First
Two things about you
Neither one moves your score. They decide which size of audit is the right one to point you at, so the recommendation at the end fits the team you actually have.
A
How big is the company?
B
How many people are in the creative and marketing team?
Count everyone who makes or signs off brand work, including the people who do it alongside another job.
Dimension one
Your source of truth
Where the brand actually lives, and whether it is built to be used or only to be read.
01
There is one place your brand lives, and anyone in the company could name it without checking.
Three or four places, and they disagreeOne place, everyone knows it
02
Your brand exists as values a machine can read. Colour, type, spacing and , not only pages describing them.
It is a document that describes the brandIt is and components that define it
03
When you change something at the source, every template and file using it updates on its own.
Someone has to go and find them allIt propagates without anyone chasing
Dimension two
What the machine is told
How your brand reaches the AI tools your team is already using.
04
Your AI tools have been given your brand as instruction, not as an uploaded reference document.
We put the guidelines PDF in as a knowledge fileIt is written as instruction and tested against real output
05
Your brand guidance says what to do when there is no rule, not only what the rules are.
It is a list of rulesIt gives judgement for the cases nobody wrote down
06
You could hand your AI setup to a new contractor on Monday and get usable output on Tuesday without explaining anything.
It only works if I am there to translateIt stands up without me
Dimension three
Whether anyone uses it
The difference between a system that exists and a system that is load-bearing.
07
In the last thirty days somebody outside the creative team produced something on-brand without asking you first.
I cannot remember it happeningIt happens most weeks
08
You know what share of the assets your company published last month came out of your system rather than around it.
No idea, and no way to find outI know the number and which way it is moving
09
When people are in a hurry, they use your system rather than going round it.
The shortcut wins every single timeThe system is the shortcut
Dimension four
What you can prove
Whether you can argue any of this in a room with finance in it.
10
You could put a number on what off-brand rework cost the company last quarter.
No, and I would not know where to startYes, and finance has already seen it
11
You could show someone the brand as it was twelve months ago next to today and say precisely what has slipped.
I can feel it but I cannot show itI can show it, with examples and dates
12
If you left tomorrow, the brand would hold for a year without you.
It would start going within a quarterIt would hold, and I could prove that too