Modern Perception: How to Rethink Your Brand
A few days ago, the marketing team and the COO at The Companion Group carved out 3 hours to re-examine our branding. The exercises, the time, and care we put into them helped us drill down into the essence of what makes our brand. Let me walk you through it:
Why?
On the surface, we’re thinking of redesigning The Companion Group website. It’ll be a lot easier to nail down a visual style and theme if we take the time to better understand the component pieces of our brand.
Additionally, The Companion Group is a complex organism. We all have our own individual ways of describing what we do here, and why we do it. Wouldn’t it be better if we all had a common lexicon so we could be more consistent?
To quote the article I leaned on most heavily for these exercises: The Three-Hour Brand Sprint – GV Library
“The point of these exercises, it turns out, is to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete. After doing the exercises, the team gets a common language to describe what their company is about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier.”
What we did
The group met up offsite on the day we set aside for the exercises, shared some coffee and breakfast, and got to work. We mainly followed the exercises outlined here. Our brand sprint took us a little longer than the prescribed 3 hours, but only because we made a slight modification. Our team is close-knit, and while we did ultimately end up using the “decision maker” rule, we felt it important to more thoroughly discuss the issues instead of defaulting to one person’s opinion. We also added an extra exercise to round out the afternoon: we each wrote a Tweet that describes The Companion Group based on the results of the other exercises.
What did we learn?
The brand is authoritative and should appeal to the masses. The most important values for the company were problem-solving, empowerment, and passion. The reason why we exist is to help people make inspired connections with the world around them, with a lot less effort. We’ll be able to use these results as a framework to change how we represent Companion Group to our customers, and to the world at large.
The exercises really did help us get a solid grasp of what The Companion Group should mean to people that come across the brand, and how we should talk about ourselves. The next step for us will be to use the results of the exercises to write up a new mission statement and other branding guidelines, but for now: we’re happy with the results!
