How we approach brand workshops

with Jo Reid, Brand Director

Brand workshops are a fantastic opportunity for us to collectively grow our understanding of your brand and its DNA, in order to unpack its potential. What makes you tick as a brand? What are the propositions that make you unique in the market, and how do you connect with your consumers?

It’s no secret that brands need tweaking and finetuning every so often, whether you’re a new or well-established brand. You might even find yourselves at a crossroads and wanting some guidance in how to be fit for the future. We work with challenger and legacy businesses alike, helping you refine and polish their brands until they’re gleaming.

But all our work starts with listening... and sharing. And brand workshops are incredibly vital, interactive sessions. When key stakeholders come together, a huge depth of knowledge and insight can be shared, discussed and debated. Our job is to collect and build on the extensive knowledge you already have, to further refine it using creative ideation and insights from behavioural science, in order to bring you closer to your audience and change consumer behaviour on an emotive level.

1. Before the workshop: Explore

When we start the process of helping you with your brand, we need to immerse ourselves in it so that we understand it in the minutest detail. We want to understand everything about how you operate, what your product does, how and what is special and unique about it.

At this stage, anything and everything you share with us might be relevant – particularly the expertise you house within your teams. For that reason, we speak to stakeholders within your business (product managers, marketing and sales teams) as well as your customers (past, present and even potential). We also pore over any documentation you provide, including existing research, sales and commercial data, and previous work on branding and product naming.

We also conduct our own analysis of the product category, looking at key competitors, audiences, and market trends, as well as your users (if that’s what you want). We can also design and carry qualitative focus groups or interviews to understand your target market on a deeper level, and commission quantitative research (e.g. bespoke surveys) to understand the issues and scale of opportunities.

At this stage of the brand immersion, we deconstruct your brief into its key parts so we fully understand what you need from us, and if appropriate, identify any drivers beyond immediate need that might reveal rich territories for further exploration. By interrogating everything, we’re confident we’ve left no stone unturned. This process takes time – but it’s worth it!

2. In the workshop: Develop

Once we’ve got all the information we need, we use it to develop actionable insights and territories to explore together. At this stage, we can also start to build in behavioural science insights – what is driving consumer behaviour, what emotive drivers lead or obstruct users when interacting with your product, and so forth. We use this to develop a detailed and intimate look at your users, along with relevant personas.

This is the point at which we conduct the brand workshop. The specific aim of the workshop is never the same twice, as every client and every project is different.

Sometimes our goal might be to build resonant audience personas. Sometimes it’s to define a brand’s proposition, purpose or values. Other times, it’s to start building a creative concept which will form the basis of future communications or a brand identity.

Whatever the desired outcome, we utilise a range of interactive techniques to prompt discussion, inspire ideas, and clarify, construct and define. We make sure everyone has an opportunity to express their thoughts. By testing and articulating ideas with your team, the idea is to push our collective thinking on your brand to actionable insights. This can be in person at your offices, or online with the use of interactive tools such as Klaxoon.

Led by our in-house brand strategists, with the help of our creative team and account managers, the workshop is fun and constructive opportunity to consolidate old and new ideas, to agree on a path forward and, where appropriate, to build ideas for testing with consumers. Any concept we refine will be underpinned by rigorous behavioural science principles.

3. After the workshop: Create and evaluate

Here’s where everything really starts to take shape. We’ve pulled everything apart and now we build something new, imaginative, and daring.

We’re in the business of clever ideas. We cast the net wide to land on the absolute best ones. The ones that have the power to persuade. With the brand workshop outputs captured, we get to work. We shape our learnings into the materials that are needed for the next stage of work. This might be a fully formed brand articulation document, a brand playbook, a strategic direction for the brand or finely honed visual concepts and creative routes. Whatever it is you need, whether this is a total rebranding direction or some tweaks and new brand expressions, our workshops can deliver the results you need.

4. Deliver

Your new site is live. You’re up and running on TikTok. Your brand is gleaming and fresh. Whatever it is, we bring it over the line, on time and to spec. And whichever results are achieved, the brand workshop was crucial in getting us there – together.

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