One of fundamental requirements for long lasting successful business is having excellent brand image. For getting good quality brand image, you must building good brand reputation and manage it. It is called brand management. Brand management is subset of reputation management. The new trends which are growing is, online reputation and it must manage by online reputation management system.

The main thing to implement in brand management is brand audit. By conduction brand auditing, you will know all information that are related to your brand management activities.

This article contains three sections, the first section is answering what is brand audit, the second one is answering what is brand management, the last one is explaining how to conduct brand audit.

Brand Audit Definition

This section talks about the meaning of brand audit, what is brand auditing, and the goal of performing brand audit.

The very simple and sort description about brand audit is, the type of audit that assess your brand image and reputation with your customers. Some examination of your brand management activities.

The goal of brand audit:

- Help you knowing your consumer’s perception about you.

- As a tool for knowing your current brand position in your industry against your competitors.

- Help you evaluating your strength and weakness, and the developing and improving marketing and brand strategies.

- Let you know about your popularity in certain targeted audience or demographic.

And the fundamental goal is let you know your strength, market opportunities, threats, and improving your brand management or marketing strategies.

What is Brand Management?

As a mention before, brand audit is one of the items of brand management activities. Therefore, I also explain overview of brand management in this article.

Actually, brand management is action to manage, such as: maintain, improve, audit a brand, in order to achieve and uphold brand positive image.Therefore, the brand remain favorable to people.

The final goal of brand management action:

- Getting emotional relationship between brand and consumer.

- Producing a higher sales, so people decide to buy product which is associated with particular brand.

Only several brand management items which I can explain here, they are:

- Corporate Branding

Company branding means brand which makes people aware of what the corporate represents and what the corporate offers.

The term represent means what company make, whereas the term offer means what the people buy from you.

- Brand Development

We can say brand building, the term for establishing special brand or special corporate name.

Steps to develop or build a brand:

1. Identify the audience.

Define your targeted audience by knowing your actual audience through some analytic and research.

2. Brand building

Find your outstanding logo, font, lettering, image, copy-writing, then create them based on your targeted audience.

- Brand Positioning

Brand positioning means doing several action so that your brand is in customer’s mind. This make customer and prospect have reason to buy your product as a substitute to others product.

If people need something, they remember your brand and make a decision to buy your product for some positive reason.

- Brand Loyalty

The substantial thing about brand loyalty is, people still choose and buy your product although there are several brands who provide similar product.

We can measure the loyalty by counting how many times consumer buy the same brand, but this is a simple metrics. There are more metrics than repetitive buying, they are: the length of publicity, word of mouth performance, trust, price sensitivity, customer satisfaction, and so on.

- Online Reputation

I have discussed this subject at online reputation management. Please read the article for more detail.

Conducting a Brand Audit

I just show you one of the step auditing your brand, this simple step is making questionnaire. We can say it brand audit questionnaire.

The fundamental thing to remember is make a question based on the thing that you want to audit.

For example:

If you want to know how far your marketing strategy is working, consider these things:

- Internal Survey

Asking for cost against sales rate, how far you reach your audience against your ad campaign, etc.

- External Survey

Asking for how is the price against your product perception, how far you know the product and brand, how many times you buy the product, and so on.