A strategic design approach to brand transformation
“Brand transformation” can mean 1,000 things. New logo. New narrative. New way of engaging with customers or employees. Here’s a few pointers on how to make the most of your brand’s transformation.
There are three foundational elements of a brand transformation that have low visibility but enormous impact:
- the value proposition
- the portfolio
- the brand architecture.
However, these elements are typically relegated to a deck that is poured over by strategists, unveiled in a high-impact presentation, and *hopefully* implemented by dutiful marketing and design teams. But a strategic design approach does away with this model, while helping tomake good on the promise of brand transformation efforts: creating a fresh experience of the brand for consumers, a space for employee engagement, and ultimately a runway for growth.
A strategic design approach applies design-led innovation concepts and techniques such as workshopping, prototyping, testing, and experimentation. It’s an approach that allows for rigorous, rapid and confident decision making. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all template for strategic design led brand transformation. Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid; meaning that we apply the principles of strategic design to help brands and businesses confront the future. Based on a few learnings from our experience, combined with radically simple workshop canvases, we’d like to share a few pointers to help business designers and brand strategists in taking a strategy-design approach to transforming brands.
Stakeholder engagement over stakeholder management
Brand transformation decisions are not singularly relevant — the implications are felt across an organisation and they have the potential to create frustration, confusion, and redundancies, etc. That is why, it is essential for decision makers from across senior leadership to have a stake in the conversation. Involvement can be scaled, meetings can be curated and tightly moderated to ensure that every session is time well spent. But stakeholders should have the opportunity to be involved and share their points of view on the implications, their hesitations, and the factor that contribute to roadblocks early and often.
Workshops over presentations
With a few exceptions, the days of the *big reveal* are over. Workshops — with consultants acting as facilitators first, experts second can be extremely helpful. A workshop doesn’t have to mean that you’re all starting from zero. Effective workshops require an enormous front-loading of work and a solid hypothesis on the outcome. For elements like the value proproposition, portfolio, and brand architecture — try taking a react and respond approach: going into workshops 85% confident in the outcome. But make it clear that the intent for participants isn’t to bless the work, the expectation is to challenge, shape and own the work.
With a few exceptions, the days of
the *big reveal* are over.
Candor over secrecy
Involve diverse voices from across the organisation at every milestone. A curated group of employees — people from diverse departments and with diverse skillsets, people with strong opinions, reputations as challengers or enthusiasts. Call them brand ambassadors, advocates or the brand council (the name isn’t important, but its important that their role is defined) and bring them along for the journey. Give them a voice, use them as a pilot testing group. Schedule regular sessions with them to update them on the brand transformation team’s progress — giving them an opportunity to provide feedback or share their concerns. Everyone wants to be heard, so create the space to listen.
With these principles of collaboration and transparency in mind, here are 3 canvases for the foundational brand transformation elements. These aren’t frameworks that deliver answers, but tools to use in the context of workshops, and materials to support conversations with stakeholders.
A radically simple value proposition canvas
The value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered to the consumer. It should be tangible, inspiring and might come to life in this formula: We help (x) do (y) by (z). This is an indespensible moment to bring together leaders from across the organisation — helping strategists to understand leaders shape the points of view of different departments.
Product teams might know the technical details and the user benefits of the products; marketing understands how to communicate those benefits to customers; commercial teams understand the implications for the bottom line and people teams understand how employees are motivated. Bringing together these stakeholders, we can use this value proposition canvas to prompt thinking that can inform the value proposition.
Decentralising the portfolio design
It’s been said that there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” And portfolio design — the way that products and services are organised — is at the heart of that argument.
Portfolio design is simple, but it’s not easy. Especially for established organisations with entrenched departments, distinct P&L’s, and legacy teams. Changes to the portfolio can cause internal turbulence.
For this exercise, some best practices are useful: best in class brand portfolios, and a category-specific portfolio analysis. From there, the task is to break the business down into its component parts, and ask participants to *independently* build the portfolio from scratch. Think of it as a kind of lego approach to portfolio design.
Participants are asked to share back their portfolio with the group — explaining their thinking and rationalising their choices. With this exercise, everyone’s interests, assumptions and hesitations are laid bare. Hidden agendas, or sensitivities are just more difficult to hide when you’re stacking and organising blocks of information while having an open conversation about the ways things actually fit together. Having individual points of view on the portfolio can also help how it is introduced and socialised to the origination. And the exercise has the added benefit of participants experiencing the complexity of the task (when they see that everyone has a different opinion on the structure of the portfolio), which can help them build empathy with the brand transformation team responsible for the output.
Unambiguous examples of brand architecture
If the portfolio design shapes the development of products and services, the brand architecture is how customers experience the portfolio. It’s also the side that many stakeholders feel most attached to since it’s the most visible part of the foundational brand elements.
Are we a branded house or house of brands? How strong should the master brand be? Is there enough equity in the master brand for it to endorse other products or services?
Taking a strategic design approach, and prioritising involvement across the organisations — clarity and consistency is essential. And not everyone necessarily knows the difference between a sub-brand and an endorsed-brand. Tangible examples that they’re personally familiar with are essential to cutting through the jargon.
This simple set of examples helps drive alignment; with tangible applications so things become less abstract and easier to make sense of.
Transforming today’s brands for tomorrow
Brand transformation is a thrilling prospect, where leaders have the opportunity to leave a lasting mark on their organisation. Manyone’s strategy-design hybrid approach helps ensure that the process of transformation can be just as impactful as the final transformation itself.
Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid. Visit us at Manyone.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
