Brand analysis

Why Bother?

Your brand is more than just your logo. Colours, fonts, imagery, tone of voice, almost every aspect of your public facing and internal collateral should be aligned to your business and your brand. It's the perception of your brand that builds up a picture of your business and identify with certain types of people. So it's important that you aim at the right types of prospect and customers.

Where to start?

The previous steps of SWOT analysis, user profiling and competitor analysis should highlight the kind of messages that you want to communicate to your ideal customers or clients. Perhaps you're planning to target the cheaper, low cost and high volume market, or maybe the opposite end of the spectrum such as prestige, high worth market. Both of these are wildly different in terms how you would portray your business and brand, and either side will quickly be deterred if this perception doesn't match their expectations.

Once you know your markets, get all of your branded material together (printing and spreading them on a table gives a nice overall picture) and check to see if your brand and marketing matches with your ideal clients. As with some of the previous steps, getting external views from those outside your company will give you more unbiased and useful information.

Useful tips:

• A good place to start is grab all of your printed material and print off all online documents and designs. Lay it all out together and look at it. This can help highlight inconsistencies and builds a picture of the overall visual brand.
• It's also worth referring back to your business goals and user profiling to ensure that your branding material reflects and mirrors the objectives you've captured.