Brand Audit

---
name: brand-audit
description: "Conducts brand audits evaluating consistency, perception, competitive positioning, and improvement recommendations across all touchpoints. Use when assessing brand health."
allowed-tools: Read Write Glob
metadata:
  author: matthewhitcham
  version: "1.0"
---

# Brand Audit

## When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when you need to:
- Evaluate how consistent your brand is across all touchpoints
- Assess brand perception among customers and the market
- Identify gaps between brand intent and brand reality
- Create an improvement roadmap before a rebrand or refresh

**DO NOT** use this skill for financial audits, compliance audits, or creating new brand identity. This is for evaluating and scoring existing brand performance.

---

## Core Principle

A BRAND AUDIT REVEALS THE GAP BETWEEN WHAT YOU THINK YOUR BRAND IS AND WHAT CUSTOMERS ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE — CLOSE THAT GAP AND YOUR BRAND GETS STRONGER.

---

## Phase 1: Brief

### Required Inputs

| Input | What to Ask | Default |
|-------|------------|---------|
| **Brand** | "What brand are you auditing?" | Must be provided |
| **Touchpoints** | "List all places customers encounter your brand (website, social, email, packaging, ads, support)." | Website, social media, email |
| **Brand guidelines** | "Do you have documented brand guidelines?" | Informal or none |
| **Customer feedback** | "Any recent customer feedback, reviews, or survey data?" | Will work with available |
| **Competitors** | "Name 3 competitors to benchmark against." | Must be provided |
| **Trigger** | "Why are you doing this audit now? (rebrand, growth, inconsistency, new hire)" | General health check |

**GATE: Confirm brief and gather access to touchpoints before proceeding.**

---

## Phase 2: Assess

### Audit Framework

Evaluate across five dimensions:

**1. Visual Consistency (score 1-10)**
- Logo usage across touchpoints — consistent or inconsistent?
- Color palette adherence
- Typography consistency
- Image style alignment

**2. Verbal Consistency (score 1-10)**
- Tone of voice across channels
- Messaging alignment with positioning
- Tagline and value proposition clarity

**3. Customer Perception (score 1-10)**
- Review sentiment
- Social media mentions and tone
- Support ticket themes
- Direct customer feedback

**4. Competitive Positioning (score 1-10)**
- Differentiation clarity
- Visual distinction from competitors
- Messaging uniqueness

**5. Brand Experience (score 1-10)**
- Customer journey consistency
- Touchpoint quality (website speed, email design, support responsiveness)
- Emotional impression alignment with brand intent

**GATE: Present preliminary scores and key findings before building the full report.**

---

## Phase 3: Build

### Deliverables

**1. Brand Audit Scorecard**
- Dimension-by-dimension scoring (1-10) with overall brand health score
- Traffic light system: green (strong), yellow (needs attention), red (urgent)
- Comparison to competitors where applicable

**2. Touchpoint-by-Touchpoint Review**
For each touchpoint:
- Current state description
- Consistency score
- Screenshots or examples
- Specific issues identified
- Improvement recommendations

**3. Gap Analysis**
- Brand intent vs. brand reality comparison
- Biggest inconsistencies ranked by customer impact
- Quick wins (fixable in 1 week) vs. strategic improvements (1-3 months)

**4. Improvement Roadmap**
- Prioritized action items by impact and effort
- Timeline: immediate fixes, 30-day improvements, 90-day strategic changes
- Resource requirements for each action

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## Phase 4: Polish

### Presentation Format

Structure the audit for the intended audience:
- **Founder/CEO:** Executive summary + scorecard + top 5 recommendations
- **Marketing team:** Full report with touchpoint details and action items
- **Design team:** Visual consistency findings with specific examples to fix

### Follow-Up Schedule

- 90 days: re-score the dimensions addressed in the roadmap
- 6 months: full audit refresh to measure progress
- Annual: comprehensive brand audit as a recurring practice

---

## Example 1: SaaS Company Audit

**Finding:** Website messaging is polished but social media uses inconsistent tone (professional on LinkedIn, overly casual on Twitter). Email templates use outdated logo. Score: 6/10 overall.
**Top fix:** Update all email templates and create social media voice guidelines.

## Example 2: E-commerce Brand Audit

**Finding:** Product packaging is on-brand but website photography style varies wildly across product categories. Competitor X has a more cohesive visual story. Score: 5/10 visual consistency.
**Top fix:** Create a photography style guide and reshoot inconsistent product images.

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## Anti-Patterns

- **Auditing without benchmarks** — a score of 7/10 means nothing without context. Compare to competitors and best-in-class examples.
- **Focusing only on visuals** — brand is more than a logo. Audit verbal identity, customer experience, and perception too.
- **Audit without action plan** — identifying problems without prioritized solutions is just a critique, not an audit.
- **Ignoring internal brand alignment** — if employees do not understand the brand, external consistency is impossible.
- **Once and done** — a single audit is a snapshot. Regular audits track progress and catch drift.

---

## Recovery

- **No brand guidelines to audit against:** Establish baseline guidelines from the best existing touchpoint and audit all others against that standard.
- **User defensive about findings:** Frame issues as opportunities, not failures. Every brand has inconsistencies — the audit is the first step to fixing them.
- **Too many issues to address:** Prioritize by customer impact. Fix the touchpoints customers see most often first.
- **No customer perception data:** Use review sites, social mentions, and support tickets as proxies. Recommend a customer perception survey for next audit.