The Strategic Discovery Session is our proprietary, intensive information gathering and strategy brainstorming forum. The BRAND team and your leaders and key advisors get a room and get all tangled up for three-to-five straight days of probing questions, revealing discussions and passionate debates. And we all get to know each other. Not quite in the biblical sense, but pretty damn close.
In the Strategic Discovery Session, we learn about your company’s history, structure, people, products, services, industry, markets, competition, consumers, values, objectives and more. We assess your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We brainstorm the business, marketing and sales strategies that will position your brand for immediate and long-term success.
The Strategic Discovery Session is basically a crash course in who you are, what you do, how you do it, where you’ve been, where you want to go and what it will take to get you there. And it’s essential for any company that is:
- Developing and launching new products and services.
- Growing and needs to re-brand and re-launch in larger markets.
- Acquiring or consolidating new or existing business units.
- Expanding into new markets or sectors.
- Seeking a greater return on their marketing and branding investments.
For companies creating a new brand and preparing it for launch, the Strategic Discovery Session is the essential first step in our comprehensive Brand Discovery and Development Process. It generates volumes of critical information that we need to understand all about your:
- Business model, business structure, products and/or services.
- Target markets and consumers, and why they will buy and benefit from what you have to sell.
- Competitors and how you intend to compete with them and win.
- Vision of what you want to achieve in the marketplace and on the bottom line in Year 1, Year 3 and beyond.
- Budget allocations for strategic branding, marketing and communications, and your expected returns on these Investments.
In this case, our initial goal is to acquire a level of expertise, in a few days, that empowers us to deliver innovative, effective strategies, tactics, assets and results in a few weeks, instead of a few months.
Who Is Your Brand?
Brand discovery is an incredibly important part of the Strategic Discovery Session for a new brand. And because we believe a brand is a person not a thing, we focus a lot of attention on discovering who your brand is.
People don’t relate to things – to companies, products and packages. People relate to people and personal experiences. So, a brand must be far more than a logo on a box on a shelf in a store or a page on a website. It must be a real, authentic, person who people can relate to, interact with, rely on and embrace like a friend.
Today’s consumers are buying the humanity of a brand, its values, lifestyle, experiences and relationships. This requires a brand with a unique, compelling and memorable personality, as well as an individual mind, heart, soul and voice that definitively differentiates it from all others. A person who can directly engage with, connect with and speak to individual consumers.
This kind of brand can be important, meaningful and relevant to people. It’s a brand they can get to know, get behind and care about. It’s a brand they can trust for years to come. And in today’s marketplace, it’s the kind of brand that can be highly profitable.
During brand discovery, we develop a broad range of attributes that describe your company, industry, market and consumers. We develop attributes that give your brand its unique personality, purpose, perspectives and values – the humanity necessary to successfully attract, communicate, engage and connect with other people.
Perhaps the most important part of brand discovery is defining your unique Brand DNA that distinguishes every aspect of your brand from all others. This genetic code informs and empowers all of your brand’s manifestations in and messages to the marketplace.
Your brand DNA and other attributes are then used to develop your brand’s:
- Core Brand Identity – its values, mission and vision statement and brand personality, as well as its brand history, lifestyle and storylines
- Core Beliefs – its key differentiators, unique selling proposition, key brand messages, value proposition and brand positioning
- Customer Personae, and more
The outcomes of the Strategic Discovery Session form a solid foundation that supports the brand. It supports all marketing, communications, creative strategies as well as all campaigns and tactics that bring your brand to life in the marketplace. If you’re a new business or brand looking for a comprehensive marketing and branding strategy for sustainable growth and future-proofing your business contact us below today.