Brand SWOT Analysis

Do you fully understand all of your brand's strengths and weaknesses? Do you understand its opportunities and threats including its brand positioning opportunities and threats? Do you know how to optimize its positioning? Have you identified your brand's critical vulnerabilities? Do you know what you need to do to take your brand to the next level? 

Is your brand plan based on these insights? Is your spending designed to leverage your brand's strengths and overcome or compensate for its weaknesses? 

Paraphrasing management guru Tom Peters, you can't manage it if you don't measure it. 

So, what can you do to identify your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? You can start with a comprehensive brand audit. You can also conduct a wide variety of brand research. But, perhaps most importantly, you can conduct brand equity research.

Your brand equity research should be diagnostic and it should be comprehensive. It needs to include the five drivers of customer brand insistence - awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility and emotional connection - at a minimum. It should identify what your brand owns in the minds of its customers - its position. It should result in detailed brand positioning maps. Ideally, it also measures brand vitality and brand loyalty. It is helpful if it identifies all of a brand's associations and the brand's personality. And finally, it is essential that the research measures the same for competitive brands because no brand operates in a vacuum (or is positioned in a vacuum). 

If you would like help in measuring the equity of your brand and discovering its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) including its brand positioning opportunities and threats, our proprietary BrandInsistence(SM) brand equity measurement system does just that. It measures more than 70 different brand equity components for your brand and competitive brands, resulting in detailed findings including a SWOT analysis and specific recommendations.

Here are some other blog posts I have written on brand equity measurement: Brand Equity Measurement 101 and Brand Equity Measurement 101.

To read more about brand equity measurement, refer to the chapter with this title in my Brand Aid book.