How we’re using brand retrospectives to measure brand effectiveness

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 👏.

As part of the process of building our brand in house (you can read about that here), we introduced brand retrospectives, a process that I outlined here. To quote myself, “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.”

Fast forward to 6 months later and things felt a little too…zoomed in? It felt like we were focusing on very small things like font choice instead of seeing a brand as a lever for the business, thinking big and thinking in a results oriented way. Things that have changed since then:

• Going fully remote (we used to do a lot of this up on a wall, analog)
• Building up a more high fidelity brand system (we’re shipping a LOT more work these days)
• Growing our team! When we started our team was 4. Now we’re 7+ freelancers

Observations:

• The format of meetings dictates the content you’ll get from people
• It’s hard to see the big picture when you’re only looking back and forward on a single month horizon (stealing GP’s words here!)
• When you’ve got no visual identity, the goal is to build a visual identity. Once you start to build that identity, just having it done is not enough — you need to start thinking about whether it’s effective

We needed a retro process that would allow us to measure effectiveness as a brand…which begs the question…

What’s an effective brand?

A brand is a space you hold in people’s minds. And brand strategy should support the business strategy. So we boiled down our measure of effectiveness to two broad categories:

• Positioning: are we positioning ourselves the way we want to?
• Performance: is our brand helping us drive business results?

So what did that mean for brand retro?

Incorporating this definition and what we focus our work on meant that how we’re reflecting on our brand work should also change…so I made some rejigs. Changes in our brand retro process look like:

• 100% in Miro and we’re all on google hangs now (that wasn’t me, that was COVID)
• Focused on our actions as a whole — added a section to ask ourselves: what we as a brand did, looked like, and said, instead of thinking of ourselves as only a visual or verbal identity
• Incorporated performance and positioning signals — we picked just a few, to keep us focused
• Much simpler template to fill in (much less work for me)

The TLDR: we defined brand effectiveness as part of our retro and have started actively tracking it — helps us look ahead and focus our projects more strategically on positioning and performance, which is hard to do when you’re in the weeds thinking about logo development. As our brand becomes clearer, we’ll continue to shift our process and reflection to help us reach our goals.