As the name implies, a brand audit takes stock of your brand assets in order to asses their value and performance at a given moment in time, and is typically launched to address a particular problem like inconsistent messaging, stagnant brand performance, or some other issue. Sometimes, changing market trends or the arrival of new competitors can also trigger a brand audit.

Unlike other kinds of brand research, a brand audit is meant to create a snapshot of your brand’s current status, and is often used as a starting point to move on to more in-depth explorations of the brand itself or market research more generally.

A brand audit measures the dynamics affecting things like brand loyalty, brand perception, brand positioning, brand value and brand identity, but it doesn’t probe for solutions. Its only purpose is to identify existing or potential problems in order to form a clear picture.

First, define your scope or area of investigation. Below are some of the most common lines of inquiry for brand audits:

Collect all available brand identity assets, like logos, color palettes, icons, etc. These may be pieces of printed collateral, like stationery or digital instances on your website and email headers. Include institutional copy, such as taglines, slogans, mission statements or other customer-facing brand copy.

Divide these assets into two categories: Tangible and Intangible. All your logos, colors and basically anything visual goes into your tangible bin, and all your brand copy – both internal and customer facing –, lands in the intangible bin.

Once you have all you have accounted for all assets and determined the focus of your inquiry, you can begin to build your framework or plan of action. For this, it is important to consider the following:

Brand audits should be quantitative rather than qualitative in nature to give an objective picture of the present state of your brand. Design your questions to elicit binary responses like yes or no, and refrain from asking leading questions or drawing conclusions. Remember, you’re collecting data, not opinions.

Make sure you have an understanding of what your competition is doing relative to your particular focus. This information will be critical for identifying your advantages or shortcomings in the final analysis.

Tap into your circle to find high-level people inside or outside of your organization, who can provide valuable insight and help you discern the information, or maybe even share their own experience with brand auditing.

There are a lot of AI brand auditing tools out there these days promising instantaneous, data-driven results. While AI may offer some value when it comes to sorting through massive data sets and large-scale pattern recognition, the reality is that effective brand auditing cannot be done by machine alone.

As with any research endeavor, try to vet your sources of information and filter out any fraudulent data. This is especially important for any Internet-based data, such as website analytics or online surveys. The cleaner, the better.

The results of a brand audit will help you find where your brand is coming up short in relation to your competition and/or your own business objectives. A comprehensive view of your brand’s overall performance can catch problems before they spiral out of control or it can inform ways in which you can take your company to the next level.

For example, if your brand audit reveals that your positioning no longer resonates with your target market, it may be necessary to launch a market study to know what the latest trends are in your particular niche in order to recalibrate your brand positioning. On the other hand, a positive result can reinforce your branding acumen and help you lean in to certain marketing directions, with more information than you had before.

Ultimately, it is a tool for gauging the overall health of your brand. Its purpose is to diagnose, but it’s just a starting point for further research that can help you find the right solutions to any problems or the next steps to take your company to the next level.

Think of a brand research strategy like a cup and all the data that you need to gather as the water that’s going to fill that cup. This cup has to be big enough to hold as much water as you require, but also small enough to hold in your hand. In other words, your strategy must accommodate your objectives as well as your resources.

There is no single brand research strategy that fits everybody. No template, model, blueprint or AI prompt that you can just plug in to see results. Done right, a brand research strategy is an indispensable tool that you will use over and over again to refine your brand positioning, understand your customer, and make decisions about your brand strategy, more broadly speaking.

There are five basic avenues that brand research can take: Brand loyalty, brand perception, brand positioning, brand equity and brand identity. Each of these can be examined through a number of different methodologies and approaches. Exploring each one can give you a good idea of their relative importance.

Perhaps the most difficult to measure precisely, brand loyalty is nevertheless important to gauge. Traditionally, surveys have been used to query customers directly. But this approach becomes prohibitive at scale, where tracking repeat purchase patterns is the preferred method. Measuring brand loyalty helps you identify high-value customers, which in turn, can help you reduce customer acquisition costs when paired with other research.

Very significant in the age of social media, brand perception deals with a customer’s sense of your brand. Literally and figuratively. When people talk about your brand by the water coolers at the office or at the dog park, in online review boards or on Facebook, they are talking about how your brand made them feel. Whether it was something they smelled, tasted, heard or actually felt, your brand’s reputation is on the line in these exchanges. As a result, monitoring brand perception is not only crucial. It has to be done constantly.

Of all the research silos, brand perception is probably going to be the most time and resource intensive. From focus groups to brand surveys to social media insights, measuring brand perception asks four basic questions: What concepts do people associate with the brand, what feelings they associate with the brand, how do they describe the brand, and what experiences do they have with the brand. Consistent capture of these metrics and how you respond over time will produce valuable insight into what really moves the needle and in which direction.

As a core element of your entire brand proposition, understanding the overall state of your brand positioning is fundamental. All your brand research strategy should be looking for here is whether or not what you decided to tell the customer about what your brand represents holds true in their mind.

Factors that can change your customers’ idea of what your brand represents can be external, like an intrinsic shift in the market or it can result from inconsistent brand messaging. As a result, the data required to asses the strength or viability of your brand positioning should be holistic. You can glean information from brand surveys, market reports, and many other sources.

High brand equity is what is built up over time through a brand’s presence in the marketplace and represents the sum total of its consumer, financial, and brand strength metrics. A combination of reputation, perception, and net worth, that imbues the brand with a kind of seniority it can use as leverage to secure market advantages unavailable to less recognized brands.

Unless you’re a company like Coca-Cola or Volkswagen, that’s been around for a hundred years, brand equity is something you’re probably striving for. And a brand research strategy can help you do that by making sure you stay on top of how your brand is performing at all levels and working to improve any shortcomings.

Bad customer service, inconsistent products, unethical or scandalous associations, onerous pricing without added value. All of these things can detract from brand equity no matter how long you’ve been around. Knowing what drives customer loyalty, which brand attributes resonate the most, and what you can do to foster greater brand awareness are all key to building your brand equity.

Finally, the brand’s visual identity. At once the least meaningful and the most critical part of your brand. This paradox has led many a company astray, because they either place too much emphasis on these graphical elements or not enough.

At its core, a brand identity has two main responsibilities: To stand out and reflect the brand’s personality. Everything else is up to how your brand is managed and the way you handle your business, and it’s important to know what your identity can and can’t do. However, a poorly fashioned or incomplete brand identity can inhibit growth from the get-go.

Brand identity is closely tied to brand recognition, but they are not the same thing. The former comprises your logo, color palettes, typography libraries and brand iconography, while the latter is the ability of your target market to pick your brand out of a crowd. If your logo is at the top of mind when they do, your brand identity is working as it should. Monitoring your brand identity’s effectiveness through surveys and social listening can help to refine your brand identity and boost brand recognition.

To continue with our cup analogy, all the research silos described above are the equivalent of primary sources of water. Think aquifers or large reservoirs. You can’t just go to these places and dip your cup. You have to define the specific metrics that you are going to measure as part of your brand research strategy.

What kind of ‘water’ do you need in your cup? Well, first you have to decide what is most relevant to your objectives. Always start here and choose what kind of knowledge is necessary to effectively meet those needs. Second, give yourself time. Data only becomes actionable when there is enough of it to run tests and values of the same metric can be compared.

Do you want to measure your brand’s performance relative to your competition? Design a brand research strategy that tracks brand preference, awareness, consideration and usage. Are you more interested in knowing how your brand identity is aligning with your positioning in the marketplace? Try measuring brand associations, quality, and purchase.

Whatever your direction, don’t over-complicate things. Look to achieve your research goals with the fewest metrics possible and avoid the temptation of trying to gather too many different types of data. More often than not, too much information undermines clarity and leads to ineffective actions.

The following are the most commonly used metrics, though there are many others. It all depends on how deep you want to go:

A broad sample that cuts across your target market’s geographical region and demographics will produce the best data to spot attitude changes and perceptual shifts. Most brand research strategies start there and then drill down with more specific sample profiles in order to fine tune their findings.

Ultimately, your sample size and respondent profile will depend on the resources you are willing to commit to your brand research strategy. Focus group providers or survey specialists can offer a wide variety of options in this area, or you might want to use your own, more organic sample if you have the capability.

At the end of the day, the most important factor will always come down to the quality of your inquiries, and whether they can elicit useful responses. On that note, its also crucial that you continuously purge bad or low quality data. Unfortunately, issues like straightlining, duplicates, and location fraud are common in the survey industry. Keeping your data as “clean” as possible will only improve its quality and usefulness.

So, do you really need a brand research strategy? The short answer is yes. The longer answer yes, but don’t overfill your cup. Your brand research strategy may consist of nothing more than a three-question survey, that you hand to customers directly to learn how they feel about patronizing your store, or it can be a multi-faceted, broad exploration of your standing in the market and brand loyalty.

Regardless of your company’s size or ambitions, a brand research strategy is an integral part of keeping that conversation between you and your customer going. You can’t possibly know what to say to your customers if you don’t know what they are talking about. A brand research strategy allows you to listen with intention and gives you the tools to respond in ways that contribute to your brand’s value.