Your brand isn’t just your logo – it’s the entire identity of your business. And if you’re not seeing the growth that you think you should, it could be that your business is struggling with a mistaken identity. That’s why it’s vital to regulary review your brand and ask yourself a few honest questions such as:

– Does your brand truly capture who you are?

– Is what you’re saying about yourself line up with what your customers are saying about you?

– Can your target market easily recognise your brand and identify with its values?

– Does your brand set your business apart enough from your competitors?

If you don’t know, or you’re not sure about any of these questions – then your identity could be having a severe impact on your business.

What is a Brand Review?

A Brand Review is an exploratory study that aims to understand your current brand’s effectiveness, evaluating your brand and combining a range of objective observations, factual data and marketing analysis to see how your brand aligns to its stated goals. It applies this data to the wider landscape, checking how the performance positions your business within the market.

A Brand Review will determine where you need to invest in your brand, and how much to invest. The goal is to save your company valuable time and unnecessary spending in the long term by making the changes you should make clear, right now.

The Brand Review process

A branding agency should cover these 4 keys areas in a Brand Review.

1. Consultation
The process starts by gathering information from a client about the current state of their business and establishing immediate and long-term goals. Using evidence from any existing marketing plans the agency identifies the mission, USP and positioning of the company. In doing this, they can compare the objectives of the business against the motives, likes and dislikes of the target market, thereby identifying the challenges the consumer faces and what your brand can promise them.

2. Evaluate the competition
In most cases, your business won’t be the only show in town. You may believe it offers the best in service, but the competition will believe they do too. A Brand Review looks at competitors and weighs up the potential implications of their branding and marketing – and, crucially, the impact that has on the client’s business.

3. Assess the effectiveness of the marketing assets
The agency will collect and critique everything from a company’s logo, business stationery, brochures and sales sheets to its online presence such as websites, email marketing campaigns, digital newsletters, social media profiles and content marketing strategies and ask:

– Is there consistency across all media?

– Do they answer to the brand values?

– How effectively does each piece target the core customer?

4. Identify opportunities for growth
Investing in a brand is about positioning the business in the best possible place, where the target audience can clearly see it and understand what benefits it can offer them. Overall, a Brand Review is designed to highlight the challenges a business is facing and provide its owners with potential areas for improvement – whether it’s making strategic adjustments to an existing brand to enhance its performance, or taking the opportunity to refresh the branding completely.

5. Define a direction for change
Change can be hard for any business owner, but sometimes the world shifts and forces a company to evolve with it. With a Brand Review, creative minds with decades of industry insight and design nouse can analyse your current brand offer and define not just where it sits right now, but where it could sit in the future – saving you time, money and effort in the long run.

Contact us if you would like to undertake a Brand Review.