Brand Analysis: How to Discover Market White Space

A brand analysis provides strategic insights to strengthen marketing efforts. This assessment examines your brand messaging, competitive landscape, and target audience needs.

The analysis covers three key areas – customer research, competitor evaluation, and a brand audit. Thorough customer analysis uncovers audience behaviors, values, and requirements. Competitor research analyzes messaging, campaigns, and overall branding approaches. And, the brand audit evaluates current initiatives across content, PR, and messaging. It identifies gaps in brand consistency and performance.

Ongoing brand analysis fuels innovation by revealing white space opportunities. It ensures alignment between brand narrative, embodied values, and delivered experiences. With data-driven insights, brands can convey relevance, fulfill promises, and create meaningful connections.

The process delivers a comprehensive view of the media landscape. It empowers strategic adjustments that fortify brand equity and market position over time.

What is Brand Analysis?

My official brand analysis definition is the following: It’s a data-driven approach to evaluate brand positioning, strategies, and tactics, identify strengths and weaknesses, and optimize messaging for all audiences.

A brand analysis involves assessing a company’s branding approaches and tactics. It delves into the company’s identity, persona, and communication with its customers and potential clients. The primary goal of brand analytics is to gauge the brand’s performance across messaging, audiences, and PESO channels and pinpoint areas requiring improvement. It may also include identifying industry trends and market research.

A vital component of a brand analysis is a deep dive into direct and indirect competitors. Benchmarking your performance against a competitive analysis can help you find your baseline and set goals. This scrutiny allows you to identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, laying the foundation for crafting a new brand strategy or refining the existing one.

Why is Brand Analysis Essential?

Why would it not be essential?

The reality is that every company needs brand analytics to make better decisions. Otherwise, the strategy will be flawed and will undoubtedly fail. Here are some reasons why brand analytics is essential for you:

1. Understand Your Customers: Brand marketing analytics lets you get up close and personal with your target customer. By analyzing customer feedback, you can understand their emotional and rational needs, preferences, pain points, and what keeps them up at night. These customer insights can be used to innovate what you bring to the market.
2. Identify Your Competitors: A brand competitor analysis allows you to recognize your primary and secondary competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. This intelligence can help you develop a unique market position, increasing market share and profitability. Often, a brand analysis will uncover new companies or start-ups that you would consider primary competitors.
3. Develop a Data-Driven Marketing Approach: Data always wins. A brand analysis provides actionable insights into your brand’s performance across several data points. This can help you adjust your messaging, creative, and digital channels or completely revamp your existing marketing strategy if it’s not performing.
4. Improve Brand Awareness: A brand audit can help you uncover insights into your performance against relevant competitors. This can be done through message testing, brand health, and calculating the share of voice.
5. Strengthen Brand Loyalty: People are loyal to brands they love. And a brand marketing analysis can help you understand why.

Brand Marketers Are Focusing on Brand Analytics

According to the 2023 State of Marketing Report, over 50% of marketers surveyed say that strengthening brand identity, increasing brand awareness, and boosting brand loyalty are top priorities going into this year.

7 Steps to Building a Brand Analysis

Brands represent more than just a logo. Slogan. Product. They embody a company’s values, mission, and purpose for existing. Therefore, conducting a brand analysis is vital in understanding how your brand is perceived and how it can be improved.

Here are the steps to make it happen.

Step 1: Define Your Brand

The first and most crucial phase in performing a brand analysis involves clearly understanding your brand. This process requires you to dive into the essence of your brand by aligning on the core values, articulating a brand narrative, and determining the unique selling proposition (USP) that sets you apart from competitors.

By specifying your core values, you create a solid foundation for your brand’s identity, tone of voice, and key messaging. In addition, these values are guiding principles that inform every aspect of your business, from decision-making to customer interactions. For example, if one of your core values is sustainability, you might prioritize eco-friendly practices throughout your operations. This goes beyond marketing, so building a case internally and collaborating with others will be critical.

Brand Narratives Matter

A well-crafted brand narrative succinctly conveys your brand’s purpose and answers the three questions: Who are you? What do you stand for? And why should others care? The narrative helps stakeholders understand your brand’s values, goals, and purpose.

Your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP) is the distinct advantage or feature that differentiates you from your main, direct competitors. This could be anything from innovative product features to exceptional customer service.

By identifying your USP, you can enable your sales and marketing team to build programs highlighting why your target market should choose your brand over others. For example, a clothing brand might offer ethically produced and sustainably sourced garments, setting it apart from fast-fashion competitors who rely on cheap labor.

Step 2: Conduct a Brand Sentiment Analysis

A brand sentiment analysis uncovers people’s emotions and attitudes about your brand, offering extremely valuable insights into your brand’s public perception.

A brand sentiment analysis is typically done with a social listening tool like TalkWalker or Brandwatch. These tools not only track the frequency of these mentions but also evaluate the sentiment—positive, negative, or neutral—linked to them, using natural language processing. For example, positive mentions may include phrases like “excellent service” or “high-quality product,” while negative mentions might contain words such as “poor customer support” or “disappointing experience.”

By analyzing this data, you can better understand how your target audience and potential customers perceive your brand. In addition, this information can help you identify areas where your brand is excelling or falling short, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction and strengthen your brand image.

Actionable Sentiment Analysis

The great thing about a brand sentiment analysis is that it’s actionable.

Furthermore, sentiment analysis can reveal trends and patterns in customer feedback, enabling you to address potential issues proactively. For instance, if you notice a surge in negative comments about shipping delays, you can promptly rectify the situation and minimize the impact on your brand’s reputation. Again, this would require collaboration and partnership with your colleagues in operations, but it’s possible.

You can also combine sentiment analysis with a primary research study to get the “why” behind the “what.

Step 3: Analyze Your Target Audience

As you continue with your brand analysis, it’s essential to focus on understanding your target audience. This stage examines their demographic traits, psychographic characteristics, and behavioral patterns. By understanding every aspect of your target audience, you can customize your brand messaging to align with what matters to your target customers.

The demographic data examines age, gender, income, education, and location. This information helps you create a buyer persona of your ideal customer, enabling you to develop marketing strategies that target the most relevant audience segments. For example, if your brand offers premium skincare products, your target demographic might be higher-income individuals willing to invest in high-quality skincare.

The psychographic data goes beyond demographics to explore your audience’s interests, values, and lifestyles. This approach helps you understand the motivations behind their purchasing decisions and how your brand can fulfill their needs and desires. For instance, if your target audience values health and wellness, you might emphasize your products’ natural ingredients and health benefits in your messaging and marketing campaigns.

The behavioral analysis focuses on understanding how your target audience interacts with your brand and makes purchasing decisions. This includes examining how they use search engines, what they say on social media and responsiveness to your marketing programs. By analyzing these behaviors, you can refine your marketing strategies to engage your audience better and drive conversions. For example, if your audience frequently engages with video content, you might consider posting more ads on your social channels.

You can get this data using an audience analysis.

Step 4: Facilitate a Competitive Analysis

The same analysis you do for your business must also happen for your competitors—all of them.

A thorough competitive analysis examines their brand messaging, marketing channels, and online presence. You can pull through the same insights you get from analyzing your brand from researching your competitors.

Analyzing your competitors’ brand messaging involves studying their unique selling propositions, brand sentiment, and communication strategies. This helps you recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their messaging, allowing you to craft your messaging that differentiates your brand and addresses any gaps in the market. For instance, if your competitors focus on low prices, you could emphasize superior quality.

Competitive Intelligence Insights

Evaluating your competitors’ digital channels involves analyzing their platforms to reach their target audiences–social media channels, email marketing, content marketing, Google ads, and a TikTok SEO analysis. By understanding their channel strategies, you can identify areas where they may underutilize specific channels or over-saturating others.

This insight can help you optimize your marketing efforts by allocating resources to channels with the most potential for engagement and conversion with the same audience. For example, if your competitors are not effectively utilizing TikTok, you might seize the opportunity to develop a strong presence on that platform and engage with a new audience segment.

Assessing your and potential competitors” online presence entails examining their websites, search engine rankings, and social media profiles. This analysis allows you to gauge their online visibility, user experience, and the overall positioning of their digital marketing plan. You can make informed decisions about improving your online presence by identifying your competitors and offering the areas where they excel or fall short.

For example, suppose your competitors have poor website design or low search engine rankings. In that case, you can prioritize enhancing your website’s user experience and implementing SEO strategies to gain a competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence analysis will ensure you have a complete purview of where your competitors stand across several industry benchmarks and metrics.

Step 5: Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A competitive framework or a SWOT analysis is valuable for determining your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This process involves evaluating internal and external factors impacting your brand’s performance and visibility. The SWOT or competitive analysis template insights can help you craft a plan to leverage your strengths and opportunities while addressing your weaknesses and mitigating potential threats.

Strengths are the internal factors that give your brand a competitive advantage or edge–legacy, superior product design, outstanding leadership, or a solid brand reputation. Identifying your strengths lets you emphasize these advantages in your marketing efforts and business operations. For example, if your brand has a highly efficient supply chain, you could use this strength to offer faster delivery times or lower prices than your competitors.

On the other hand, weaknesses are internal factors that may hinder your brand’s performance and growth. Recognizing these weaknesses allows you to implement measures to address and overcome them. For instance, if your customer service is lacking, you might invest in training programs to improve your sales team’s communication and problem-solving skills.

Opportunities are external factors that can benefit you–emerging market trends, technology advancements, or changes in consumer behavior. By seizing these opportunities, you can expand your market share, enhance your product offerings, or enter new markets. For example, if there is a growing demand for eco-friendly products, you could do market research to develop a line of sustainable goods to cater to this audience.

Threats are external factors that could negatively affect your brand, including competitor actions, market fluctuations, or regulatory changes. Identifying these threats enables you to develop contingency plans to safeguard your brand against potential challenges. For instance, if a new competitor with a similar product enters the market, you might consider differentiating your brand from indirect competitors through unique features, superior quality, or exceptional customer service.

Step 6: Building a Social Media Brand Audit

When carrying out a brand analysis, it’s crucial to assess the effectiveness of your brand’s marketing channels, with a particular focus on social media. This process involves determining which platforms are the most successful in engaging your target audience. Doing so can optimize your marketing budget and maximize your brand’s reach.

I call this a brand audit.

To begin your brand audit, closely examine the various social media platforms your brand utilizes, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest. Then, analyze the performance metrics for each platform, including engagement rates, follower growth, and conversion rates. This data will help you gauge the effectiveness of your content strategy collectively.

Next, examine your brand’s social media presence’s quality, consistency, and tone of voice. Ensure your brand voice, visuals, and messaging are cohesive across all platforms. Consistency is crucial for building brand recognition and fostering trust among your audience. If you identify any inconsistencies or areas for improvement, take the necessary steps to address them.

Additionally, monitor your direct competitors” social media presence to identify trends, strategies, and content types that resonate with their target audience. This data can provide valuable insights into the competitive landscape and potential opportunities for your brand to stand out or improve your social media strategy.

Finally, adjust your marketing efforts based on all the data and insights gathered from your social media brand audit. For example, allocate more resources to the platforms that generate the most significant results, and consider testing new content formats or tactics on platforms where your performance could be improved. By doing so, you can make informed decisions that ensure your marketing budget is used effectively to reach and engage your target audience.

Conducting a social media brand audit is a vital step in your brand and social media and competitive research and analysis, too.

Step 7: Measure Your Brand’s Performance

The final phase of a brand analysis involves evaluating your brand’s overall performance. This entails monitoring vital indicators like brand health, customer loyalty, and sales metrics. Regularly assessing these factors enables you to identify areas needing improvement and ensure your brand achieves its goals.

Brand health covers various aspects of your brand’s performance, such as awareness, reputation, and market share. To gauge brand health, utilize tools like brand tracking surveys and social media monitoring to collect data on your target audience’s awareness and perception of your brand.

Customer loyalty is another critical performance metric. Loyal customers tend to make repeat purchases, recommend your brand to others, and contribute to your brand’s long-term success. To measure loyalty, monitor customer retention rates, net promoter scores (NPS), and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Sales metrics are crucial for examining your brand’s financial performance and growth, including revenue, profit margins, and sales growth rates.

Besides tracking these primary performance indicators, establish specific, measurable objectives for your brand, such as expanding market share, enhancing customer retention rates, or increasing brand awareness. Then, regularly review your progress toward these objectives to ensure your brand stays on track for success.

Final Thoughts on Brand Analytics

A brand analysis is crucial for evaluating your branding strategies and gaining valuable insights into your brand’s identity and communication. This process helps you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth. In addition, a comprehensive analysis examines customer preferences, competitors, and current brand status.

Focusing on customer orientation and staying up-to-date with market trends allows you to create a robust brand identity and maintain relevance. In addition, various tools, such as analytics systems and software, can provide vital insights into your brand’s performance across multiple dimensions, channels, and metrics.

FAQ