Run a brand audit without guessing at your own brand.

The American Marketing Association defines brand equity as the value a brand carries in the mind of the consumer — built from attitudes about the brand's attributes and the favourable consequences of using it. A brand audit is how you check whether the machinery producing that equity is actually in working order.

Kevin Lane Keller's Strategic Brand Management frames the audit as two distinct exercises. The brand inventory is a comprehensive, current profile of how the brand is actually being marketed — every product, every piece of messaging, every channel, described as-is rather than as-intended. The brand exploratory is research into how customers actually perceive the brand: its awareness, the favourability of its associations, and what makes it distinct in their minds — the sources of customer-based brand equity itself.

Most self-assessments (this one included) can only ever do the inventory half well. Inventory questions are things you can answer honestly by looking at your own material. Exploratory questions require asking people who are not you — which is exactly why Section 03 below is upfront about where this checklist's usefulness ends.

The five dimensions this checklist scores

• Positioning — whether you can state, in one sentence, who you serve, against what alternative, and why they'd choose you.
• Identity consistency — whether your visual identity and tone of voice hold up the same way everywhere, not reinvented per channel.
• Message clarity — whether the core message actually lands in plain language, without relying on jargon or generic claims.
• Channel coverage — whether you show up, coherently, on the specific channels your actual customers use.
• Measurement — whether you track real numbers on a real cadence, so you'd know if any of the above was working.

What this checklist can honestly tell you. It reflects only the twenty boxes you ticked, scored against the maximum of twenty — nothing here is compared against an industry average, a competitor's score, or a "typical" result, because no single such figure is honest across categories, company sizes and markets.

What it cannot tell you. This checklist is entirely the brand-inventory half of Keller's framework — a look in the mirror at what you control. It cannot fabricate the brand-exploratory half: real evidence of awareness, favourability and the uniqueness of your associations in an actual customer's mind. That requires interviews, surveys, review mining or social listening with real people who are not you or your team. A perfect inventory score paired with a brand nobody has heard of, or actively dislikes, is a real and common outcome — which is precisely why the two halves are scored separately in Keller's own model, not merged into one number.

Treat a low-scoring dimension as the next thing worth fixing, in whatever order matters most to your business right now. If you want to think through which dimension to prioritise, or how to design a lightweight brand-exploratory pass on a small budget, that's exactly the kind of question the concierge below can walk through with you.