, those are a couple of ways that they can make sure that that brand promise is actually being captured.
After your team has done the hard work of delivering it, how do you then show it off in everything you do?
So true.
And one other fun way to engage your stakeholders and your clients is to see them as advisors, because they can also help inform and shape your brand identity and strategy.
You can, you know, run ideas by them, or ask them a series of questions, and that could give you a lot of really invaluable information when you're developing your brand or evolving it.
Yeah.
I mean, you, Rachel, love to be the storyteller, so this must all kind of come together, right?
You're interviewing the team to find out their experience there.
What kind of tricks do you have for teasing out those components of the brand promise through your storytelling process?
A lot of times I like to just ensure that I am actively engaging with people across an organization.
I think it's so important to get really diverse perspectives, and when I'm telling a story, you don't want it to be just from the executive level leadership.
You want it to be from your trade partners or from your interns even.
I think there are really compelling stories that come from an intern who has spent maybe two or three months working at a larger organization.
And maybe it's a first, maybe it's a second professional work experience, if you can call the internship that.
But they can just provide such fresh perspective on your company and the values that you bring.
Right.
They're not encumbered by having too much history behind them.
Yeah.
So what you might be hearing from them is a real true version of how the brand promise shows up every day in the work that you do.
It's a good idea.
More anecdotes from the interns and the first year people.
Let's do that.
What about evaluating the brand personality?
That, gosh, brand personality is just like it touches every element of the brand, right?
Visually and the voice and the project you go for, don't go for that kind of thing.
Let's talk through how you would actually assess that and give it a grade to decide, like if it's working out there.
So the brand personality, like people, we connect with brands that have similar values.
So a personality, it really brings to life that brand.
And what we look out for is to ensure that, well, one, across all brand touch points, you are conveying a consistent and cohesive brand personality.
But also I like to think of it as if this is someone I'm planning to work with or a company I'm planning to work with, I wanna know that the personality is like a good friend, like someone that I would get along with really, really well.
And I think that is, when that is communicated clearly, that brand kind of becomes personified and there's a stronger connection that can be formed between company and client or audience.
Yeah, you're giving a company the human traits, right?
And sharing that.
And I was thinking, Rachel, you were saying like, you know, you want to be well aligned with the company that you would choose to do business with or whatever that might be, which I guess goes to say, a company is not going to be the right choice for every person, right?
So true.
We all have different personalities ourselves.
We cannot be aligned with everyone.
So I think it's a better practice to be as a firm, be true to yourself and what is really part of your brand values and other things that we've talked about.
Having that pretty solid and then just making sure that what you're putting out there reflects that so that it's not a bait and switch out there in the marketplace.
Oh, we thought they were all this type of company.
No, it turns out they're not at all or hands over the map.
The authenticity piece is so important.
Yeah.
Figure out who you are as a firm and then double down on it as part of your brand personality.
And make sure it shows up and so that you're not so generic.
It should definitely be a differentiator.
Yeah, that's the way you would evaluate that and give it a score and decide how to ramp it up even more if you're going to do a brand refresh.
We haven't talked about brand equity, but that is a pretty important piece of evaluating your brand.
If you are a really long time established brand in a marketplace, well, there's going to be some brand equity there.
Probably very, mostly positive.
I mean, brand equity, you think about it, it's like built up value.
You don't want to be in the negative.
Right.
Absolutely.
A proven track record and repeat clients.
I mean, every brand is going to have some amount of equity.
We don't want to be like Enron, right?
So that has brand equity.
That was not going to be on the positive side.
If there are past issues or I mean in our industry, it could be lawsuits or failed projects or things that have leadership changes that harm the brand equity.
I mean, these things have happened for sure.
That can give you a little more firepower as a marketing team to decide that it's time to go further with your brand refresh because you're okay losing some of that brand equity or maybe some of those connections are not reflecting the true values of the current firm.
And then on the other side is going to be if you have really strong, amazing brand equity, you don't want to throw that away, right?
You don't want to lose that.
You're like, oh, let's refresh this because we want to be blue instead of red or vice versa.
And there's a change in ownership and you want to have more agency in deciding who you are and what you do.
There's still so much value if you do have strong brand equity to build upon it.
And you don't have to scrap your brand and start fresh.
So there are so many different motivations and you just want to ensure you're being really intentional.
Yeah.
So when we're evaluating brand equity, we're looking at that value that the company has in the marketplace compared to its competitors, right?
So this rolls into the competitor analysis piece of it and giving it a bit of a score.
And sometimes you need to do some things like client perception surveys to confirm.
Maybe sometimes if you're an internal team, you have an idea of what that equity is, but this might be a case to do some surveys or have some one-on-one conversations with your clients and just do a little confirming out there to make sure you're not going off of a perception that is not accurate to what's actually going on there in the marketplace.
So this can be an area where being in-house or your own leadership team might have some ideas that feel true to them but need to be tested in the marketplace.
So just be aware when you're thinking about brand equity to get some outside perspectives as well.
Such a good point.
The other piece of that evaluating the brand that I just want to hit on and just started with that is the brand perceptions, right?
What do people feel about your brand from their own experiences and stories in the marketplace, other relationships that maybe they haven't had an experience with your company, but if they're asking trusted advisors in their network, what are those recommendations and stories being told?
So spending some time thinking about the client perceptions is an important piece.
It is an important piece.
You know, I think simply put, you want to ensure that your brand identity, which is, you know, the way that you want your clients and audience to perceive you, is aligned with this brand image of the way that your clients and audience are actually perceiving you.
And if those two are in alignment, I would say you most likely have something to work with.
Yeah, I mean, you're looking at all of those, these elements that we've talked about, and even more, you know, you can go as deep as you want to go, but you're getting a general score for the brand.
You know, where are the weaknesses?
Where are the opportunities?
What needs to be adjusted because you can fine-tune it?
And what might need or require just a full rethinking, rejiggering of the brand to make sure that what you do moving forward is like with the best possible strategy?
I think one thing we also want to consider, which we hadn't touched on yet, was data points.
That's another piece of the brand audit, is looking at a lot of these analytics and metrics and just ensuring that are we reaching our audience?
Are we reaching the people that we want to be marketing our services to?
And if not, maybe our audience has changed significantly and we need to change our approach.
That sometimes happens when we conduct these audits.
It's hard to draw the line from where your brand is contained and how it bleeds into everything else, right?
So part of doing some brand analysis is going to be looking at your website, mini website audit, looking at your proposals, mini proposal audit, you know?
I mean, all of those elements, like, what are we saying in social media, you know?
I'm sure that's coming across to our listeners as maybe like, well, that is a lot, but your brand touches everything.
So it really does.
You want to scale it and start with, I mean, simply again, like going to that spreadsheet and mapping out the things that you're curious about and you want to compare, putting that content in there and then building on it as you want to take a deeper dive comparing how the proposals are being presented, comparing social media content, getting those data points like you said, Rachel.
But you don't have to be overwhelmed and start with some small parts.
Some baby steps.
Yeah.
Start proving some points in your own mind of like, yes, I thought this could be an issue.
I see that there are some red flags or yellow flags here.
Let's dig into this further.
And then maybe depending on what you find out, congratulations if you feel like, wow, I've got a really strong brand.
The brand equity is there.
It's solid compared to our competitors or at least like holding its own.
Yay.
Now you can like focus your marketing efforts in one area.
Like let's continue driving these messages, put more resources in there.
Or you're like, uh-oh, red flag, there's some weaknesses here.
Maybe there's an opportunity then to have conversations about like, what are we going to tackle first?
How are we going to address this?
What are the proper steps?
because obviously, if you're going to redo a website, maybe you want to focus on the branding part before you like put all the energy.
So it can help you decide long-term what your marketing strategies are going to be in the order that you might want to prioritize them.
Oh, well, that's a scratch the surface on a brand audit.
I think it was a good starting point.
Well, we should probably at some point push out there some information, maybe like a cheat sheet on what marketers could do to like conduct their own mini brand audit.
I think that'd probably be a helpful thing.
I mean, it is something that we do a lot, and it's pretty customized to our clients and what they're trying to achieve.
But I feel like as a starting point, that was pretty good conversation.
Rachel, any other tips or thoughts that you wanna add in here on this?
I was thinking that I would love to pick your brain, Wendy.
I received a question from a listener involving wanting to start the process, being really interested in conducting a brand audit, but not having the tools or resources to hire a third party to come in and do this.
This person was curious about how to go about doing this brand audit in-house.
And are there any available resources that someone could start with to conduct their own internal audit?
Just really simply looking at what's your brand positioning, how, you know, how is that clearly defined?
What is your visual identity from the logo to your photography to how you're presenting everything about your brand out there to the outside world?
How does that look?
How does it compare with your competitors?
What's that personality and voice?
Is the tone disjointed and all over the place, or is it pretty dialed in, and is it actually reflecting your brand promise?
You know, so there's that balance of those two pieces.
You know, do you have some of the tools that you need to effectively implement and communicate to other people your brand guidelines and standards, whether it's the brand book so that you're bringing new team members up to speed and people can be ambassadors to your brand, or if you have brand guidelines that you can share, so a social media team can help make sure that they're staying on point, or if you have an outside support service that they understand and are implementing all your colors just perfectly, that's a piece.
If you don't have it, there's a minus, something to put on the list.
And then the perceptions and the brand equity, judging that.
Now, I mean, I don't have a score sheet for everyone, right?
But you're going to have to take that time to do some research and have a gut analysis on, we are struggling in this area or this is really strong.
And don't forget to get some outside perspectives there.
So those are the categories I'd say you could start with.
And if you're a super marketing geek, I bet you would enjoy digging into them and then learning more.
And marketing is your area of expertise, so own that and feel free to like share it with your leadership team, start those conversations and see what they bring back to you so that you can kind of make some informed recommendations from that.
Yeah, that sounded great.
That was great.
Okay.
It's kind of a nice like recap of just everything.
Thank you so much for having me, Wendy.
It was a blast.
Yeah.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing and graphic design by the team at Middle of Six.
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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.