Get plenty of colorful sticky-notes (at least 40 per person) and Sharpies for everyone. Once you’ve listed the participants, schedule a 90-minute block for the first session in a room with whiteboards or foam boards. In any case, just don’t do this by yourself: you’ll end up with a limited perspective. You can also bring whoever demonstrates interest - you want motivated people brainstorming. If it’s larger, get the people who’d be expressing the brand day-to-day: designers, marketers, executives, salespeople, recruiters. Distill them into values, key attributes and analogiesĮvery brand stakeholder in your company should take part, so if your team fits in a room, get them of all in there.Group the ones which belong into abstracted groups.Separate those into what belongs and doesn’t belong to it.Brainstorm possible values and attributes for your brand.And it won’t cost you more than two 90-minute sessions and a few dozen sticky-notes. The output will enable designers to define how it looks, writers to how it speaks, and for any vendor or team member to make coherent decisions by themselves. It can help your team get into alignment and articulate the core attributes of your brand. Here I describe a simple branding exercise I’ve used and evolved with the companies at Expa with success. How can a startup make the most of its branding efforts for the best results?

But users impressions - especially first impressions - matter greatly. Startups lack the time to develop this relationship: it’s a race against the clock, and every dollar spent needs to bring the company closer to validation and traction. “When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” You can see it in incredibly affordable furniture, family-oriented stores, and approachable visual design.īuilding a brand is a long-term commitment which results from thousands of interactions between a customer and the brand’s touch points over time. Ikea is about cost-consciousness, simplicity and togetherness.You can see it in reliable, albeit generic-looking vehicles, and simple and approachable visual design. Honda is about affordable quality and trust.You can see it in purple aircraft lighting and quirky safety videos. Virgin America is about quality, fun, innovation, challenging assumptions.It’s about abstract attributes and values which present themselves in concrete ways: That’s because a brand, at it’s core, is immaterial. Brands cut across media, and present themselves in colors, shapes, words, sounds, and even smells. While a logo might be the most recognizable manifestation of a brand, it’s only one of many.

Simple exercise sononym