Brand new you.
author
Ben
19 June 2019
What is a branding workshop?
Branding, it’s not just logos, fonts and colour schemes.
Aesthetics is part of it, of course, but that’s just the surface of what branding really means. Branding, put simply, is about the message you send, how you send it and the people you send it to.
A branding workshop defines these three things.
And once you know that, the other things will follow. Your logo, tagline, and color scheme will convey what you really want it to and attract the people it should.
A branding workshop is a get-to-know-you session.
Our branding workshops are like a first date with your business. We encourage you to forget all you think you know about it and see it with fresh eyes. More importantly, we paint you as the role of the customer, so you think about your brand from the most important person’s point of view.
At our branding workshops, you’ll complete structured exercises designed to help you define your brand – not just what you offer, but what you have to say, and how and where you should say it.
You’ll answer questions like: what’s your brand’s personality? Fun and quirky, conservative and serious, elegant and refined. We’ll draw up a formality scale and see where you sit on it.
We’ll revisit your existing mission and vision statements and your brand values to see how well you work towards them in your daily operations. Do your statements and values need changing? Or do you need to change the way you work to uphold them better?
What about your message? Where are you telling it? How are you telling it? Is your tone of voice in line with your mission and brand values?
In our branding workshop, we’ll work with you to answer all these questions. And, in the process, we’ll create a brand architecture that will serve you for years.
Thinking about your business in a whole new way.
In our branding workshop, one of the first things we’ll do together is evaluate the things you already know. We’ll lay it all out on the table, and then do some exercises to really get to the core of your business.
The goal is to get you to think more deeply about who you are and find out if there are any gaps between your brand’s theory and your everyday reality. Right now, you may be sabotaging yourself by setting goals that aren’t achievable or sending a conflicting message between what your brand is and what you actually offer.
With that in mind, we’ll invite all of your company’s stakeholders to lay everything out on the table. By inviting everyone to share what their vision is, we’ll be able to create a more cohesive brand that everyone is happy with.
It’ll be a fun few hours. We’ll get you to reconsider things you haven’t thought of since you were handed your induction pack on your first day. Things may even get a little… fractious. Debates come with the territory and we’re here to make them as productive as possible, using even differences of opinion to clarify where your company is going.
In the end, you and your stakeholders will leave our offices with a fresh perspective and a new drive to push your business forward.
The structure and timing of the workshop
How long will the brand workshop take? After all, you and your stakeholders are a busy bunch, and we value your time as much as we value our own. That’s why most of them won’t take more than half a day.
We’ll take regular breaks, stock up on coffee, grab a bite if we need to. Our workshop structure will keep things ticking along but there’ll always be time for ad hoc discussion and Q&A sessions in between the activities and presentations.
We tailor each brand workshop experience to your business. This means we can’t offer you an exact template of what each workshop will look like, but it will include some or all of the below:
● The icebreaker – We’ll introduce ourselves, get comfy, become friends – and then have an in-depth discussion about what branding is and how you can create a good one.
● Mission statement and values – We’ll dig deep about who you really are as a company. Together, we’ll discuss your thoughts about your brand and then try to break them down into one cohesive set of brand values.
● Designing the brand – This is what everyone thinks of when they think of branding. Logos! Color schemes! Fonts! We’ll tackle all the visual and stylistic elements of your brand. And, whilst we won’t finalise anything here, we’ll leave you with highly defined ideas to take away to your design teams.
● Pitching the brand – In order to pitch anything, you need to know it really well. So, we’ll challenge you to pitch your idea to an investor in under three minutes. If we give you a customer to convince, can you sell them on your product or service?
● Telling a story – Every brand has a story. In this part of the brand workshop, each person will write out what they think the story of this brand is, and we’ll see how cohesive they are, or whether or not you need a new one.
● Developing the marketing persona – In this exercise, we’ll learn about customer personas, why they’re helpful and how you can make your own.
What happens next?
Well, first, you congratulate yourself for a job well done. And while you’re doing that, we’ll take everything we’ve learned and condense it into a package for you that you’ll be able to always refer to while you’re building – or rebuilding – your brand.
In the package, we’ll include the recording of the brand workshop, the workbooks from all attendees and our closing thoughts. We’ll offer unique insight from our experts on points of conflict, issues that arose during the workshop and how we think you can be your best self as a company moving forward.
So, are you ready to define your brand? If you are, then so are we.
And don’t worry. We believe pretty firmly that cookie cutters should be reserved for cookies only. Our brand workshops are designed specifically around what you need and where you want to go.
Interested? Contact us today for an obligation-free chat about your situation.