Brand Building 101 — Discovery & Brand Strategy
Our approach to brand-building has been over ten years in the making. When we started BrandCraft there was no brand strategy formula or framework to utilise. Each agency cobbled together a few bits from different resources into their unstructured method. As we worked with our early clients, it was clear we needed a robust, critical methodology to ensure our work was not purely aesthetics, but based on real-life metrics.
When we started BrandCraft, there was no brand strategy framework that we could follow, so through each client engagement we developed and iterated our own strategic approach. We saw how a critical approach and framework directly improves our client project workflow by empowering our clients and our creative teams to make informed and uniform decisions, while building long-lasting brands. Fundamentally, a strong brand strategy framework vastly improves the whole branding workflow.
Our brand strategy tools transformed our small agency, and opened doors to bigger and bigger projects. We even launched a brand strategy resource site, BrandWerks in 2021, as a way of bringing these tools, frameworks and brand strategy templates to other branding practitioners and creative agencies. Our brand strategy tools are now used by agencies and freelancers across the world.
Contents
What is a Brand?
What is Brand Strategy?
Why do Businesses Need Brand Strategy?
Brand Strategy Framework
Discovery
1. Brand Audit — Past, present, and future
2. DNA — Understanding the company behind the brand
3. Positioning — Leveraging difference
4. Vision — Looking back to look forward
5. Values — Defining the core values
6. Personality — Communicating character
7. Mission — Moving forward with a clear purpose
8. Brand Identity — Visual Metaphors
How We Run Brand Strategy Workshops
Brand Strategy Resources and Tools
What is a Brand?
There are endless quotes about what a brand is.
“Quality and consistency create identity.”
— Jony Ive
There is no better quote, than the beautifully critical Jony Ive, who led the product development of Apple. Identity, recognition, and memorability all cannot happen without the quality of the product or service at the center of the organisation.
A brand is more than its logo, its products/ services, its staff or its shareholders. A brand is the collect all for an individual’s experiences with the company.
Fundamentally, a brand is the gut feeling you have when you think of said company.
When we consider branding we’re speaking of the act of brand creation and specifically the crafting of the ‘visual identity’. We’re a branding agency, we craft visual identity.
What is Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy is a long-term plan for how an organisation will build and grow its brand. Brand strategy is a roadmap for how a company will differentiate and position itself in the market and how it will communicate its purpose to its target audience.
The function of brand strategy is to uncover and communicate an organisation’s core purpose. To reach a unique and compelling purpose, the brand strategy process is a pragmatic approach, designed to help the organisation reveal its vision, core values, market differentiation, personality and mission statement.
A compelling brand strategy helps the organisation communicate its purpose to the market to build brand equity and market share. A strong brand strategy is an authentic, contextual, goal-oriented, and actionable plan, and acts as a foundation and design brief for the branding process.
Why do Businesses Need Brand Strategy?
A brand strategy helps an organization’s brand in a variety of ways. A brand strategy helps create a sustainable, future-proof brand, that has clear core values, messaging, tone of voice, brand promise, and mission.
Brand strategy helps to analyze and take advantage of market opportunities.
A strong, clear strategy helps the organizations align on a shared vision and goals, clarifies the organization's core values and differentiates the company as purpose-driven.
A differentiated brand defines a distinct visual identity and tone of voice that resonates honestly with its target audience.
Brand strategy helps define and communicate the brand’s promise and mission statement to its customers.
A brand strategy helps the internal team align with agencies and designers with a shared vision for the visual and verbal direction of the brand. Brand strategy helps empower the client, whilst also guiding the whole branding/ rebranding process.
Brand Strategy Framework
Our brand-building methodology covers three phases:
1. Brand Core
— Brand Audit
— DNA
— Vision
— Core Values
2. Positioning
— Competitive Landscape
— Market Personas
— Differentiation
3. Brand Voice
— Brand Personality
— Tone-of-voice & Messaging
— Mission
Brand Audit
The brand audit is where we can start to identify areas of problems, weaknesses and potential for improvement. Using our Brand Strategy Template, we start the audit by filling out responses to the first three questions from the discovery questionnaire.
— Brand Audit
Continuing through the Brand Strategy Template, we create a current brand moodboard by pasting in a diverse range of important brand touchpoints. If the brand has no existing logo or wordmarks to use, then we will focus more on the products/ stores/ visuals of anywhere customers come into contact with brand touchpoints.
We will fill this first phase out after we receive the brand questionnaire answers and before we sit down with our clients for the brand strategy workshop. We find it helpful to have moodboards of the existing brand to help tease out any functional problems of the existing brand or subjective opinions.
We go into further detail on the benefits and step-by-step process in our article, How to Conduct a Brand Audit.
DNA
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
— Simon Sinek
— Service Map
Using a service map tool, the company services are broken down into broad overarching ‘Level 1’ categories, and then sub-divided into ‘Level 2’ categories which can be category of individual lines of services or products.
The Service Map is a great way to present the information in a non-biased, factual way. It is best to avoid precise percentage representations and focus rather to make sure all segments of business offer are clearly annotated to get a broad enough view of the business.
We then build on the service categoization by asking our clients “What three problems do we solve for our customers?” This is another great way to focus down to the truth, to start broad and then become more and more critical.
— Brand DNA
Positioning
“Positioning is not what you do to a product, it is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”
— Al Ries
— Positioning Matrix Diagrams
Using a matrix diagram, together with our client we first map out their competition to see where there are opportunities for product/ service differentiation. We keep things simple. Red represents our competitors, and green represents our clients.
To get a broad understanding of the marketplace, first, we map out Price against Quality. Which might give us early clues about areas of differentiation. We can then map out other comparison diagrams such as Market Share against Customer Satisfaction.
The second chart is made contextual to our client, and we can use a variety of comparisons to reveal some areas where we can differentiate our client’s company.
Comparing products or services — This could include features, price, and customer satisfaction.
Comparing operational efficiency — This could include metrics such as inventory turnover, cycle time, and defect rate.
Comparing cultural values — This could include things like employee engagement, innovation, and customer focus.
We can then take this analysis further, with a table comparision.
— Positioning Table
To complete the positioning phase we introduce the Brand Archetype Wheel. We first plot out our client’s competitors and then review areas of opportunity to differentiate. We have to be careful to steer clear of the personalities that do not resonate contextually with our brand.
— Brand Archetype Wheel
— Competition & Opportunity
Brand Archetypes are one of the core tools of brand strategy and there is a great deal of depth you can explore. We introduce brand archetypes with the archetype cards, shown in the Personality stage below.
Vision
“A brand is a story told consistently through time.”
— Michael Beirut
— Past, Future, Present
We then use a vision road map to simplify our client’s path forward. For small and medium-size companies this workshop might be one of the first times the client has sat and really thought about the goals and objectives for their company. Don’t be afraid to sit with a little silence, and let the client speak, come to their own conclusions, that you can then question a little further to get even deeper.
We first ask our client to talk about the past, key moments that made the business what it is today. We might ask them to talk about their key achievements and milestones, or times of trouble they’ve overcome.
We then look forward to the distant future. We ask about their blue-sky 50+ year vision for their company. We ask our clients to define their goals.
We can then come back to the present, and ask our client to talk about what’s happening right now, or in the very close future.
— Brand Vision
Finally, we focus the dialogue around the core steps they will need to make in order to reach their future goals. Again, we’re not afraid to sit in silence, keep the questions a little open and broad. Once we have something down on paper we can then review, question and iterate.
Values
“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”
— Howard Shultz
— Core Value Wheel
— Core Value Table
We start to explore possible brand values. In the first part of the exercise, we are trying to brainstorm as many possible values that feel natural and authentic to our clients business.
— Core Value Brainstorm
First, we guide our client discuss openly and reach a list of 20-25 brand values.
— Core Value Map
This brainstorm is then questioned and critiqued down to just 6 values — three core values, and three overlapping values. These overlapping values are an important part of the process, and act as devices to link the core values to each other.
— Core Value Journey
With our client, we question whether these core values feel real and authentic, and together can successfully summarise the brand. We use the Value Journey to explain how the core values relate to each other.
— Core Value Pyramid
Finally, to record our client’s core values we place them into the Value Pyramid.
Personality
“Brands, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them.”
— David Ogilvy
In this phase, we love using a couple of the tools included in our Brand Strategy Workshop Toolkit. With our client, our brand archetype cards are a great way to discuss our client’s brand personality and also their competitors. All of our tools are designed to help the project teams reach critical choices, which is a fundamental part of creating a strong, concise brand strategy.
— Brand Personality Sliders
We begin the personality phase by using a tool everyone understands, personality sliders! This tool is a great way to align our client’s thoughts. For each slider we use two marks.
The first, lighter colour indicates where the client’s company currently sits, and the second, darker mark indicates where the client wishes they would be.
— Brand Archetype Wheel
We come back to our Brand Archetype Wheel to decide our chosen brand archetype.
— Brand Archetype Cards
As this is such an important part of the brand strategy, we love to use our Brand Archetype Cards to help with the difficult task and aid in an open discussion.
— Personality
We then note down the unified, chosen brand archetype, and the reasons behind the choice.
Mission
“We wont be distracted by comparison if we are captivated by purpose.”
— Bob Goff
— Mission Map
Through the brand mission phase, we distil the core values, personality, vision, and positioning into our client’s mission statement. We asked three final questions:
— Mission Development
A great mission statement is a critical statement that defines the purpose of our client’s organization. It should directly answer the question, "If not for profit, why should our organization exist?" The mission statement should be clear, concise, and memorable, and it should be something that everyone in the organization can resonate with.
Visual Identity
“Without a brand, a logo is meaningless.”
— Seth Godin
In the final phase of the brand strategy, we will prepare visual reference moodboards and share them with our client. This is a powerful way to aligning our creative team and client together before we start ideating branding concepts. We do this within the brand strategy template, which usually forms a couple of pages.
Visual reference — These are visual metaphors for the brand, abstract visuals of the core values and personality. For example, visuals for ‘freedom’ could be inspired by nature, and references for human values of ‘fairness’ could form a diversity of culture. This is a highly subjective phase where us creatives can start imparting our visual response to the brand strategy.
Graphic language — This is a more literal, stylistic and graphic moldboard, which often includes references across logos, packaging, signage and other brand touchpoints.
These moodboards are also a fantastic way to get our clients excited about the next phase, Visual Identity.
How We Run Brand Strategy Workshops
Running brand strategy workshops can be a daunting task. We look into how to run stress-free brand strategy workshops with any size organization, in person or remote.
The brand strategy workshop is a collaborative meeting between the creative team and the brand leadership team to develop or update their brand strategy.
The workshop is designed to get everyone on the same page whilst uncovering key brand attributes such as personality and core values and to then building the brand mission.
Running a brand strategy workshop is not a mythical process. With any client-service provider process, the key is to be well prepared and take your time. The brand strategy workshop is the perfect environment for asking the right questions to the right people. The goal is a long-term plan that will help the organisation achieve the brand's vision and goals.
Remote or In-Person? — Remote workshops are now our go-to choice as we regularly facilitate workshops in the USA and Europe from our office in Hong Kong. To facilitate the workshop we use screen-sharing video calls or a traditional in-person presentation. The convenience and focus that video calls now allow create the perfect environment for the workshop.
Traditional video call software that allows screen sharing such as Google Meet, and Zoom work very well.
Digital whiteboards such as Miro, and Figma take collaboration to the next level allowing better collaboration but are not totally necessary as the facilitator will be sharing their screen and approach.
Whether remote or in-person, we recommend including stakeholders of various levels, positions, and specialties within the organisation. This sets a platform for a diverse, honest, and meaningful dialogue.
The time required for the brand strategy workshop will depend on the size and stage of the organisation. A new organisation might benefit enough from our Two-Day Brand Strategy Template. A rebrand project of an existing organisation will require more in-depth analysis and digestion, with the full 8-phase Comprehensive Brand Strategy approach.
In order to ensure the process is not rushed, we allow two sessions of two to four hours per session over a two-day period. We split the workshop over two sessions to allow the first day for discovery, and the second day for review.
Session 1 — Discovery
We run through the entire framework during the first day with the stakeholders. Following the workshop, without the stakeholders, we then write up our findings into the deck, reviewing and iterating on the ideas.
The first part of the brand strategy process is to dive deeply into your organisation to uncover your DNA, vision, and core values, and develop these into your compelling brand purpose, promise and mission.
During interviews with key stakeholders, we get to know the company and begin to build out our design brief.
The first session allows us as facilitators to ask questions, and create space for dialogue.
Session 2 — Review & iterate
The second session lets us run-through the whole brand strategy framework with the team, critiquing, editing, and adding to what we discovered on day one.
As facilitators, it is at this point we step up our diagnosis of the current brand, and take the team through the core values, culminating with our proposals for the brand’s mission statement.
Rather than questions of the first session, the second session uses our observations, and critical analysis to initiate dialogue. The brand strategy workshop is still in flow and requires movement, so we might go back and forth through the framework with the team, editing, observing, and talking until we reach mutual agreements.
The goal for the second session is to reach the finalised core values, personality, and mission statement.
Brand Strategy Resources & Tools
Brand Strategy Template
The brand strategy template is the core framework that we follow through the brand strategy workshop. The customisable PPT/ Keynote template allows real-time editing while taking centre stage during the workshop. The screen-shared brand strategy template is the focal point of the workshop that keeps everyone working together.
Brand Archetype Cards
Brand archetypes are a great resource to send to the workshop participants ahead of schedule so they can start familiarising themselves and considering the personality of their brand.
BrandWerks Resources: