Brand Audit Basics

Why this matters

A brand audit is the diagnostic that tells you where you actually stand before you invest in where you want to go. Without it, brand spending is directional at best and counterproductive at worst — you may be reinforcing a perception you're trying to escape.

Try it yourself

1. Conduct a 30-minute brand audit on your own product: collect your homepage headline, three customer reviews, and one competitor comparison. Write one sentence on the single most consistent perception across all three sources.
2. Find a brand audit template from a reputable source (Nielsen, Prophet, or Interbrand) and map each section to a data source you could realistically access within a week without a research budget.
3. Set a 'brand audit reminder' for 90 days from today, and define the three metrics you will track between now and then (e.g. NPS, review sentiment, share of voice in a specific keyword cluster).

Prompt your AI

Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.

1. Basics & terminology

In one paragraph, explain what a brand audit is, what questions it answers, and when a founder should do one.

2. Why it works (the mechanism)

Walk me through how a brand audit is conducted step by step — what data is collected, from what sources, and how the findings are synthesised into a usable picture of current brand health.

3. Advanced — application & what's next

I'm running a brand audit on a 3-year-old B2B SaaS company with 200 customers. I have access to NPS scores, support tickets, G2 reviews, and LinkedIn analytics. Walk me through how I'd use each of these data sources to answer the question: 'What do buyers think of us, and how does that differ from what we want them to think?'

References

• https://www.prophet.com/thinking/brand-audit-guide/