Is a Brand Workshop the Right Answer to Your Brand’s Challenges?
As brand creatives and marketing experts, we shout from the rooftops that a brand is more than the identity of the logo, colors, and images. But where we miss the mark is explaining the connection between your business mission, vision, values and your target audience’s needs and expectations.
A big part of the Clover mission is to build transparency in the creative process and get beyond clichés and lingo. In that vein, we want to unpack a bit more about what “brand” means.
We think of a brand in 3 main parts - the brand core, the internal brand, and your external brand. Let’s break those down.
Your Brand Core is the heart of your organization. These are the things that build your “why”.
Your Internal Brand is the things that come to life internal to your organization
(Pro-tip: these make great pieces to your employee onboarding experience)
Your External Brand is what the consumer sees and interacts with - your key assets and touch points.
This list could get very long and will vary a bit depending on your unique business and consumer needs.
While your consumer only sees your external brand, you can’t grow a brand without the seed of the core brand.
When working with clients of all sizes and stages, we discovered a common challenge - creating a brand (or revamping an existing brand) that feels connected to the core of the organization while still appealing to their target audience. That’s why we’ve worked hard to develop our brand workshops with these key moments in mind. We consider it our job to connect the dots of those three things to build a bridge between internal and external perceptions while bringing together your leadership and employees to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Our brand workshops are designed to define the essential nature of your brand as well as the mindset of your target customer and find the links. We dig in and ask the hard questions to go deeper than “that’s just the way we’ve always done it”.
We have three different types of brand workshops - two focused at small businesses and another that is customized for the client needs based on size, brand maturity and other factors. However, even with three different styles, all of our workshops center around some fundamentals that get to the heart of your brand.
So, what can you expect?
Our brand workshops are full or half-day workshops where your team collaborates with experts from our team in the realms of creative design, copywriting, marketing strategy, and overall brand strategy to define and document your brand core. Before each workshop, we develop many brand worksheets and activities to guide us all through the process of building your brand. We consider our team your guides and facilitators to get your team talking and digging into the things that make you unique. You’re the experts of your brand. We are here to offer our expertise in branding but the work needs to reflect your true nature.
What will you take away?
These exercises aren’t just to have conversations, but we ensure all of our clients walk away with actionable insights to make moves that differentiate you in the eyes of the consumer. Our workshops are developed to help you identify the unique strengths and weaknesses in your marketing and branding efforts. We do this by combining the primary components of your brand along with our expertise and research on your target audience and key competitors.
Target Audience + Touch points
Most businesses have a solid grasp on who their customers are and how they interact with them, so our workshops focus on digging into the minds of existing and target audiences and outlining the touch points along the buyer’s journey to understand their pain points and opportunities for connection.
Brand Attributes
Brand Attributes are the things that bring your brand to life - tone of voice, logo, tagline, and color palette. But these can’t come to life without the understanding of your brand’s core and your target audience and their journey.
What Happens Afterward?
We work with our clients in many ways and our workshops are no different. At the end of each workshop, we share with our clients the outputs of the key brand takeaways from the mission and vision to the target audience, journey pain points, and the SWOT analysis. These recommendations come in the form of a booklet that summarizes our own findings from the workshop, identifies the greatest opportunities for brand evolution, and tactics to capitalize on these opportunities.
Sometimes, our clients have an in-house team and they just need an external point of view to help bring objectivity to the process. Once we’ve handed off the materials, they’re off to the races!
Other times, organizations don’t have the capabilities or bandwidth in-house to take on the execution and they connect with us to continue the work by developing a custom brand strategy and execute the brand attributes to bring it all to life.
As we work with our clients through the workshops, not only do they learn more about their brand and target customer, but we help them connect the dots internally from their most senior leadership to the newest hire to ensure the whole team is speaking the same language and headed toward the same vision.
Let’s Build This Together
We believe emotion drives business, branding, and design. We’ll work with you to develop and implement strategies that increase affection and enthusiasm for your company. Our Brand Workshops are a great place to start. Whether you need to repair and refresh a tired brand or develop a new one, our team of design-driven strategists is ready to partner with you.
If you’re ready to build a brand you’re proud to show off, contact us to schedule your workshop!
