Branding
Brand audit
A brand audit is a review of everything a brand communicates through, from the logo and website to invoices and emails, naming the inconsistencies. It is usually the first step before a rebrand.
What it means in practice
In practice a brand audit is collecting and comparing. Someone asks for access to the shared drives and pulls the last proposals, decks, flyers, screenshots from Instagram, email signatures and the invoice template. Then it all goes side by side, usually on one big wall. A strategist and an art director do it together, and it happens before anyone opens Illustrator.
A machining company ordered a rebrand and wanted a new logo straight away. The audit showed the logo was fine. The real problem was proposals going out in four different versions depending on who wrote them. Instead of redesigning the identity we built templates. The job cost a third of the original budget and the change was visible immediately.
The process usually runs two to three weeks, one of them spent collecting material on your side. We need the source files, not PDFs, the contacts of people who actually produce the materials, and one person who can decide. The output is a document with an inventory, a list of inconsistencies and an order of what to fix first. If a brand manual exists, everything is compared against it.
Where a brand audit gets oversold: a hundred and twenty slide deck with competitor analysis that nobody opens. An audit should be a task list, not an essay. Second thing: an audit is not a strategy. It tells you what is broken, not where the brand should go. If you are buying one and getting the other, ask what the deliverable will be.
Our brand audits start by asking for the last five documents the company sent a customer. Not the pretty ones from the website, the real ones: a quote, an invoice, an email with an attachment. That is where the brand actually lives. Try it today: open your last three proposals next to each other and check whether they use the same typeface.