How to facilitate the workshop exercise to add valuable ‘descriptors’ to each of your project Brand Values. How to facilitate the Competitor Mapping workshop exercise for your project.

When the time is up, take turns going around the room and reading each sticky note out loud and adding it to an empty wall. It’s no secret that we’re big fans of documentation, but it’s because we’ve seen over and over how game changing it can be for businesses of all sizes. It’s certainly useful for large enterprises, but even small startups can run into issues when there’s no documentation around content. If you want to leave it up to the professionals, you can work with a branding company that will take the reins to help with your branding strategy and design. Build a relationship with your audience through the correct person.

Outcome Of Branding Workshop

Download this FREE BluePrint to get the EXACT FRAMEWORKused by TOP AGENCIES to build brand strategies for their clients. This is often where the brand strategists’ people management skills come to the fore. Extracting the thoughts and ideas from the leaders early on is a critical step in the development of an aligned brand. Depending on the branding agency or branding consultant offering the services, these terms are often used as one and the same thing or with variations in the processes. Photo byBrandi Redd.Pass the stack of notes around the room and ask each person to pull off the top sticky and read the adjective out loud.

The best thing you can do is try your best to read the room and try to adapt your activities to the group you have. Now, you have a goal for what your brand voice needs to do. We do theses as a standalone workshop, but also sometimes as part of a longer two-day discovery session.

Components To Cover In A Brand Strategy Workshop

This workshop is excellent for new brands and established companies looking to connect with customers and get their products in front of new audiences. Now it is time to take everything you have learned from the workshop and continue to apply it to your brand’s marketing strategy. To create a personality with your voice, you must decide how you want to be perceived by your audience. This should accurately reflect your brand’s personality.

If you have brand management responsibilities in your position, download the Outside-In Innovation Fake Book today (it’s still free to download!). If your brand is seeking growth, where else can you deliver benefits central to your brand in new markets?

How We Uncover Your Brand Essence

Last, but definitely not least, we aim to provide all of this through an experience that is fun, educational, collaborative, and consultative. We believe better brands build a better world and our mission is to help give brands the best chance to succeed. Nick Tietz and Shelby Chollett, Co-Founders of ILT Studios, joined us to share their advice on how to lead social impact workshops using MURAL.

For example, you might include optimistic, mischievous, and judicious. This might be done using a survey, like we did with our own rebrand. Ideally, you’ll be able to conduct one-on-one interviews with at least your key stakeholders so you can really dig into what’s working, what’s not, and what the brand means to them personally. These personal attachments will prove to be important when you try to get everyone on board with the new brand later.

Take Your Time

In this workshop you’ll identify common usability mistakes and learn best practices and high ROI techniques to correct them. Natalie has the ability to cut through the distraction, keep the team on target, and deliver the result we set out to achieve. It’s one thing to answer the questions; it’s something altogether different to illustrate how your organization can apply the results to tangible sales and marketing pieces. Making the leap from theory to the tangible is a must. This step is about organizing ideas in groups of emerging patterns, a process also known as clustering or affinity mapping. To get started, spread out all the yes stickies on a table. This process will take quite some time, and you should use all the remaining time in this session to finish this sorting.

Our library system has a track record of pursuing ambitious projects and delivering amazing results. You’re not just signing up for a service—you’re joining a community of libraries interested in leveling up. Technologies and learning styles of the 21st Century have forced libraries to take another look at their business model. They are taking learning and free entertainment to a new level, with programming being the key to their success. The idea behind a swipe file is super simple — take what works and converts and adapt it for yourself and your marketing. It’s a super easy way to take advantage of the testing, that others have done and apply it for your own marketing process.

As a group, discuss whether this adjective describes the brand and invite the person who chose it to add it to a column on the whiteboard. Explain up front that it’s okay to disagree and it’s also acceptable to move the sticky notes around as the conversation progresses. Come back together and choose a spokesperson to present to the group. Allow each group to share and add to one another’s ideas. We always tell our clients that the hardest part of a rebrand is deciding you need a rebrand. The Tone of Voice Cards are a useful tool to help you identify communication style.

The Workshop

All of these wonderful human things get put into the washing machine of a workshop. But the reason workshops work is because they weave together lots of ideas into a cohesive narrative and output, swiftly. I make it a rule that there is nowhere to hide in one of my workshops. I am constantly scanning participants to find the quiet ones and I will come to them directly if I feel they need to be heard and invite them in. Your brand should reflect who you are, what you believe in and what you stand for.

All of this will be done by exploring nine special components of your brand. The benefits of a brand strategy workshop cannot be underestimated. Any successful business starts with an effective branding strategy. A brand strategy is a long-term plan that affects all facets of your business. This can be overwhelming to put together when you are new to the game. The process always starts by defining who you are and identifying the characteristics that make you unique. This way, the remaining phases–where you craft your messaging and logo–are based on those unique characteristics.

Your brand will lead with your core archetype, but having a secondary wing will add personality to your offering. Think of it as a complementary component to your core values – a flavor, an edge, or the cherry on top. This Boston-based design firm was able to recreate the interactive vision workshops that are a critical component of their creative process with their clientele.

This module looks at how various prospects would approach your brand during the buying cycle and where they would interact with it. Structured mapping and gap analysis looks at how your customers and stakeholders interact at each step of the journey, what could improve that interaction, and where advocacy begins. This module will provide your team with a better understanding of how prospects will interact with your brand and identify where the gaps in communication are. ” We want to cover every detail, which is why our brand guides are anywhere from 20 to 35 pages. Our team reconvenes soon after the end of the workshop to debrief and assess the next step of creating the resulting brand guide deliverables. You’ll get a follow-up from our team summarizing the workshop results while we turn our attention to executing the creative component of the workshop. During this exercise we key in on your brands traits and voice characteristics using this same approach where we identify the most appropriate descriptors for your brand.

A workshop can align company leaders on current goals while also laying the groundwork for all future branding efforts. We structured ours around where we currently are and where we want the brand to be moving forward. —Check out my tutorial on how to translate brand strategy into visual design. While your positioning statement is for internal purpose, your tagline is for external purpose — its customer facing, but your tagline should be aligned with your positioning of course. Second, let’s look at the personality — your and voice must align or complement your personality. So that your personality and voice will work together, to represent the HOW – how your brand message is delivered. Brand Attitude Statement.This will allow you to form your brand attitude and express your personality in simple messaging.

It’s certainly possible to build your user experience expertise by reading books and blog posts, but that can be a slow process and it makes it hard to see the big picture. This is without a doubt the most critical stage of the branding workshop as it defines the new direction for the brand. By developing realistic personas with names and faces, the leadership team can begin to develop a real connection with who their brand is trying to appeal to. In this section, fictional characters are created to represent the typical buyers in order to understand their personality, what they want and how they feel. A branding workshop can be a highly detailed session spanning days or it could be conducted in a few hours. Often, brand leaders have differences of opinions whether it’s related to strategic direction, positioning or even the identity style.

• Choose a couple of those changes as ideas to implement.
• Based on who the audience is, the group will look to uncover where they congregate and go to for answers related to the brand solution.
• Users have unprecedented access to products and services, leaving companies competing to be seen and identified with.
• Simply ask the participants to trim the keywords they selected in the discovery survey from 20 down to four.
• Creative Component – This process takes 7-10 days typically and usually includes additional design review meetings for us to go over the design and collect feedback from you.
• Participants can play with the cards to create a moodboard that accurately reflects the brand.
• Brand Strategy — Guide to discovery sessionIf you have any questions, just shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

In fact, we rarely arrive at an expected conclusion in our workshops. Before we dive into the first workshop exercise, we take some time for everyone to get to know each other. We’ll start off with some introductions of our team and then ask the client to tell us a little bit about themselves in their own words. From there your Workshop Emcee will review the process ahead so everyone knows what to expect. If Process is our “what”, then our Approach is “how”. Our Approach to the workshops themselves is the secret sauce of our branding workshops.

Ikea is about cost-consciousness, simplicity and togetherness. You can see it in incredibly affordable furniture, family-oriented stores, and approachable visual design. The information you need is right up front, so you can decide quickly whether this is a good fit for your library. Draw and describe in detail one or two of your favorite ideas, then write down three steps to move this idea forward. For your ideas to become a reality, you need to go deeper into how they would work and have a clear action plan for next steps.

• Before we formally engage we will have already started off by getting to understand you, your goals and how exactly we can help.
• It’s not about reading it to them and being a micromanager; it’s more about getting time on the calendar to discuss it and allow them to ask questions.
• You can use a branding agency, but my favorite source for great design is 99Designs.
• The second workshop focuses on strategically implementing these concepts into real-life applications.
• A sitemap or plan for your upcoming website, based on your customers’ purchasing process.
• Before we begin any brainstorming, we want to ground our discussions with clear strategy.

First, we printed out sets of the archetype cards for each stakeholder to read. Each card had 1) the name of the archetype, 2) what the archetype personality is, and 3) companies that embody the archetype. Once all the participants had read through the archetype cards, we asked them to pick one that they felt strongly resonated with where our brand is currently and pin it to the board. Then, we asked them to take the third dot and place it under branding workshop exercises an archetype card where they believe the brand should be going. Now, since you’ve defined your personality, now let’s add to that by projecting a compelling voice for your brand. Here we’re going to give your brand a human side by defining its personality in order to build relationship with your customers. Ok, so without further ado let’s jump right into the first exercise in this section, or the 7th exercise overall — your brand personality.

I’ve been running workshops for over 15 years and most weeks I’m facilitating at least two, usually with leadership teams located all over the world. As a facilitator, I have designed and implemented hundreds of workshops and I believe creating a good workshop experience is crucial to aligning and energizing teams. But the real action happens when ideas are released and grappled with. Around not only the content of those workshops but, more importantly, the experience leaders have in a workshop. This exercise looks at how your brand creates significance, engagement, and confidence based on your current set of tactics and your aspirational goals of connecting prospects with your brand.