Our facilitated discovery workshop is a framework that helps align a company and its people around a shared purpose. It serves as a decision filter to govern actions, new initiatives, investments, marketing efforts and digital platforms.
The process gathers existing programs and initiatives, stakeholder input, customer research, and industry trends into a highly engaging and interactive meeting.
We run collaborative work sessions led by a facilitator to gain deep understanding of your brand. This approach accelerates the strategic process in general, and builds consensus throughout the entire engagement.
Together, using a fast paced, user centric, and facilitated framework, we define and prioritize user needs, create desire user journeys, define the brand, surface actionable insights, make strategic recommendations and produce tangible results that can be deployed within your organization.
Having an ultra clear understanding of why your brand exists, above a simple “to be successful”, is essential to your brand’s growth. This has less to do with your brand and more to do with your customers/consumers/users. No clear communication of your “why” to them, no resonance. No resonance, no loyalty. No loyalty, no business. Discovering your “why” and building all efforts around this inspirational core is like cutting a path through the jungle to El Dorado with a Lightsaber.
Our branding workshops benefit entrepreneurs, venture-backed startups, small businesses, CEOs, and marketing teams that aren’t clearly communicating your brand’s “why”, because leadership hasn’t communicated it to them, or possibly, because they don’t know. The benefit lies in identifying the “why” and in getting an entire organization, from the C-Suite to the folks in the company’s feet, on the same page.
Stakeholder engagement is crucial for the success of any project. It’s during this early stage that we will clarify what the needs, objectives and success criteria are for each of the project’s key stakeholders. We will determine the decision making and escalation processes required to keep the project plan on-course whilst ensuring that best practices are applied at each stage throughout its execution.
Forging ahead with your project without first having a clear understanding of what your business objectives are and the audience requirements that you’re looking to answer is likely to result in failure. During discovery we will partner with you to conduct top-level quantitative analyses of your business goals and audience requirements that will enable us to define solutions which will result in specific, relevant and measurable outcomes for your project.
The parameters of the project will determine the outputs but generally at this stage we will be developing key elements such as low fidelity prototypes, design concepts and content hierarchy that will help to visualize frontend architecture, through to listing out the core areas of the project that need to be defined in more detail.
Stakeholder engagement is crucial for the success of any project. It’s during this early stage that we will clarify what the needs, objectives and success criteria are for each of the project’s key stakeholders. We will determine the decision making and escalation processes required to keep the project plan on-course whilst ensuring that best practices are applied at each stage throughout its execution.There are many frameworks for conducting a branding workshop, and each come with their own unique set of modules. No two branding workshops are alike. Our process walks teams through 6 self-contained modules and is the framework of choice for the venture-backed tech giants of Silicon Valley. One consideration above all others is the philosophy of “diagnosis prior to prescription”. Prescription before diagnosis, on the other hand, usually leave brands over-medicated, numb, and ineffective. We must dig deep before effective brand strategy and content strategy can be recommended.
Unveiling the Workshop Findings.
Kudos to you! You’ve bit off some large chunks of truth and started digesting some heavy new realizations. But when we leave, the real work begins. We synthesize all the information, insight, and awareness we gathered and start compiling our Discovery Doc. This document is a comprehensive blueprint of your brand positioning. It serves as both a roadmap as well as reference point enabling all future decisions to be easily vetted as “on brand” or “off brand”. It is also a living document, because your brand is living breathing thing right? It can be added to and edited as you continue to write your brand story in the years to come. This is a strategic document, and like any strategy, it’s effectiveness relies on a disciplined use of it.
Who Should Be Involved?
Our branding workshops are tailored for 4-6 team members for maximum impact. Too many voices can dilute the conversation, and too few may result in biased findings and fail to reveal accurate and actionable content strategies. Invite people who bring expertise, imagination and are able to confidently speak their minds even in the face of opposing viewpoints. This is a democratic session so also consider inviting folks at differing levels of employment: Founders & C-Suites, Managers & Team Leaders, Staff & Contractors.
What Happens Before We Meet?
Before the workshop, we take time to research your company, its current branding strategies, successes, and objective shortcomings. We want to minimize the “getting on the same page” process so our time together can be better spent being future centric rather than historical. Knowing your company also enables us to facilitate and lead the workshop better. Once you’ve decided on your participants, we email the workshop agenda over so all team members can get their wheels turning and we can all hit the ground running on day one.
