The Wonderful Guide to Brand Analysis

Whether you’re looking to rebrand your company or just trying to find areas of improvement, a brand analysis can help you identify and understand your differentiators to ensure your messaging, services and products, and customer outreach efforts are in tune with your customers’ needs. The key is to not view your brand as a static idea; it should be constantly evolving and growing. It can be easy to stray from your strategic direction, but regular brand analysis can get you back on track.

Before we get started, let’s break down a few key terms.

Quick Reference Glossary

Brand Equity: The value of a brand that takes into consideration both financial and non-financial assets. Non-financial assets include all distinguishing elements of a brand as measured by public awareness, perception, and influence.

Brand Strategy: A business plan that includes specific long-term marketing goals that lead a company to have a successful brand that becomes synonymous with its character and values.

Brand Voice: The way a company communicates with its customers and other various stakeholders. There should be uniformity in words, tone, attitude, and the conveyance of values across all channels and interactions with other people.

Visual Identity: A company’s visual identity is made up of its name, logo, symbol, design, and any other visual component that distinguishes it from competitors. As with brand voice, a company’s visual identity should present consistent and cohesive imagery, color schemes, and tones across all channels.

Brand Awareness: This is the extent to which a company is identifiable in a crowded market. Expansion of brand awareness is often a major goal of marketing campaigns and is absolutely critical for new companies or new product launches.

Brand Gap: A brand gap is the difference between a company’s brand strategy and reality. Essentially, it represents the areas of improvement that are identified through a brand analysis. When these gaps are closed, a company can connect better with customers, thereby raising the brand’s equity.

How to Conduct A Brand Analysis

Step 1: Consider Using a Third Party

Sometimes, business owners and marketers are too close to their brand to conduct an objective brand analysis. Internal bias is extremely difficult to remove and can often cloud judgement when conducting a brand audit. A third party can identify and explain brand gaps that you may not be able to see yourself, which can lead to innovative ideas and creative solutions.

Here at Wonder, we tap into our vast network of analysts who can provide an objective perspective when conducting a brand analysis. Our analysts work to pinpoint inconsistencies in brand voice or visual identity that may not be apparent to internal teams and deliver unbiased results that improve business processes for companies both large and small.

Step 2: Create a Framework

If you’ve decided to go it alone, you’ll want to start by creating a framework of the company’s mission, values, and strategic goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Your mission statement and values should be clearly stated and will drive your organization’s purpose. All subsequent business decisions should derive from the mission statement and values. If you company does not currently have a mission statement, a brand analysis can help you create one, as the framework should include the components that comprise a mission statement, which are the following:

• The scope of your operation
• The kinds of products and/or services you provide
• Your intended audience (target market)
• Your company’s values.

Other components of the initial framework should include your distribution channels, partnerships, pricing, marketing channels, and social media platforms. The evaluation of these components will provide a comprehensive look at your brand.

Step 3: Obtain Customer Feedback

Understanding your customer is perhaps the most critical component of the entire brand analysis. This is because their experience is directly related to how well you are communicating your brand. When you solicit customer feedback, it not only tells the customer that you are listening to them, but it also provides direct first-hand insights into brand gaps.

There are many ways to obtain customer feedback, which can include surveys, phone calls, and comment cards, but if you are looking for instant perceptions, you can turn to reviews and social media. A review audit of all comments and ratings from customers can help identify pain points, understand where your brand is weak, and provide you with considerations for brand evolution.

Step 4: Analyze Marketing Efforts

This is where brand voice and visual identity come into play. Take a look at any marketing materials, videos, and advertisements published since your last brand analysis and with a critical eye, determine the level of consistency among all components. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my logo consistently displayed on all marketing materials?
• Am I using color schemes that can be recognized as belonging to my brand?
• Do all colors align with the company’s mission and values?
• Do the marketing materials include design elements from my website?
• Is your language consistent across materials (slogans, tag lines, descriptions)?
• Are the words reflective of our mission and values?

You will also want to examine your marketing channels and their effectiveness. Understanding how customers are engaging with your marketing efforts is critical to knowing how to best reach them for future campaigns. Analyze number of views, comments, reactions, shares, and other data to grasp the impact of your marketing efforts.

Step 5: Analyze Website Traffic

In today’s internet landscape, there are various tools that allow you to determine how customers find your website. SimilarWeb and Alexa will give you some preliminary data for free, but paid subscriptions can allow you to fully analyze conversion rates, keyword effectiveness, demographics, and other key components of website performance. You will also be able to see where your traffic is coming from and determine if certain advertising strategies are paying off. Conducting website traffic analysis may pinpoint traffic channels that are not working well that may constitute a pain point for your customers. For example, if they aren’t able to find your website due to a lack of search engine optimization (SEO), that would be a major issue affecting your brand’s visibility. Analyzing website traffic over time and against your competitors is an excellent way to measure brand awareness.

Step 6: Analyze Social Media

While some social media analysis is involved with a couple of the previous steps, it is here where you’ll take a full look at how your brand is using social media to engage with customers. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have analytical tools that can help you with hard data in terms of engagement rates and hashtag performance. You will also want to look at your response times to customer inquiries and how often you respond to customer comments on posts and tweets.

Qualitative data from social media, such as the tone of your interactions with your customers, their comments, and reactions can provide you with insight into the overall sentiment towards your brand. This is also where you might glean information on brand awareness as well, since viral posts and tweets are one way to increase your visibility in the marketplace.

Step 7: Identify the Customer Journey

Knowing the various touch points you have with your customers as they engage with your brand will allow you to identify pain points and brand gaps. Mapping out how a customer finds your company, researches your products and/or services, makes purchasing decisions, and ultimately buys your product and/or service can show you where customers are turning away or where they are fully committing to your brand. You can also determine the factors involved with gaining and retaining customer loyalty throughout the journey. The five components of a customer journey map should include the following:

• A timeline: This will include how long it takes for a customer to move from one part of the journey to the next.
• Customer steps: These will show you what the customer is doing along the timeline. Are they researching your product/service online? Are they comparing prices? Are they getting advice from friends? Ensure the steps are written from the customer’s perspective and include elements like waiting for a quote or seeking out options from competitors.
• Customer Personas: You likely have different types of customers seeking out your services or products and will want to create a different journey map for each persona type. For example, a single mother’s journey will look very different from a contractor’s journey. Considering the journey from multiple perspectives allows you to identify pain points that one persona may have and another does not.
• Pain Points and Highlights: Effective customer journey maps will visually show you where your company is excelling and where it needs improvement. Large gaps in the timeline, for instance, may show you where you need to reduce waiting time or increase purchase incentives to help customers make the decision to work with your brand.
• Supporting Evidence: Supplementing the journey with customer reviews, net promoter scores, conversion rates, attrition rates, churn rates, average wait times, and other hard data can help you tell your customer’s story. These elements will also allow you to identify brand gaps and inconsistencies in your brand strategy.

Step 8: Putting it All Together

After completing steps one through seven, you should have a comprehensive picture of your brand and the strengths and weaknesses it reveals. At this point, you will want to compile a list of your top five differentiators and a list of actionable targets designed to close the brand gaps you have identified. These goals will want to be specific, measurable, realistic, and time bound so that when it’s time to conduct your next brand analysis, you’ll be able to see if your objectives have been achieved.

Want to see some examples? Here are some brand analyses we did at Wonder:

• View Hotels Brand Analysis
• IWCO Marketing Solutions Brand Analysis

This piece is powered by Wonder, an on-demand knowledge service that allows you to gain unique insights to any question in as little as 24–48 hours.

Originally published at https://www.blog.askwonder.com on November 21, 2019.