The role of the brand audit

Visual audits are so important to keeping your brand in check. After years of establishing your company, with countless changes happening within the organization’s team structure and service offering, the consistency of your marketing materials can become quite the cluttered mess.

Even if you have the most talented design team at your disposal, good creative doesn’t always line up with consistent creative. 

Your brand is an experience, built up over time by small and large interactions with your audience. Without cohesion, you’ve missed an opportunity to shape how people feel about you and understand what you can do for them. 

“Organizations that have grown more by word of mouth or power of personality may have established strong ‘brand perceptions’ in the minds of their audience, yet when audited the actual physical, visual and verbal branding can lag far behind.” - Michael Johnson

I’ve done visual audits for multiple brands and they are always surprised that their collection of creative from just 1-2 years of work is reminiscent of a disorganized pantry. There’s expired food, three different versions of canned beans and that small container of extract you bought five years ago for one dish but are holding onto for….what exactly? 

It takes serious restraint to keep your brand in check. Before anything gets changed, you should be asking “why?” Even minuscule changes — like switching out a photograph, adding a paragraph here or there or keeping up with the latest trend — can domino effect from piece to piece until you’re so far away from your original intent.

Take a team, and have everyone pull 10 - 20 items of creative materials from every tactical execution you can think of — social media posts, proposals, reports, invitations, even screenshots from the website. 

Print everything out and tape them up on a wall where you can easily see gaps in design and messaging. 

Does it look like a cohesive collection? Probably not. 

In reality, an organization needs to go through this process multiple times over the course of its lifetime, especially when going through transitions of change. Start with the audit, update your materials, and create an entire brand collection (or at least in tight and purposeful phases) before launching any one piece. Use your existing materials as needed while you work through the process. Difficult to do, but worthwhile to avoid winding up right back where you started. 

It’s a system. Now go, and Home Edit your brand.