Are you looking at conducting a brand workshop and want to do this in-house? Well you've come to the right article! A brand is only as good as its impact on its audience and how clearly it can communicate the values and mission, while standing out from the crowd. We always start every branding project with our brand workshop, to help them understand their current brand vision and the direction they need to go for it to achieve their business goals. Since every agency does this differently, we decided to share our process behind the brand workshop.
After reading how we run our workshops, you’ll be able to conduct a brand workshop internally with your team using our DIY brand workshop download.
Download our step-by-step guide to run your own Brand Workshop internally.
Branding allows you to build connections and relationships with your target audience, to project your mission and vision which can turn them into loyal customers and users. Branding is your first impression, a way to highlight and bring awareness to your offering and to leave an everlasting impression.
Your brand can be broken down into three areas:
Brand Strategy
Brand Identity
Brand Marketing
Your strategy is the blueprints for how you will appeal to your ideal customer, identifying your reason for being, promises and how you solve your audience's problems.
Your brand identity is the way you communicate this to your target audience with visual assets, messaging, experience and consistency.
Finally, your brand marketing focuses on how you bring awareness and consideration to your offerings through connecting those values and voice to your target audience.
A brand workshop looks to peel back the layers of your business and allows you and your team to discuss what your aspirational brand currently looks like and what you want it to be. It is to make the abstract idea of ‘our brand’ into something concrete. After completing our workshop, your team gets a common language to describe what the company is about - all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become easier.
Sometimes, it’s easy to become short-sighted and to see the brand as the final product, but our workshop breaks this down and helps with questioning each element to think logically; questions you probably haven’t thought about (for a long time or at all).
The process of conducting a brand workshop begins with setting clear objectives and identifying the target audience. Next, the facilitator must determine the format and structure of the workshop, taking into account the size of the group, the desired outcome, and the available resources. When conducting a brand workshop, it's important to create a collaborative environment that encourages open communication and active participation.
One effective approach to conducting a brand workshop is to start with a review of the company's current brand identity, including its mission, values, and brand personality. This provides a starting point for discussion and helps to focus the group's attention on the key elements of the brand. From there, the facilitator can lead the group through a series of activities designed to generate ideas and feedback on various aspects of the brand, such as messaging, visual identity, and customer experience.
Another important aspect of conducting a brand workshop is to involve key stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and partners, in the process. This can provide valuable insights into how the brand is perceived and how it can be improved. It's also important to involve a diverse group of people, including those from different departments and levels within the organisation, to ensure that a range of perspectives are represented in the workshop.
Our workshop format is a sprint-like process that any team can use, walking a cross-functional group through the entire flow in about 3 hours.
The Brand Workshop consists of six exercises:
One example of the above is your 20-year roadmap, a 15 minute exercise:
1. Look into the future and think about what your company might be doing 20 year from now.
2. Draw a timeline on the whiteboard, labelled with 5, 10, 15, and 20 years into the future:
To decide what your company will be doing at each of those future dates, you’ll use a simple exercise we call Note-and-Vote.
Note-and-Vote speeds up thinking and decision-making by alternating between solo and group activities. Here’s how it works for the 20-Year Roadmap:
1. Each person quietly writes down his or her own prediction for all four dates.
2. Going around the room, each person reads their answers aloud and the facilitator writes them on the whiteboard.
3. No argument or discussion yet.
4. Each person looks at the list and quietly writes down their favourite answers.
5. Going around the room, each person reads their votes aloud and the facilitator marks the votes on the whiteboard.
6. Discuss and argue for about five minutes (use a timer to keep it to five minutes!).
7. The Decider chooses her favourite item for each future date.
8. Take a photo of the whiteboard and put it into a new slide deck called “Super Simple Brand Guide”.
Taken together, those six exercises are a powerful, concrete representation of your company’s brand. When you’re faced with a big decision — about naming, identity, marketing, or even company policy — you can use these diagrams as a guide.
Your Brand Guide can also help new employees understand what your company is about, and can even remind the founding team what you stand for. That’s a big deal. When you really nail your brand, it’s not a fluffy veneer applied at the end. Instead, it’s everything: what you build, the way you build it, who you build it for, and how you do your work. And we think it’s definitely worth three hours to figure that out.
We will always recommend that you conduct a brand workshop hosted by us as it’s difficult for internal teams to distance themselves from the brand, and subconscious prejudices can hamper the process. But, if you’d like to run an internal brand workshop using our framework, take advantage of our free Brand Workshop Guide download below.
If you need additional help with your brand, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us now or just drop us an email.
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