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How to run a brand strategy workshop

Oct 10, 2022

Jonathan Courtney

Want to know how to run a brand strategy workshop? Follow our actionable guide for easy-to-follow steps and proven best practices to guarantee the success of your first session.

Running your first brand strategy workshop can be daunting. Where do you start? What do you prioritise? Who should be there? And what even is brand strategy?!

In this article, we want to take the fear out of running your first brand strategy workshop. We’ll introduce you to the concrete steps and tangible techniques you’ll need to identify and expertly communicate your brand’s vision and mission.

By the end, you’ll be equipped to guide and support your workshop team as they work together to define your brand in a way that represents the business’s core values and resonates strongly with target audiences.

Are you ready to get started? Then let’s go!

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy is the element of a business plan which focuses on developing a brand’s favourability in the market, makes the company memorable with customers, sets it apart from its competitors, and provides a consistent, clear image of the company’s goals and values to external stakeholders.
To create a brand strategy, a company will typically focus on the company’s purpose and goals, consistency of image, voice, and messaging, creating an emotional connection to customers and users, building an authentic workplace culture, and understanding what the competition is doing. The brand strategy ties together all of these details to tell a story about the company’s product or service that enables it to resonate with customers.
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Why is a brand strategy so important?

Brand strategy is essential to your company's success for a surprisingly wide range of reasons. It’s needed to help your business define and distinguish itself against the competition, identify the team’s goals, and give you the structure you need to build a strong brand that users can resonate with. It can also give you a clear indicator of your progress further down the line. Additionally, branding strategy develops trust, enhances company value, communicates the company’s value proposition to customers, and helps to attract and maintain the right talent.

How to run a brand strategy workshop

The purpose of the brand strategy workshop is to bring together all company stakeholders and business leaders to collaborate on and develop the strategic direction and goals of the brand and decide upon the steps needed to meet those goals. The workshop should assist in clarifying the business’s vision, identifying target users, pinning down brand values, putting a name to competitors, and defining the company’s USP.

We’ve put together some simple steps to help you run your first brand strategy workshop, which we’ve split up into three main sections: Brand Core, Brand Positioning, and Customer Persona. Let’s dive in!

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Brand core

The core of your brand, also known as the ‘brand core’, is the idea or set of values that sit at the very heart of your business and which all other activities should be inspired by, relate back to, or support. The brand core is the reason you created your company in the first place: its essential purpose for existing. Having and successfully communicating an authentic brand core is important because it helps your company attract and retain genuine interest from customers and followers, while inauthentic roots are not only quickly identified by users, but highly unlikely to draw the same kind of loyal following (and can even create distrust).
The first part of your brand strategy workshop should focus on your brand core, that is the purpose of your brand, your brand’s vision, and your brand’s values.
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Identify the purpose of your brand
What is your brand’s purpose? Why does it do what it does? As a key part of your brand core, you’ll need to spend the first part of your workshop working together to identify the purpose of your brand, ie, uncovering the reason your brand exists. Asking yourself and the workshop group the following questions can help lead you to an answer:

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Why did you start your business in the first place?
What problem did you initially create your business to solve?
What change did you envision your business bringing to the world?
What changes or solutions does your target audience want to see?
What is unique about your business?
What would you like to be known for?

By the end of this brainstorming session, your group should have identified a clear and singular purpose for your brand.

Craft your brand’s vision

Your brand’s vision is a concept that is very much focused on the future. It should define the trajectory of the brand, the company’s hopes and dreams for the future, and where it wants to go.

In this part of the workshop, you’ll work together to create your brand’s vision statement. A vision statement is a written declaration which clarifies the meaning and purpose for all business stakeholders. It should focus on the ‘whys’ of the company, revealing a common goal and a clear direction for all employees.

To come up with your brand’s vision statement, consider using the following thought experiments in the group workshop:

Look to the future– five or 10 years ahead
Think big and focus on potential positive outcomes
Write in the present tense
Use jargon-free terminology
Be passionate and inspiring
Align it with the values and goals of the business

By the end of this session, you should have a short statement which defines the dream, the long-term goal, and the direction where the company is heading, that aligns with the current business values and inspires passion from the team.

Define the brand’s values

A brand’s values are essentially a set of guiding principles and beliefs which the company stands for and behind. As well as determining the brand’s identity, they also reflect the brand’s personality, as well as the shape of its story, actions, behaviours, and finally how decisions are made.

In the final part of examining your brand's core, you’ll define your brand’s values. To do this, you’ll want to think about:

What values are important to team members as individuals
What values are important to customers and users
How your values can guarantee against negative experiences
What you’re currently doing that’s working (and what’s not working)
What values your favorite brands have

When you’ve drawn up a shortlist of values from the team, you’ll probably need to edit them a bit for clarity and readability. To do this, think about:

Making your values actionable
Making them memorable (again, avoid jargon)
Making them unique to your brand
Making them clear and specific
Making them meaningful

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Brand positioning

Once the brand core has been established, it’s time for the team to establish the brand’s positioning. Positioning relates to where a company sits in relation to its competitors, its place in the market, and how it is perceived by customers, users, and potential customers. Positioning your brand clearly is important to the success of your company because it:

Creates market differentiation
Enables your brand to break through the noise and reach its customers
Makes it easier for customers to make a buying decision

Identify your target audience

In this phase of the workshop, your first step will be to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people who are likely to become customers of your product or service.

Some simple steps the workshop group can take to identify the brand’s target audience are as follows:

Outline the features and attributes of your current customers, users, and leads
Write down the pain point which currently lead users to your product or service
Run through the benefits your product or service brings to users
Identify where your audience is currently finding you, and the keywords they’re using for searches which bring them to your business
Research who your audience follows on social media, which other brands they use and trust, and other services they rely upon to address common pain points

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Research the competition

Next up in the brand positioning phase of the workshop is researching the competition. Competitive research is extremely important because it gives you insights into your customers’ behavior, enables you to study and understand competitor strategies (and how successful they are), and can give you new ideas for improving your own strategies.

Here’s how to do it in your workshop:

Identify your top ten competitors
Conduct a SWOT analysis, this stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to compare details such as content, features, pricing, quality, and customer experience
Use keyword search tools to identify which search terms users are using to find your competitors
If there’s time, dig into your competitors’ monthly site traffic, page views, bounce rates, and time spent on each page–this information shows you the areas you need to excel in in order to compete.

Using all the information you’ve gathered, your task as a team is to find something that makes your brand unique and sets you apart from your competitors. For example, this could be convenience, user experience, customer service, price, or quality.

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Create measurable goals for brand awareness

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The last part of the brand positioning phase of the workshop is to create brand awareness goals. A brand awareness goal is a target by which you can measure the extent to which users are familiar with the distinctive qualities of your brand, product, or services.

Some examples of brand awareness goals are:

We will increase website traffic by 25% in the next 12 months
We will post twice a week on the company blog
We will increase the number of recommending influencers from 5 to 12 in the next 12 months
We will gain 1,000 new Twitter followers in the next 6 months by posting new blog content, infographics, studies, and statistics

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Try to make your goals SMART. This means they need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

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Brand persona

This final phase of the workshop involves bringing together the internal goals and values of the company with the external position of the brand in the market and the needs and wants of the customer. The brand persona should embody both sides and showcase them via a collection of personality traits, attitudes, and values in order to authentically connect with the target audience. To create the brand persona, you’ll need to think about brand personality, voice, and a memorable tagline.

Brand personality

Your brand personality is what makes your brand unique. It also humanizes your brand, helping customers relate to what you’re trying to do and to resonate with your mission. To define your brand personality, first try to imagine it as a person.

Ask the group to come up with adjectives that usually apply to a person, but which they feel would fit well with the brand. Some examples of such words might be: unique, caring, funny, trustworthy, creative, straightforward, dishonest, and rebellious.

Brand voice

Your brand’s voice is how the brand’s personality is expressed. That could be via text on the blog, graphics and video on social media, or the style and messaging used in print, online, and TV advertising. Consistency in your brand’s voice is key to building trust with users and ensuring you encourage a loyal and enthusiastic following.

How to create your brand’s voice:

Use your brand's mission or value statement to help you determine some key characteristics of your brand voice.
Consider the target audience and buyer persona–can they resonate with this voice and its message?
Look at which pieces of content have performed well in the past and consider emulating the tone of voice used in them.
Make a list of what you don’t want your brand voice to sound like, ie, ‘we don’t want to sound pretentious.’
By the end of this session, you should have a list of words which describe how you do want your brand voice to sound. Some examples might be: authentic, silly, witty, and inclusive.

Tagline

Last but not least, you’ll want to create a memorable tagline for your brand. Here are our top tips for your tagline.

Keep it short and simple
Tell a compelling story
Explain what you do
Be clear, specific, and avoid jargon
Keep your target audience and values in mind
Be true to your brand’s voice

This part of the session should be spent first brainstorming taglines, and then working and reworking them based on these tips.

Who should be involved in a brand strategy workshop?

You’ll need to consider your team carefully when organizing your brand strategy workshop. We’d suggest an average of 7 participants, though this number will depend on the number of key stakeholders.

You’ll need:

A facilitator who is essentially the organizer and ‘host’ of the workshop who ensures the process is adhered to and that all members are fully engaged throughout.
A decider who can be relied upon to make final decisions and who has a lot at stake in the branding strategy.
A customer expert to represent the target audience.
A business expert who can represent the best interests of the business.

Other roles on the team can include a marketing expert, a design expert, and a financial expert.

Conclusion

We hope our guide to running a brand strategy workshop has given you the confidence to define your brand in a way that resonates with customers and communicates your business’s core values. One last tip? Be over-prepared! Writing and distributing a solid agenda well in advance will ensure your team stays focused on the challenge ahead and keeps the energy levels of the group high throughout the day.