How to run the ultimate brand workshop.

You’ve probably already heard loads about this in the branding and TOV world — that’s because it’s incredibly useful and crucial to building a strong brand strategy and brand identity.

In this exercise, you uncover the What, the Why and the How behind the brand.

• What the business does as a primary service.
  (e.g. Make toothpaste)‍
• How does the business operate?
  (e.g. Made with all-natural ingredients)‍
• Why does the business exist?
  (e.g. Promote a healthy lifestyle)

For this exercise, I often compile a long list of popular adjectives that reflect the brand’s characteristics. The client then gets involved by placing “stamps” on the ones that resonate with them the most.

This is a wonderful debate starter since, more often than not, when you run these workshops with three or more client-side participants, they all have fairly varied viewpoints.

This exercise is more focused on the brand’s personality and tone of voice. How would your brand sound if it were a person? A good brand voice should be genuine, appropriate, and approachable.

In order to help us create their brand voice, certain terms are divided into the following 5 categories: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. Within each area, there are 4 options/scales for us to choose from.

Similar to the last exercise, clients are asked to get involved and “stamp” the words that best describe their brand.

Another task that helps us to understand the brand personality and traits, is brand attributes. This is a straightforward 6-row structure showing scales from one end to another. The client is asked to get involved and set these scales to what they think is right for their brand.

Although this task may seem small and insignificant, this contributes to the visual identity as well as the brand voice. Again, this is a good discussion point to get the client thinking as their thoughts may not align with each others.

When building a brand, especially if you’re starting from nothing, it’s essential to understand the market. In this exercise, you ask the client to choose 3–5 of their main competitors to begin with, and once those are agreed with, they then have to decide where to position them on the chart provided.

As not everyone on the client side typically agrees with where things sit, this is yet another excellent debate point that gets the client thinking.

The final task in this section is to place where they believe THEIR brand sits amid their competitive landscape.

Many of these that I’ve personally conducted in the past have shocked me in terms of how the customer positions themselves, as it is usually quite different than where I’d personally position them myself, so this is a really helpful task.

Where do you see your brand in 5 years? It’s good to get the client thinking about the future of their brand, is it timeless? Are they expecting to be acquired and change brand? Will they branch off and birth new brands that need to tie back to this brand?

This section is more so for our future goals and outcomes of this brand, where will it be seen, what will it be used for, what do we need to prepare for, and so on.

In this task, a timer is set and the client can freely post sticky notes with ideas onto this artboard.

This task is very helpful when coming to the visual identity and defining the brand voice. What brands (non-industry specific) does the client love and aspire to be?

As designers, strategists, copywriters… etc. this helps us do more research into these brands to find out what the client likes/dislikes about them and figure out how we can learn and incorporate some of those learnings into the branding we’re going to create. Is it their colour palette? Their photography direction? The way they speak? and so on.

Side note:* If the client doesn’t mention a brand like Apple, Google or Nike in this section, I would be very surprised!

For me, this is one of the most important questions for a branding project and it very easily gets forgotten about or side-lined until very late on in the project lifecycle.

What does your client need from this branding? What will it be used for? and how will it be used by them?

Here are some of the examples I suggest at this stage (Of course depending on the answer the estimate and cost for this need to be adjusted):

1. A short, minimal and condensed PDF format Brand Guideline document they can easily share via email to multiple agencies to use on their channels.
2. A simple digital Style Guide / Style sheet to incorporate the brand on their website
3. A detailed Digital Design System in Figma that their in-house team can take away and use/implement in all of their channels
4. A dedicated URL website (like Frontify) that houses everything including documents, guidelines and assets, that can continue to evolve over time.
   

I don’t always include this in my brand workshops as this task itself can take anywhere between 4–6 hours to get through with the client, however, it is extremely important and valuable to the client nonetheless and I do recommend running this task with your client at some point.

There’s no one who knows your brand better than your audience, and ultimately there’s no point in designing any brand or voice without first understanding who you’re doing it for.

In this exercise, we try to get into the mindset of the audience and understand their personality, interests, pain points and more to uncover what we need from this branding.

This exercise is split into three tasks as follows:

1. Who do you think is your audience — For 3–5 minutes, everyone can freely drop sticky notes on one art board of who they think their audience types are (i.e. Young Artists, Company Founders, and so on). There should be at least 10 if done correctly. What you will find is some duplicates or some completely different types, but at this stage, the more the better.
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2. Narrow down your target audience — You can’t just target everyone with a single brand, a good rule is to try and base your target audience on 3 or fewer categories. The next task for this exercise is to work as a collaborative team with the client, to narrow down all of the sticky notes to the 3 main prioritised audience types. This is a great discussion task, as your clients might debate between themselves who the audience types should be at this stage, and more often than not have completely different ideas.
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3. Create personas — One by one select each of the 3 narrowed-down audience types and create one realistic person based on that type. Assign a photo to them and give them a name so they feel like a real person, then work with your client to create a realistic audience member with details such as location, age, and occupation. Dive into what that audience type might be interested in, and what their hobbies might be. Lastly, break down some ideas of what their pain points and frustrations might be, and ultimately why they would be coming to this brand to start with.

After you have done this exercise, you and the client will have a really good understanding of who we are creating this brand for, and this helps influence the look and feel as well as the tone of voice and personality behind the brand.

An additional step to this task is to challenge some of the decisions made earlier in this workshop by relating them back to the audience types. Does the personality, voice and traits of the brand match the type of audience we want to connect with?