(Our version of) The Brand Workshop

How we use in Everest our version of the brand workshop to create lean brands for our products and align team and stakeholders.

Let’s start by tackling the elephant in the room: I’m not a brand specialist and I don’t pretend to be one. For anyone that is looking for a solid branding work: you should go to a brand specialist. They are awesome and take months to define strong brand strategies that work and evolve constantly to really make an impact in the audience.

The reality is tho, that as a product designer that is done a tremendous amount of startup work, I’ve been in lots of occasions in the situation when a product we are defining needs a brand, but has not the budget (nor the maturity) to go thought a months long process. We are aiming to put some MVP in the market to test our hypotheses and we don’t even know if our MVP will work or not! This is the context where the brand workshop has worked for me very well.

When I’ve been in the situation to create a lite-brand for a product, there are always two really difficult things:

• The first one is to explain again and again that brand is not only a logo and a set of colours. Brand is the way your audience perceive your product or service and hence, Branding is the art of science of affecting that perception to be what we want to be. That implies a very important thing: before we go and choose any colours, we need to know and align how we want to be perceived.
• The second one is related with the subjective quality of visual design. We know we are designing for the target audience and not for us or the stakeholders, but for the reality is that everyone has an opinion and stakeholders (and team members) tend to judge a brand based on their own personal point of view.

The reason I love the brand workshop is because it has solved for me consistently that two big problems, no matter how remote, multicultural or difficult is the situation.

I started to use the workshop from Jake knapp 3 hours brand sprint a few years ago, and from that I’ve been adapting it to my needs and tweaking it here and there until I got to this version, that can be done in around 1.5h with some pre-work.

Who to invite: everyone that is going to be related with the product. Of course stake holders

When to do it: definitely is better at the beginning of the build, when you have clear what problem are you solving and what is your audience, but haven’t started to build/design the product yet. It is also a really good opportunity for team building.

How to do it:

1. Warm up
2. Defining what we are
3. Understanding the context: competitors and audience
4. Defining how we want to be perceived: the brand personality

1. Warm up

Starting with a bit of dreaming and imagine the product in the future is a very useful way to get into the right mindset to think about branding, and the technique of asking the team where our product will be in 5, 10, 20 years works quite well for me.

It is important to cheer up the group to think big, and share and celebrate the big visions in order to put everyone in the right starting point to start the workshop. For 1.5 hours we want to to forget aboutMVP, estimations and realises and just think BIG.

2. Defining what we are

In this area of the workshop we will focus in us an our product or service and what we want it to be, not in a functionality level but in a values and mission level.

I love to user the Simon Sinek’s golden circle here, and yes, we use it from outside in (wen end in the why, instead of starting with the why). Through the years many people has commented that I’m using it in the wrong way. Feels contra intuitive but the reason we do this is because in product projects we normally know at this point what are we doing, we have an idea on how we will do it… but we are doing this workshop precisely to came up with the why (that normally is missing).

Is precisely the why what we will incorporate to our brand strategy with the values. Don’t really care much about the how and the what except as tools to bring our team in the journey.

3. Understanding the context: competitors and audience

In this area we really recommend to come with some pre-work, share with the team and start working from there. Ideally we have done some deep competitor research and we have very clear understanding on what is our audience.

Is a very interesting exercise when thinking about the competitors to expand to indirect competitors. For instance, if we were defining a videoconference tool, don’t only focus in other videoconference tools in the market, but also in other productivity tools that our audience use. Helps a lot when doing this part of the exercise to prompt the team with the question “what would you like to be like” and maybe even more important “what would you DON’T want to be like”

4. Defining how we want to be perceived

In the last part of the workshop, once we understand how we want to be perceived, the context and audience that will be perceiving us, we focus in the brand personality.

I’ve tried many ways to do this with teams and is really hard to ask people to imagine a brand personality from a white board. What works for me very well is instead to ask them to imagine what personality they DON’T want the brand to be perceived. Works like magic, and once they have the negative on the board, is way more easy to think in the positive attributes.

Output of the workshop

Is very important to keep in mind that the output of the brand workshop is not to define a brand strategy, but to collect the thoughts of the team and align in some starting points.

I recommend to avoid trying to come up with one final answer during the workshop. The workshop is great to collect and align ideas, but if you want a great outcome you need to massage and wordsmith a fair bit the output after this. Instead of trying to define final outputs, I always cluster and use votes for people to express themselves.

The brand elements that will come out of the workshop and you need to refer constantly from there onwards in your creative process are:

• your Why, that will become your mission statement
• your Brand Values
• your Audience
• your Brand Personality

This artefacts become your starting point but also a stepping stone where you go back again and again to avoid subjectivity in the feedback along the process. Use them also to build the soul of your product and team, keep the vision alive and get everyone excited about what you guys are building together.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

If you want to try this at home, you can find a Miro board template here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lkvhF2o=/?invite_link_id=456831544208