When to Perform a Brand Assessment For Your Luxury Brand

As a business owner, you are making lots of decisions each day that will move your brand forward. These decisions are often met with changes that require reflection.

Reflecting on where your brand is now and where it’s headed is necessary to make the type of impact you desire.

In this episode, I’ll be covering when to perform a brand assessment for your luxury brand and equipping you with some questions you can use to help you navigate the direction of your brand.

What is a Brand Assessment?

A brand assessment is a process you go through to evaluate your business. The purpose is to help you identify opportunities, challenges, and gaps that your business may be facing in the short and long term.

As you can imagine, this process can be eye-opening and enlightening as you’ll get a transparent view of what’s happening in your business.

This process may also be scary as you’ll be identifying some shortcomings that could be holding your business back from reaching the goals you’ve set.

Don’t worry. This applies to everyone, and no one has an absolutely perfect business. Instead, I encourage you to use the information that you uncover as a way to help you improve and move forward.

When to Perform a Brand Assessment?

You may be wondering when you should perform a brand assessment. There are many instances where taking a deeper look at your business can be beneficial in helping you reach your goals. Here are just a few examples.

You’re Making Changes to Your Business

If you are in a situation where you are planning to make changes to your business. This is a great time to perform a brand assessment as it will help you to stay focused on your goals.

Businesses are constantly evolving, and change is evident. It’s not uncommon for a business to think about changing things up. Whether you are introducing new products or offers to your customers, it’s important to make sure that you assess if it’s the right move for your business.

An assessment can help you identify if the changes you are planning to make are going to be worth the work. It can also help you determine if it’s the right season for your business.

Things you’ll often have to consider when making changes to your business are your existing customers and clients—the seasons of your industry, your positioning in the market, the economy, and more.

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s definitely time to perform a brand assessment.

You’re Adding New Offers to Your Business

Another indicator you need to perform a brand assessment is when you are creating new offers.
Elaborating further on my previous point, new offers can be great. They can fuel more excitement in your business and help you serve the people you love serving.

Before diving in and creating new offers, whether it’s products and/or services, you must first identify what is currently working, what isn’t, and if there are any gaps.

The reason why is you want to avoid creating new offers that may not add to the value of what you are currently selling. Sometimes, a new offer can create additional confusion for your buyers or add more work to your business that threatens profitability.

During your assessment, make sure that a new offer holistically adds value to your overall business.

You’re Ready to Expand Your Business

Growth is the natural effect of lots of positive actions. Every business’s version of growth will look different, and it’s up to you to determine what that looks like for your business.

It could look like an increase in the demand for your products or services. Or expanding your team to allocate workload better.

Either of these conditions can change the dynamics of your business, so it’s vital that you take a step back and evaluate what will make the most sense.

Lately, there have been a lot of discussions in the entrepreneur space about cutting back resources in terms of team size.

Prior, there was a lot of push in the space to scale, and scaling often meant growing a team and hiring all these people to support the business.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with hiring to support the needs of the business, many entrepreneurs found themselves in a position of overwhelm where they were managing all these people or at least trying to, and it wasn’t moving the business forward.

Instead, it resulted in increased stress and frustration.

What I noticed from the countless stories of this occurring was that a lot of those entrepreneurs hadn’t taken a high-level overview of their business and determined what roles would be needed.

For example, if you hire a few people to do execution work, such as packing orders or working with clients. Do you have a manager in place to ensure the work gets done?

If not, guess who’s the manager?

Needless to say, it’s important to be clear about if you are considering expanding your business what will that look like for you and your brand?

You’re Ready to Simplify Your Business

On the opposite side of expansion, maybe you’re ready to simplify your business.

I’ve been loving hearing about running a slow business.

Slow business doesn’t mean it’s not profitable. It just means that you are running your business with more intention and simplification.

Focusing on the core elements that really move your business forward.

If that is you then you’ll definitely want to perform a brand assessment because it will help you decide what you should keep or let go of in your business.

It could also help you to discover a new approach to improve your process and more.

How to Perform Your Own Brand Assessment

Now that you’ve heard of some common situations of when to assess your business, you are most likely wondering how to perform your own brand assessment.

There are several ways you can do this:

Simply grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down the answers to some of these questions:

• What’s happening or not happening in my business that I want to change?
• Am I still leading the business in the direction I want it to go?
• Who are my biggest brand advocates, and how can I continue to support them?

Use these questions to help ignite other thoughts and questions to help you uncover your true vision for your business.

Download my complimentary guide to 7 facets of a successful luxury brand and website experience and take the included assessment. Inside, you’ll find questions that you can answer to help guide you on what needs to happen in your business. I’ve even included a Google doc so that you can easily fill in your answers and share them with your team.

Those are just a couple of approaches that will help you get started.

When to Seek Additional Support?

After you thought through and written out some answers you may find yourself in a situation where you want to get additional support.

I’m happy to help support you by helping you dive deeper into what makes the most sense for your business and figuring out a plan that works for you.

That could look like working together through one of my 1-hour strategy sessions or diving deeper into a full revamp of your brand strategy. Be sure to reach out and connect with me at themaycreative.com/contact, and we can set up a time to discuss your specific needs.

If you resonated with any of the points I covered in this episode, be sure to take action, and if you have questions you can always reach out to me using the information linked in the description of this episode.