A brand defines the position and appearance of your company or even your project. Especially in highly competitive environments, a clearly recognizable brand and message is crucial. For the fast and agile development of a brand, a Brand Sprint can help to transform your ideas about your brand into a defined brand image.
The Brand Sprint guides you and your team to the essential cornerstones of your brand through fast-paced and intensive workshop methods. Results count! Teams should not be too large during the Brand Sprint in order to condense and finalize the brand strategy, target groups, brand story and tonality as well as the visual design. As a rule, a brand can be fundamentally created in its content and visual dimension in about ten to twelve days.
For anyone who needs quick and substantial results, often including:
• Start-ups and project brands
• Companies that are in transformation and want to address new target groups quickly
• Spin-offs from larger companies
1) Understand: Your brand and its environment: market and target group
To ensure that the positioning of your brand is not based on chance, but is the result of data- and fact-based analyses of your target groups and the market environment, the sprint begins with building a shared understanding of the challenges and target group expectations. Based on an individual questionnaire, the agency goes into the preparation of the first sprint workshop and evaluates market and target group data in a desk research and creates competitor analyses and first workshop questions individually for your company and project.
These are discussed in a first workshop and results and consequences for the new market are condensed.
• From company goals to brand goals
• Competitor analysis and identification of gaps
• Identifying option spaces for USPs and niches
• Options for communicating USPs and niches (content and visual)
• Understand target group insights and define target groups
2) Define, Formulate: Condense your brand
In a further workshop, the results are further condensed and linked to concrete solutions for formulating your brand. Brand contact points (touch points) and user stories, brand values and statements as well as other attributes are already defined.
• From corporate goals to relevance for the target group
• Definition of brand contact points (user stories and touch points)
• Brand message (brand attitude, purpose, values, etc.)
• Condensation into text elements and visual impressions
3) Create, Visualize: Prototype
This is where the design work begins. Based on the verbal definitions, the name and the brand architecture, first mood boards and prototypes are created. The aspects of a strong brand such as positioning, values and benefits cannot simply be visualized in a logo or symbol. Here, further design solutions and guidelines are created to provide the most comprehensive brand toolkit possible:
• Basic style statements and design paradigms.
• Mood boards, key visuals
• Design of the logo/signet and brand symbols
• Visual identity definition (typography, color, imagery, etc.)
• Infographics and visualizations
Basically, a conclusion can already be found here and the handover of the guidelines to the teams can be realized. However, it is also conceivable to review and adjust the design in an evaluation step or to animate the brands externally as well as internally.
4) Evaluation or activation
In the sprint so far the essential aspects of the brand have been found and ideally an idea of the brand culture has been described. But now the brand has to be filled with life. To be sure, prototypes and brand understanding can again be compared or questioned with the target groups such as initial customers and partners and possible findings can be transferred into an adjustment. More important, however, is often the internal activation in your team to explain your idea of the brand in small workshop sessions on your values and narratives. This is how you establish a common understanding. Migration into your website, social media content and, if necessary, first small campaigns also help to quickly introduce your brand.
If you're looking to run a brand sprint, keep in mind when putting together your team that decisions should be made quickly and effectively.
If you are looking for a creative agency partner - Uhura is a solution-oriented and award-winning agency that has created diverse brands in design and brand sprint.
Send us an email or just give us a call.
