Brand building activities pdf

This exercise helps you: consider new ways to create brand experiences for your customers, by taking inspiration from the Big Boys. Who is your arch nemesis and what evils are you trying to get rid the world of? Your answers can be concrete or abstract. For example, an IT consultancy might be about vanquishing complex solutions and long helpdesk queues.

A fitness studio may be against intimidating classes and lack of confidence. These are things that drive your organization and must be a part of your brand. What does the headline say? Have you cured a problem? Grown to be the biggest? Changed the way people do something? What does success look like? A strong vision helps guide business strategy and motivate the team to achieve it. Get in groups and talk about specific moments your company was at its best. For example, maybe it was solving a complex business challenge for a client.

Surprising a customer with an unexpectedly high level of service. A company fun day where your team got closer. What made these experiences so memorable? This exercise helps you: understand what your brand truly cares about and delivers. By the end of these exercises, you should have a mound of paper with scribbles.

Underneath, write what you learned about your brand today, like beliefs, personality traits or strengths and weaknesses. List the things you hope your brand will achieve or become over time.

Think about changes you could make to bridge the gap between your brand today and tomorrow. The magic of this exercise is that it clarifies that each option might be appropriate, depending on what you seek.

Can you see how this chart would be totally different if the axes were changed to convenience and cost for example? So the goal of this positioning exercise is quite simple — to get people to remember your brand for one thing you want to be known for. As a business you can do many different things, but as a brand you want to be known for ONE thing.

Are we claiming superiority or exclusiveness over other products or services in your category? And the goal of this exercise is to figure out what we can do to get people to discover you. This is NOT marketing strategy, but we need to run this exercise to get clarity and define the scope of work for this branding project. Sample awareness goals would be: website, blog, stationery, business cards, social media, email marketing, trade shows etc. So simply move it onto the X axes where it makes most sense, and then second, we need to answer whether it would have high or low impact on your business?

Would designing a website bring you awareness and make you money? Everything that is easy to do and has high impact — we should do those things first, and this is our priority.

Next, everything that is difficult to do but has high impact as well — we need to do those things next. And finally everything that is easy to do and has low impact — we can just ignore this for now. There was no social media, so brands communicated with one-way broadcast messages in the form of advertisements.

Now, word of mouth, which is leveraged by social media, means that the consumers do have a voice. And the way we gonna do that, is by identifying your brand personality, and then projecting the right voice. So that we can create a brand persona, a real character that they can trust and feel connected to.

In the seventh exercise we're going to define the personality of your brand. Archetypes were a concept introduced by Carl Jung , who believed that they were models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Archetypes, he suggested, were inborn tendencies that play a role in influencing human behavior. So our goal is to assume one core archetype and alternatively one secondary for differentiation. But before we do the exercise, we actually need to fly quickly through all of them, to help you understand what they are all about.

So the Archetype Framework identifies 12 personalities divided into 4 sections that group them based on common desires. They desire to build something that wasn't there before, in their own name or in the name of others.

Now, the challenge is to define the right archetypal mix, because often what happens is, I see brands try to cherry pick some characteristic from different archetypes. But the problem is that by doing so, you will end up diluting your focus and therefore confusing your customers. Because if your brand is providing them with some kind of education, to help them get that power, then they're likely will be drawn to the Sage personality that demonstrates wisdom and knowledge.

Once we have that, then with your archetypal mix in mind, answer the two questions about what you as a brand love and hate. This will allow you to form your brand attitude and express your personality in simple messaging. So that your personality and voice will work together, to represent the HOW - how your brand message is delivered. Your tone is not only about how you speak, but also the words you use and how you use them the cadence and rhythm, velocity, and length of your speech and so on.

For example, do you speak fast or with a drawl? Are you loud and bombastic or quiet and reserved? For example: Geico is an insurance company that uses a funny tone of voice to distance themselves from their competitors in a traditionally serious industry. And finally, let's translate those sentences describing your voice to the main Strategy Worksheet. If you're working on a marketing project website, emails, ads then also check my complimentary Brand Story Framework. We need to basically define what we want our audience to remember us for, and giving them an easy to remember tagline is key to helping them remember your brand.

While your positioning statement is for internal purpose, your tagline is for external purpose — its customer facing, but your tagline should be aligned with your positioning of course. So that the brand can have a tagline that uses consistently, and it may also have many slogans created for different marketing campaigns. And you want your audience to get an idea about your message in just a few very concise and memorable selection of words in a creative sequence.

So simply look at all the previous exercises and highlight the most important keywords that you think could do for thoughts or ideas.

And then from each branch more ideas can branch off, so there is no limit to the number of levels our your map. So the first category is Imperative , which basically starts with a verb and commands action. Now, the second category is Descriptive , which basically describes your service, product, or brand promise. Pay less. The next category is Superlative , which positions the company as best in class.

And lastly we have Specific category, that just basically reveals the business category. So that way we can select 3 strongest candidates and circle them and put them in our main Strategy Worksheet. I've also released a case study video tutorial of this exercise on my YouTube channel. But running workshops and building a brand strategy will bring tremendous value to your clients and to your design practice as well.

You will be able to charge money for thinking, rather than having clients forcing their ideas onto you. With a proven strategy framework, you clients will see you as a competent, strategic designer rather than just hands to do the design work. And most importantly, you will level up as a designer, charge premium fees and run projects effortlessly. This is what I help my clients to do, and if you want level up and become a strategist I suggest you do it too.

Use this guide to run brand strategy workshops with your clients prior to doing any type of design work. Need more information? What's next? With the purchase of my premium guide , you will get all brand strategy resources that you need to successfully run discovery sessions with your clients:. Buy my premium Strategy Guide and level up today! If you have any questions, just shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

If you're a CEO or Founder, book me to run the workshop for you and let's build your brand fast in To get useful market research data, your sample group needs to be relevant to and representative of your target population. Design your survey or market research questionnaire carefully. Make sure that it's focused specifically on the information you need to know, and that you haven't included any questions that may offend anyone.

Many people are put off by questions that ask them how much money they earn, for instance. If you offend or confuse them, they won't bother to fill out your market research survey. If so, from where?

If so, where and why? Keep it short. If possible, your market research survey or questionnaire should all fit on one page.

Long forms intimidate some people; others see multiple page forms as just too much of an imposition on their time. Always provide some opportunity for detailed answers. Not everyone will take advantage of it, but some will, and sometimes these written-in comments are the most valuable of all. Work out your market research recording techniques first. Telephone market research surveys are popular, but how are you going to record what the respondents say?

If you're orally interviewing someone, will you record them or take notes? The purpose of market research is to gather and analyse the data, so you've got to have a system of recording the data worked out in advance.

Websites like www. Invest in the process The amount of market research you do is limited only by your time if you're doing it yourself or your budget if you hire someone else to do it.

But market research is necessary at all stages of a business's life, if you want continued success. Only market research can truly keep us in touch with what's most important — your customers, and their needs and desires. Step 3: Define your offering Once you understand your customers — their wants, needs, desires and expectations — you should revisit your offering and start to lay the foundation for a brand that accurately reflects the essence of what your business stands for, how you operate, what you promise and who you serve.

Positioning is the precise job of differentiating your offering, then slotting it into a free spot in the market to fulfil an unfilled need. You should know their needs and desires, where they are, how to target them, what kind of messages will motivate them to buy from you, and what kind of customer experience will make them loyal to your brand.

Designing a marketing and communications strategy Your marketing strategy is the big-picture insight that guides your marketing activity and makes sure all your activities add up to success. A good core strategy gives a special kind of high-level direction and purpose to all you do. There are several types of marketing strategies and you need to decide which one best suits your business offering. The idea is very simple. Just pick some new territory and head out into it.

The advantage of this type of strategy is that it allows you to tailor your product, or service and your entire marketing effort to a clearly defined group with uniform, specific characteristics. In essence this means taking some business from your competitors. The result is the never-ending cycle of birth, growth and decline. This strategy looks at long-term trends and evolves as the products evolve. This strategy focuses on getting customers or prospects to see your product or service in a positive light.

Unless you have a marketing degree or the inclination to absorb a library of strategy books, we recommend that you get us to create your strategy for you. They only tune into messages that appeal to their wants and needs.