The 45-minute brand audit Qvicom runs before we touch a pixel

Before we write a tagline or open Figma, we run a brand audit. It takes about 45 minutes, it runs identically for English and Spanish, and it exists to answer one question: is the problem in front of us a design problem or a decisions-that-never-got-made problem? Most of the time it is the second — and the audit is how we find out before anybody is billed for guessing.

The first ten minutes: what exists

We inventory the identity as it actually is, not as the pitch deck claims: logo files (vector? one color? does a light-background version exist?), the palette in use — pulled from the live site and the decks, not from memory — and the typefaces, with their license status. In bilingual contexts we add two questions that rarely get asked: does the name read the same in both languages? (phonetics, false friends, uppercase collisions) and do we have a spelling for search that matches how each market says it out loud?

Minutes 10–25: voice in two languages

We read the last ten public texts in each language: home, service pages, the last posts, the emails a client actually receives (welcome, quote, invoice, reminder). We mark three things — formality level, first-person plural vs impersonal, and how promises are phrased ("we" vs "the platform" vs silence). Bilingual brands fail most often here: the English voice is confident and specific, the Spanish voice is polite and generic, and visitors feel the split even if they cannot name it. The output includes a mini-glossary: ten recurring terms, agreed once, in both languages.

Minutes 25–35: the neighborhood

Four competitors per market (not four global giants — four companies the client actually loses deals to), scanned for the same variables: palette, type, offer shape, price posture, language behavior. The question is not "are we better" — it is "where is there room to look unmistakably like ourselves". Two markets often yield two different answers, and that is a finding, not a contradiction to average away.

Minutes 35–45: touchpoints and the one-page verdict

We close on the digital surface: site speed and mobile behavior, the quote/contact path (can a visitor in each language reach a human in two clicks?), analytics truth (is anything measured at all?), and the social profiles as a stranger sees them. Then you get a one-page verdict: what is solid (keep), what is inconsistent (fix — with the specific pages/texts named), what is missing (decide — with the three decisions ranked). If what you need is a full strategy engagement, we say that too; the audit is 45 minutes precisely so it never becomes a vehicle for selling you the next thing.