Organizations conduct audits to examine a business process and evaluate the process’s compliance with internal and external requirements. They also use audits to implement continuous improvements. Internal and supplier audits allow management to: Learn about potential problems before they become burning issues. Five Steps to Planning an Effective IT Audit Program. According to the guide, the audit process consists of three phases: planning, fieldwork and documentation, and reporting and follow-up. The planning phase consists of five distinct steps. Determine audit subject. Define audit objective.
Every ten years (or after a pivot or rapid growth) a company faces the question—do we need a rebranding? Usually, it’s one designer or a team of designers that push for the rebranding because they see some lost potential there.And they have a point. Refreshing a logo and visual identity can boost companies’ recognition and profits thanks to:. Standing out from the competitors.
Connecting with a new audience. Staying up to date.
Reflecting new goals, values, or services. Keeping the brand consistent and scalableRebranding perceived externally means a change of a logo and the look & feel of a brand. Internally though, it requires a company to make a lot of important decisions: what has changed? Where do we want to be in ten years from now? Who are we targeting? What actually needs to be rebranded?We faced that challenge at Polidea at the time of our 10th anniversary—you can.
In 5 months we designed a new brand identity that represents the company we want to be. Today, I’m proud to share the process we went through. Here are rebranding process tips you can use at your company.Refer an auditTo define the challenge and the state of your current branding, it’s best to ask designers who are not very familiar with your brand to prepare an audit. You can ask people you recently hired or an agency that can also conduct the rebranding for your company externally.
A fresh look will be very valuable.The audit should cover:. Internal and external brand perceptionAn analysis based on research—how people describe your brand? What kind of emotions does it bring, what associations do they have? It’s important to learn all that about both your clients and your employees. The reason for that is to avoid changing to worse. Competitive analysisWho do you compete against when the client makes a decision?
Do you stand out? Are you keeping up? What’s their message and visual identity? Answers to these questions will be a great input to creating the brand strategy. Review of the logoFacing reality. How exactly do you use the logo? Is it consistent?
Is it recognizable as a strong symbol? Most importantly: is it still aligned with the vision of the company? Does it represent the company you want to be?. Visual identityYou should verify if there is a clear system for colors, typography, and any graphical elements that represent your brand. The brand bookYour designers should describe how productive working with the current brand is. If the guidelines are clear and descriptive or in contrary—creating any material requires a lot of time to even define the style of it.
Benefits and risks of rebrandingThere are always two sides of the coin. Being aware of the risks helps in the decision-making process.Use workshop tools to create the brand strategyGather the stakeholders for a couple of days of workshops in order to make decisions that will, later on, serve as a brief to the graphic designers.
Redefine your target audience—you don’t have to analyze all the groups that get in touch with your company. Focus on those who are affected most by the branding; for example, we decided to analyze clients that come to us via Google search, not through referrals.
To understand your audience better you can use the and/or. Find your place among the competitors—look for similarities among them and how you want to be different. Unique Value Proposition—there are different tools to define what is truly unique about your company. Might be helpful. The key here is to decide on a value that will be repeated in the communication, shown in visuals and present in the pitch. Something that will be clear both your team and your clients.
Brand personality—it’s time for brainstorming! This one can be really fun. Name the categories, for example, an animal, plant, food, car, and celebrity. If your brand would be a car, what would it be? Remember about the rule of design thinking?
Generate as many ideas as you can and then pick together with the ones that you find most accurate. You can use the technique. Communication—this could be a part of the workshop but can be more effective when it’s done by the marketing team. They should be the ones responsible for the Tone of Voice, Elevator Pitch, Slogan. Mind mapping—to kick-off the visual work it’ll be helpful for the designers to start with naming all the connections and associations with the company.
Based on the workshop findings they can create a mind map that should give them some creative ideas for a visual representation of the brand.Define 3 different concepts for the look & feel of the brandThere are always some stakeholders that have to be consulted during the process and agree with the vision of the team that is conducting the rebranding. Presenting them sketches of the new logo on an early stage might be misleading. When you’re not in the process it’s hard to understand what is work-in-progress and what is final. Our team decided to create 3 different brand concepts before showing the logo to the board. We had to make sure that we’re all on the same page and want to show the same story.A concept was built out of a mood board, a proposition of colors, typography, an example of the graphical style—basically anything that can show what the visual identity could consist of.Polidea’s initial mood board.
Design the logo and visual identitySounds so simple but it’s actually the most challenging part of the rebranding process, especially if it requires creating a whole new symbol, not just lifting.During our process this part included:. workshops. Beer sketching aka having drinks and brainstorming:) To enforce creativity!. Polishing a couple of selected symbols. Testing how it would ‘live’ in our materials.
Previewing the symbol with selected typography, colors, photographyThe perfect logo should be easily adaptable, unique, timeless, simple but smart, accurate for the purpose. To decide on the style of it, we used a chart of adjectives on which we decided if we want to be classic or modern, minimalistic or complex, fun or serious, digital or handcrafted etc.Start to build the brand bookYou don’t need to have the final brand book before implementing the new visual identity. Give yourself some space to redefine guidelines that turn out to be not so practical or attractive. Still, to start with the implementation designers have to agree on some rules, how to use the logo etc.A brand book should include:. Story of the brand.
Logo variations. Logo construction and optical corrections for the minimum size. How not to use the logo. Brand colors.
Typography. Icons style.
Illustration style. Animation guidelines. Photography style. Grids for the stationary or website layout.
Composition rules. and more, depending on a specific caseImplement the new brandingThis might be the most time-consuming part. It includes a redesign of all branded materials that your company has: the website, any additional landing pages, social media / Google ads, office interior, business cards and gadgets, presentations, documents, a photo shoot etc.The challenge here is to keep consistency, especially in a team of designers, but also to plan everything ahead and being aware of all the things that have to be rebranded.Don’t try to do it all at once—plan the milestones and prioritize. Consider that the new brand can be launched even if some internal items are not yet ready, however, everything that represents your company should be consistent.At some point of that phase, the designer will be ready to polish the brand book and release a final version of it.Launch!There is still a lot of work to be done with the showcasing. Rebranding is a perfect occasion for some PR buzz. Showcasing and announcing it properly might bring you new clients and opportunities.
And, of course, lots of satisfaction for the team to share their work;)Make sure to check! The controller of the personal data that you are about to provide in the above form will be Polidea sp.
With its registered office in Warsaw at ul. Przeskok 2, 00-032 Warsaw, KRS number:, tel.: 0048 795 536 436, email: [email protected] (“Polidea”). We will process your personal data based on our legitimate interest and/or your consent. Providing your personal data is not obligatory, but necessary for Polidea to respond to you in relation to your question and/or request. If you gave us consent to call you on the telephone, you may revoke the consent at any time by contacting Polidea via telephone or email.
You can find detailed information about the processing of your personal data in relation to the above contact form, including your rights relating to the processing, HERE.
If you’re in the business of content, you need to perform a content audit. And yet—. Whether rebranding or launching a new website, onboarding a new client, or simply starting a new campaign, you can’t measure improvements and growth without establishing clear baselines.A content audit ensures you know what content you have and don’t have. It helps you focus content creation and curation efforts on gaps in your inventory.
An audit prevents investment in duplicate content. It enables you to identify and replace or remove outdated content, determine which content can be reused and repurposed, and improve the quality of your existing content.Imagine you’re setting out on a classic “discover yourself” cross-country road trip. Some free spirits out there might argue that going without a map is the best way to start the adventure. Which is fine, if you’re ok with getting lost along the way, missing out on landmarks and opportunities you were looking for, and constantly struggling with breakdowns and time inefficiencies.Which is also what you get when attempting to launch or execute a content strategy without a content audit to serve as your road map.A content audit helps you develop and navigate a content strategy. It enables you to allocate and analyze all your existing content to identify what’s working and what isn’t.
A content audit not only informs how you optimize existing content, but also the content you develop in the future.
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