The brand audit I run in my head in the first ten minutes

Every clarity call starts the same way for me. A founder gets on a call with me and tells me her brand feels off or something is wrong. But she can't say exactly where that is. And somewhere in the first ten minutes, I usually pick it up and know. And no, I'm not saying that I'm psychic, not saying that whatsoever. In my head, however, I'm running the same brand audit every single time as she speaks to me.

Five different checks and today I'm handing you all five so you can run them in your own brand before anyone else does.

I'm Gina Dunn. I'm Gina Dunn, and this is Morning Cup of Brand Spark season three, the real work season. This is episode one. One true thing about brand study one true thing about brand strategy said the way I'd say it to a client in the room in front of me. So let's get started. And here's what I want you to have. And here's why I want you to have this.

The founders I work with are really good, like seriously good at the thing that they do. And they still sit in this fog where they know something about their brand isn't necessarily perfect. But they can't actually point what's not working. So they guess. Sometimes they'll buy a new logo, seen that a million times. Sometimes they rewrite the text on their website. I have done that myself, you guys.

Sometimes they try a new content calendar or a new course. And the thing is, the fog, it just stays there. Because the fog was treating symptoms without a diagnosis. The audit that we're gonna I'm gonna share today is the diagnosis. And it doesn't fix anything on its own. Let me be really clear with you. What it does is tell you where it hurts in your business.

In your marketing in your brand. And it tells you that in plain language. So you stop spending money on the wrong repairs. Now people are out there and they're slapping logos on confusion and they're calling it branding all day long. And this is how you check whether that's what happened to you or not. So go ahead and open your browser.

And open your about page. Open it up. Or go open your LinkedIn profile. Whichever one you would send to a potential client right now. You're gonna need it. Alright, here we go. Let's move on. The first check, and I call that the costume check. So read your about page and read it out loud. Don't read it in your head. Literally speak it, voice it out loud.

with your own voice. And I want you to listen for one thing. Would you ever actually say these sentences to a person, a client, a potential client, a partner sitting across from you right now? Would you? I want you to listen for that. That's what I listen for. Because here's what I find over and over again. When there's a founder

A founder who is warm and sharp and funny on a call. And an about page that says she's a passionate professional dedicated to an empowering businesses. She would never say that at all. Nobody says that. It's a costume. That's what I call a costume. Somewhere along the way she was told that what professional sounds like so she put it on.

Somewhere along the way she was told that that is what professionalism sounds like. So she put the costume on. But she tells a different story when she's in a call and in front of a client. And the tell is the gap between the call and what's on the page. So when I hear one person on the phone, and then I read a completely different person on their website, I know that the brand was built as a mask.

And a mask by itself, it has a huge cost. Because when that client shows up expecting that costume that you put on your website, but meets a human being behind it, trust will wobble there. And when it's the other way around, when the page sounds exactly like the call, exactly like the person, the founder she's about to meet, that trust locks in before the first meeting. So in the end,

If it doesn't sound like you, it is not strategy. And that is this whole check number one. So let's move into check number two. Check number two, check number two is the swap test. So if you take your homepage headline, that is that main headline in your the top third of your website, right? The header image, take the main headline, or

Take your latest LinkedIn post and do one thing. Swap your name and logo for a competitor's name and logo. Does it still work? And sit with this for a minute because the answer usually stings a little bit. So if your headline says something like that you are helping ambitious businesses grow with strategy and heart, I can put

two hundred other names on top of that and nothing breaks. And that means it was never yours to begin with. It's a timeshare. Everyone in your market owns it at once. So nobody does. What is your positioning there? So when I run this test on a clarity call with a potential client, I do it live in the call. I read the founder her own headline.

With a competitor's name in front of it. And there's always this pause. The pause is the moment that she hears the sameness in her content and marketing and her brand. If ten founders could have published it, it was never you, you guys. And that's the one part about And that's the part about this that makes it difficult. And sounding like you

And sounding like everyone else is what gets you skipped by a buyer. Because a buyer can't remember a brand that reads like the whole damn category in the first place. It doesn't read as unique. There's nothing to connect to. So what I'm deciding in that moment from the inside, does she have specific material hidden under her generic copy? Almost always the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

The specifics come out. The specifics come out in how she talks about her work. It comes out in but they just never made it to the home page. Or they but they just never made it to the page. That gap is workable. And that's good news about wearing a bad outfit. It's fixable. And then check three. The difference sentence. I ask this one straight. What makes you different?

From all the others, what makes you different from all the others who do exactly what you do? In one sentence. And the rule is that she can't use the words passion, quality, personal approach. Because those are just three examples that everyone gives no matter what industry you work in. Most founders that I meet can't do this. Not in one sentence. And it's not, it's never

For lack of a difference. The difference is so close to them that they can't see it. You can't see the forest through the trees. It's the wallpaper in their own house. Or it's the saying, you can't smell your own house. And this founder, she'll say, I just do good work and I care about what I'm doing. And then, 20 minutes later, she'll describe how she handles a client crisis.

I will hear the actual difference. Plain as day. And she'll have no idea she just said it. So go run this one on yourself. Say your difference out loud in one single sentence. If what comes out is the description anyone can have in that category, if it's something that any peer of yours could also truthfully say, mark this check as totally failed.

And failed here is fine. Failed here is information you can work with. It just means that the true thing hasn't been named yet. You haven't said it out loud, you haven't documented, you haven't put it out there, but you probably know it. Naming it is work that you can do now. It's not a talent you were born without, you actually know what it is.

And if you want to head start on finding it, listen in two places. Think back and listen to what clients thank you for. I bring this into my workshops a lot. It's rarely, super rarely, is it about the deliverable you gave them. It's usually the thing that you did around the deliverable that made you special and unique. What is your secret sauce? It is the calm and the chaos sometimes. It's the hard questions that nobody asked.

Maybe it's your speed or your honesty, or your way of connecting the dots.

It can be that. And the second thing, how do you handle things when they go wrong? Your difference usually shows up the loudest when you're under pressure, because that's when the trained professional in all of us falls away and the actual you runs the show as hard as you can as a founder. So the material here, it's already in your business. It's just filed under the normal instead of under your brand. That's the important thing that you should check here.

And then check number four. Check number four is the order check. I look at what she's built and in what order did she build things. And this one explains so many stuck brands that I run into. A new website on top of a fuzzy story. Or a fresh logo on top of an unnamed difference. What is your differentiation?

Sometimes it's months of content on top of no clear POV, that's point of view. And every piece of it, if you pull it out separately, it might be fine in its own right. But it's wrong in the order that it was done. So the check here for you is to look at the last real money or the last big block of time you spent on your brand. Did it go into a container, like a website?

A logo, a template, a thing. Or did it go into the contents of that thing? Like naming what you stand for or how you say it? Did it go into your strategy? Did it go into something that you can use long term? If everything went into the containers, the audit says your effort is totally out of order. Which is Which should be a relief to hear.

Because out of order means nothing you built is wasted. It's waiting. It's waiting for the next step. It needs something true to hold. So I run my own brand builds in a very, very intentional fixed order for exactly this reason. Mirror first, name the true thing, then create the voice, then create the form, the design, the sight, the artifacts.

It's always clarity before craft every single time. And that makes a difference here. So when a founder arrives mid-website build, and this happens a lot, with an issue, we stop the website, we stop building anything. We stop it every time. The website, it's quite easy once the brand underneath of it is named, documented, and completely

unmistakably clear. But it really is an impossible task before. And then your final check five, that's the drive check. Last one. And it's the one that almost everyone skips. I always ask, where does your brand strategy live right now? Where is it? And most people answer, if they even have one, that it's a PDF.

Sitting in a folder somewhere. And that it's never been opened since the day the designer sent it. And it's true, most brand strategy it dies in the folder that it was given in. Or it dies in the email, or it dies in the deliverable. But somebody did real thinking once, at one point in time. And it got made into a beautiful, probably spotless looking deck. And then

Nothing in the business changed, right? The proposal still sounded the way they always did. The LinkedIn profile never got updated. The sales emails are still improvised from scratch every single time. The ICP never got integrated into any content. So this check is really very simple. Open your last three client facing things. Grab a proposal, a post, and an email.

Can you see your brand strategy in them right now? Same story, same language, same point of view. And if the strategy isn't visible in the everyday stuff, you don't have a brand problem. You have a brand application problem. The thinking exists and it's just not being used. An unused brand strategy is just a really expensive document.

This is not the reason to have a brand strategy, to sit in a folder. And now let me tell you about the final catch. Because there's always one. The audit will tell you where it hurts. Painstakingly. And the mistake is treating each and every failed check as its own micro repair job. Ooh, that failed. I'm gonna rewrite the about page. Ooh, I'm gonna punch up the headline.

Or maybe it's time to update those proposals. And I understand the reasoning why, because it feels productive, it feels awesome. I got this done. This was wrong. I got it done. But if you failed three, But if you failed check three, if the difference isn't named, every one of those repairs that you're doing is a redecoration project. You'd be writing fresh copy around the same unanswered question. And in six months' time.

It's still gonna feel off again. So the order of the fix is always the same. Name the true thing first and foremost. Then the words, then the pages, and then everything else. This audit will take 10 minutes. In my head, or if you're doing it. But the naming is the real work. And it's the one step you can't skip. You just can't skip it.

So that's the audit. The costume check, the swap check, the difference sentence, the order check, and the drive check. Five questions, ten minutes. Five questions, ten minutes, and you'll know more about your brand than most founders ever find out. And if you're looking for a structured version of this instead of doing it in freehand, like I do in my head, I built a tool for that.

It's called Mirror Not Mask. It's basically your free diagnostic. And it shows you where your brand sounds like a costume instead of the real you. The link is down there in the show notes. It's mirrornotmask.com. Super simple. So go take that and you'll have your answer before your next cup of coffee. And if you're like me, you're gonna have a second cup right now.

And that's the real work for today. New episodes when there's something worth saying. And don't forget to leave your brand mark. I'll see you next time.