Brand Audit Services That Find What Your Brand Is Costing You
The Inspector Goes To The Attic First
He walks a house you've already decided to buy, and he spends most of his hour up there. Then he comes down and says the roof has maybe three winters left, and the number you were happy to pay an hour ago is the wrong number.
A brand audit is the same purchase. You're not paying someone to tell you the house is nice. You're paying $5,000 to find out what's actually wrong before you spend five times that building on top of it.
What A Brand Audit Actually Is
A brand audit is a paid outside examination of everything your brand is doing in the market, measured against what it's earning you. It covers the packaging a shopper actually picks up, the price on the shelf, the sentences you use to sell, and your positioning, meaning the one thing you want a buyer to think when they see you next to the other three options. It ends in a written diagnosis: what to keep, what to kill, what to upgrade, and the order to do it in.
It isn't a workshop. Nobody stands at a whiteboard asking what animal your brand would be. It also isn't a logo review, though the logo gets looked at along with everything else that's carrying weight it was never built to carry.
Most Founders Arrive Certain It's The Logo
That's a reasonable place to land. The logo is the part you can see, the part everyone in the building has a private opinion about, and the only part anyone ever asks you to approve.
It's usually not what's costing you the money. The pattern we see in Tampa and everywhere else is the same: a product worth more than its packaging says it is, a price that hasn't moved in years, and an owner who's been eating that difference so long it stopped feeling like a decision.
What Brand Audit Services Actually Include
Four pieces of work, in this order. The names are the same ones on the pricing page, because it's the same audit whether you buy it on its own or inside a full engagement.
Founder And Stakeholder Interviews
We talk to the people who built the thing, separately, before we look at a single file. The person who runs your production line and the person who runs your sales calls already know where the brand is soft. They rarely say it in the same room as each other, and almost never in front of the founder. Asked one at a time, they'll tell you.
Brand Autopsy
Every asset you have in market, taken apart: packaging, site, sales deck, social, retail presence, the email template somebody built in 2019 that nobody has opened since. Each one gets marked keep, kill, or upgrade, with the reason attached. This is where most of the money hiding in your business turns up, and it's rarely hiding where you'd guess.
Alignment Assessment
Your brand set against the competitors you actually lose to, at the size a shopper sees it, and your price set against what the category leader charges and what you could defend. We also measure the gap between what your team says you are and what your market says you are. When those two sentences don't match, the market's version is the one you're getting paid on.
Report And Recommendation
A written document, delivered to you, that says what's wrong, what it's costing, and what to do first. You keep it whether or not you ever hire us again.
What You Walk Away With
Where your brand is costing you money, with the number attached
A keep, kill, or upgrade call on every asset you have in market
Your packaging set against the competitors you actually lose to, at the size a shopper sees it
Your pricing measured against what the category leader charges and what you could defend
The messaging you run now, and the specific sentences that aren't landing
A first read on where you could be positioned instead, and what that's worth
A ranked list of what to fix first, what to fix after that, and what to leave alone because it's already working
The deliverable at most studios is a deck. Sixty slides, a mood board, and an invoice. We've sat through enough of them to know most are an expensive way of saying fuck-all about your margins.
What Brand Audit Services Cost, And What Happens First
The audit is $5,000 on its own, and you keep the diagnosis whether or not you carry on. If you do carry on, the $5,000 credits toward the engagement, and those run $20,000, $25,000, or $35,000 depending on how much gets rebuilt after the audit.
It takes two weeks from the end of the stakeholder interviews. Those come first, because the people who built the thing already know where it's soft and they'll tell you if somebody asks them separately.
Every other brand audit page we've read publishes a range and a line about how it depends on scope. That's a real answer to a real problem, and it's also how a $4,000 job and a $40,000 job end up sitting behind the same sentence. Ours is one number, and you can decide right now whether it's worth it to you.
Doing It Yourself, Hiring An Agency, Or Buying A Diagnosis From Us
There are three ways to find out what's wrong with your brand, and two of them are cheaper than this one.
You can run it yourself off a template. That works when the question is whether your brand looks consistent across channels, because consistency is something you can see once somebody hands you a checklist. It stops working the moment the answer involves your price, because you're the person who set it, and the whole reason it hasn't moved in four years is that it feels normal to you now.
You can hire a full-service agency, where the audit is a free opening step on the way to a retainer. The audit is honest and the incentive isn't. Nobody at that meeting gets paid for telling you the fix is a price change and a new back panel.
Or you can pay for the diagnosis by itself, own it, and take it anywhere, including to the agency you were already talking to. That's this. It's the most expensive of the three up front and the only one where the person writing it has nothing to sell you at the end of it.
Who This Is Not For
If you're pre-revenue and pre-product, this is the wrong $5,000. There's nothing in market yet to autopsy, and you'd be paying us to have opinions about a hypothetical. Go build the thing, sell it to thirty people, and call us when the pattern in what they say starts to bother you.
If you were hoping to skip the audit and go straight to the design, that isn't on the menu either. Every engagement starts here, including the $35,000 one, because the alternative is a studio guessing expensively about a business it met last week. You can buy the audit on its own and walk away with it. You can't buy the build without it.
If what you want is somebody to confirm a decision you've already made, we're going to be an expensive disappointment. We have told founders not to rebrand. When the audit says the problem is the business and not the brand, a new logo is a very pretty way to spend money you needed somewhere else, and saying so out loud is the thing you actually paid us for.
What This Looks Like When It's Done Right
We named Power-Pole's MOVE trolling motor and led its branding and marketing. It went into a category owned by companies 10 times its size with an 80-year head start, launched at twice their price, and sold out in three months.
That wasn't a logo decision. It was a call about who the product was for and what it was allowed to charge, which is the call an audit exists to put in front of you.
Mission Control Brands is Palmer Holmes’s studio, and we have worked from Tampa since 2009.
Questions Founders Ask
-
Ours is $5,000, and that's the whole number. If you go on to a full engagement, it comes off the price of that engagement. The engagements are $20,000, $25,000, and $35,000, and those are on the pricing page too.
-
Two weeks, measured from the end of the stakeholder interviews. The interviews get scheduled around your people, so the calendar start depends on you more than on us.
-
It's a written document, yes, and that's on purpose. A deck gets presented once and then lives in a folder. A written diagnosis gets read by the person who wasn't in the room, argued with, and used as a checklist twelve months later. You can forward it to your board without translating it.
-
On the visual side, partly. If you want to know whether your logo is used eleven different ways across your own channels, a free template and an afternoon will tell you. What you can't audit yourself is your own price, your own positioning, and the difference between the company you think you're running and the one your customers are buying from. Those need somebody who doesn't already know the answer.
-
Yes, always. Every engagement starts with it, including the $35,000 one, and the $5,000 comes off the price when it does. We don't design against a business we haven't taken apart first, and a studio that's willing to is telling you something about how much of this it has done before.
-
Not necessarily. We’ve done audits for solo operators as well as mega corps. An audit is an effort to get the lay of the land so small companies with a handful of employees can get just as much value from the effort as larger companies.
-
You get the report and the ranked list, and then you decide. Some founders take it and fix the top three items with their own team. Some bring it back to us and we build from it. Either one is a result we'd sign off on, which is the advantage of getting paid for the diagnosis instead of for what comes after it.
This is the part of a service page where we are supposed to promise that every brand is unique and that no two audits are alike. They're not, and they mostly are. The categories change and the mechanism doesn't.
Send us the product, what you charge for it, and what the store brand next to it charges. That’s what the project box on the contact page is for, and the page after it is our calendar. We'll tell you inside a few days whether you've got a brand problem or a pricing problem.