Brand Workshops: What are They, and Does My Business Need One?
How brand workshops can help your team define or redefine your brand
If you’re hoping to grow your business and establish yourself as a leader in your industry, you’ll need a strong brand. The best way to build one? Complete a brand workshop with your team, led by a branding professional.
In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about brand workshops, including why they are important for any business. You’ll also learn a bit more about what to expect and how often you should revisit brand-specific conversations.
What are brand workshops?
Brand workshops are a chance for you and your team to explicitly define who you are and what makes you unique — and reach consensus across your various teams and employees about how your business will write, talk, and appear to the world.
In your workshop, you’ll be analyzing the existing marketplace, and competitive landscape to more clearly understand your unique niche. You’ll also define your organization’s vision for the future, the values that guide your decisions, your personality, and aesthetic.
Brand workshops, essentially, form the foundation for all other future brand endeavors. From marketing your company on social media to creating a website, the outcomes from your brand workshop will guide these projects to ensure they’re staying true to your brand.
Workshops like this provide a hyper-condensed version of a long-term engagement with a designer to help you jumpstart your current brand efforts. They can be a really great starting point for future work on other projects with a designer, but these workshops can provide you with a lot of quick value that you can walk away with and start implementing.
Why do brand workshops matter for your business?
The External Impacts of Brand Workshops
Brand workshops are an extremely important step in building a strong foundation for your business’s success. When you clarify what you represent and why, you make it possible to build a brand that intentionally evokes emotion to connect deeply with your audience. Without being thoughtful about this process, you’re likely to end up with a brand that feels a bit all over the place.
A workshop like this could be used to regularly check in on your brand across the board and make tweaks to keep it honest, or brand workshops can be used for specific events, special co-branded partnerships, or anything that would require a sub-brand to your main brand. The goal of the workshop would be to hone in on the small differences between the sub-brand and your usually branding to create a refined and compelling set of rules for your use case.
With the ever-growing importance of cohesive branding, brand workshops can be a quick way to tweak your branding to fit a particular project without losing the overall appearance and feel of your brand.
The Internal Impacts of Workshops
Workshops are also a great way to invite more members of your team into the brand-building process, which provides transparency and buy-in from your employees. When you invest in brand workshops, it’s a great way to level set expectations about the brand, how you use it, what it looks like, what emotions you’re focused on evoking, and the general outcome of how to make sure it’s a unified piece of work.
The goal of most brand workshops is to create a space for you and your team to get immediate feedback from a professional on how to incorporate a rich and thoughtful resource like a brand guide into your everyday habits.
How often should you revisit brand-focused conversations?
You should be revisiting brand-focused conversations at least once per year. You’ll want to have more sessions if you’re a fast-growing start-up that’s changing very quickly.
If you’re launching a new product or service, that’s also a key time to revisit brand conversations and make any necessary changes.
The big message:
If you’re noticing that your branding isn’t resonating, it can be a good idea to revisit brand conversations to see what needs to be shifted to come more into alignment with your target audience.
Set up a brand workshop with us
If you’re excited about going through a brand workshop for your business that will help you to build a foundation for your future growth and success, send us an inquiry here. We can help your team prepare a workshop together that will help you dig into key issues and uncover new meaning for your business.