About two months ago the eyespeak team became blatantly aware that our internal brand has greatly matured over the last two years while our external brand has not kept up. We immediately started to eat our own dog food and put ourselves through our Brand Clarification Exercise.

This brings up the question, how often should I evaluate my brand? Our exercise that we do for our clients is time- and energy-intensive, so it can be hard to capture the key leadership’s mind-share long enough to make adequate process. Most companies look to do an exercise like this when there is pain or opportunity: start-up, key change in market, changes in product offerings, acquisitions/mergers, or they just feel stale.

Last year when we finalized our exercise with a tech recruiting firm in Atlanta, the CEO declared, “We need to commit to doing this every year.” My first reaction was that it was overkill. My second reaction was that he is brilliant. He was greatly aware that his company was moving at lightning growth speed, and if they didn’t make the time for this annually, they could easily head off course or fragment as a company.

When was the last time you invited someone in to assess if you are who you mean to be to the market around you?