What is a brand retro?

A practical method for using continuous improvement to build a brand in house

Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future work retiring into. We’re building our brand in house and documenting what we learn in the process. If you like what you read, please subscribe, follow, like or hit 👏.

Brand retros are something we’ve started doing at Future Super for building deep ownership of our brand, and moving from analysis to action as we test and flex our brand system. Retrospectives are common in software teams to practice iterative development, but not so much in creative development. We use them because culture, business, and brand aren’t static, so our process shouldn’t be, either. We’ll explore what a brand retro is, and practical advice on how to use it. Ready?

We developed brand retros as an alternative to the too-common one-and-done approach to branding. We want to develop deep ownership of our brand — and a playful, curious approach to constantly testing and flexing our system. Culture and business aren’t static — our brand shouldn’t be, either.

Iterative branding vs one and done

First: why build a brand iteratively? The biggest reason is that we want to be constantly evolving our brand — people, culture, and businesses are not static, and our brand shouldn’t be, either. Secondly, we’ve seen retros work well in our team to focus our work and improve how we work together, and we wanted to apply that process to our brand work, too.

The purpose of a retrospective

A good retrospective is an invitation to acknowledge what’s not working and commit to improve, together. It moves the focus from blame to solutions: what did we miss? How can we improve? Most importantly, it builds empathy and understanding. Something I’m sure we could all use a little more of.

The same method can be used for building a brand. Here’s how we use it.

Our brand retro agenda.

Brand Retro

What it is: Monthly check-ins on as we build out a new brand

Objective: Identify what’s working, what’s not and come up with solutions to test int he coming weeks

On the guest list: Anyone we’ve worked with over the past month — in house, freelancers, developers.

How it works

• Gather brand / creative work. We do this every 4 weeks. Hang it on a wall.

Left: December brand exploration. Right: January brand exploration. It’s helpful to see everything together in one place and see what’s uniting the system, as well as what’s not working.

• Reflect. Each attendee completes reflection on post-its of what’s working / what’s not.
• Facilitator summarises ‘what’s working / what’s not’. It’s helpful to group these as people share their working / not working notes.
• Define How Might We’s. We focus our ‘How Might We’s’ on areas we think will help move our creative development forward significantly.
• Define tests of How Might We’s. Once we’ve identified an area to explore (testing our motion principles, for example), we assign a test to that HMW, so that we have an action attached to the experiment. For example, we might commit to releasing an ad that is an exploration or extension of our existing motion principles.
• Document what you’ve committed to. We keep this pretty simple and frame these in terms of ‘How Might We’s’ and ‘Tests’.

So far, we’ve held two brand retros. We grade ourselves on a traffic light system.

Outcomes so far

So far, we’ve come further and faster using this process than anything else. We’ve committed to monthly brand retros, as well as sharing what we learn along the way. You can view the results of our January retro, here.

Do you run retrospectives? What has helped your team make continuous improvements?