Before you hire a designer, audit yourself, your competitors, and your audience. In that order.
Most founders walk into their first agency conversation underprepared. They aren’t lazy, and they certainly aren’t unintelligent. They’ve done the work of building the business, they just haven’t done the work of looking at the business from the outside. That gap costs them. A designer briefed by an underprepared founder spends the first two weeks reverse-engineering what should have been clear on day one, and two weeks of designer time is spent analysing the business, and not solving the problem.
Three audits, run before any designer is hired, close that gap. Each takes between two and six hours. Together they are the difference between an engagement that produces a brand and an engagement that produces a logo.
A designer briefed by an audited founder works at twice the speed and produces twice the work.
Why audit anything at all
An audit is the act of looking at something that is usually invisible to you. Founders cannot easily see their own business from the outside because they live inside it, and the discipline of the audit is what forces the step back. The three audits below look at the three things a brand always exists in relation to: yourself, where the brand stands today; your competitors, what the brand stands against; and your audience, who the brand stands for. Skip any of the three and you are, in effect, designing in the dark.
The self-audit
This is the audit founders most often skip, because it feels like navel-gazing. It isn’t. It is the act of taking inventory of what already exists in the business, so you don’t waste a brand budget accidentally recreating it.
Pull every public expression of the brand into one folder. Website screenshots. The last twelve Instagram posts. The most recent newsletter. The current logo and any older versions. Business cards. Packaging. Email signatures. Invoices. The bio on your About page. Photographs the business has been featured in. Print them if you can, and lay them on a table or pin them on a wall so you can see them together. Then step back and look at them as one set rather than as individual pieces.
You are looking for three things. Coherence: does the set, viewed together, feel like one brand, or like a portfolio of pieces from three brands at different stages of their evolution. Voice: read the captions, the website copy, and the newsletter side by side and ask whether there is one voice, or several fighting for airtime. Standard: is the work at the standard you would describe, out loud, as the business’s standard, or has the standard drifted over a year of being busy.
Now write a one-page document. What is working. What is no longer working. What was always weak, and you tolerated it because there was never time. What surprises you. That document is the brief beneath the brief. When you hire a designer, share it. A designer who has seen it walks into the engagement already aligned with you on the gap between where you are and where you intend to be.
The competitor audit
The competitor audit is the audit founders most often do badly. They do a quick Instagram scroll, decide that all their competitors look the same, and stop there. That isn’t an audit. It’s a glance.
List ten brands. Not five, ten. They should fall into three groups: three direct competitors (the brands a customer would put in a shortlist alongside yours), three adjacent competitors (brands in nearby categories your customer also follows), and four aspirational references (brands you admire in any category for how they have positioned themselves, even if they are nothing like your business). For each of the ten, take screenshots of the homepage hero, the About page, the latest three Instagram posts, the most recent newsletter you can find, and one product or service page. Save them, print them if you can, and lay them out by group.
You are looking for five things, roughly in this order. First, positioning sentences: pull the sentence each brand uses to describe itself, verbatim, and notice the patterns, and more importantly notice what nobody in the category is saying. Second, visual language: which palettes recur, which typography recurs, what kind of photography, what is the unspoken aesthetic consensus of the category. Third, voice: read three captions from each brand out loud, and ask yourself which ones you could tell apart blindfolded and which ones are interchangeable. Fourth, audience signals: who does each brand look like it is speaking to (the model in the photograph, the language of the captions, the price points named in the copy). Fifth, gaps: after looking at all ten, where is the unserved version of the customer you already want.
Now write a second one-page document. Three columns: what most of the category is doing, what the best in the category is doing, what nobody in the category is doing. The third column is where your position lives. This is the document a strategist will pay almost any price to receive from a founder, because it does the slowest, most repetitive part of positioning work in advance.
The audience audit
The audience audit is the audit founders most often refuse to do, because it requires talking to people. There is no shortcut. The brand is being built for an audience, and the audience is not knowable in the abstract.
Identify five people who match your ideal customer. They can be existing customers, prospective customers, or thoughtful proxies (a friend who fits the profile), with one condition: they cannot be so close to you that they will only tell you flattering things. Schedule a thirty-minute conversation with each. In person if possible, on a call if not. Bring six to eight questions. Listen four times more than you speak. Record the conversations with permission, or take detailed notes.
The questions to ask, more or less in this order. Tell me about the last time you bought something in the category I’m in, what were you looking for, what did you find, how did you choose. What did the brand you chose do well, and what did it do badly. What is hard about being a customer in this category. What brands, in any category, do you think do this kind of thing brilliantly, and why. Where do you go to find new brands, and whose recommendations do you actually trust. If I described my business to you, what would your first questions be. If you were recommending it to a friend, how would you describe it. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think I should know.
Now write your third one-page document. Three sections: the language they used (their words, verbatim, not yours), the patterns across the five conversations, and the surprises. The verbatim language is gold. It is the words a real customer uses to describe the problem your business solves, and your brand copy should be built out of those words wherever it can be. Borrowed marketing language will always sound less true than language taken from a customer’s mouth.
Three documents, one studio brief
After the three audits, you have three documents totalling six to nine pages. Together they tell a studio, ours or anyone’s, exactly what you know about your business, your category, and your customer. They tell the studio where you have been clear-eyed and where you have been guessing. A studio briefed in this way works at twice the speed and produces twice the work, because the engagement starts with shared understanding. Time goes on strategy, not on basic discovery.
If you remember one thing
The point of an audit isn’t to be critical of yourself, your competitors, or your customers. The point is to be honest about what is in front of you. Honesty, on paper, before the design begins, is the cheapest, fastest brand-improvement intervention available to a founder. Do it before you spend anything.
