Using a brand workshop to review and re-engage your brand

It has been said that working on your brand “as you go” is like trying to change the tyres on your car while you’re still driving it!

Well, it might not be that bad but it certainly isn’t the best way of using a brand workshop to review and reinvent your brand or update your brand strategy? So, what should you do if reinventing your brand? Quickly arrange an F1-like pitstop? Or put the car in for a metaphorical service or MOT? The correct answer should depend on what you want to achieve, not how much time you can spare.

What do you want to achieve?

The goal should always dictate the tool, so if you are reasonably confident in your brand’s integrity, then a quick review should be more than enough. Alternatively, if you can’t answer some of the fundamental questions about your brand, you may need to have a more thorough audit or review.

Talk to us today about your brand

What are the fundamental elements of any brand?

If you can’t answer simple questions about your brand, then you may be overdue a review, questions such as:

• Who are the major stakeholders or audiences your brand must engage?

• What are the brand’s mission and vision statements?

What are the key brand values?

Toast has helped customers to create brands from scratch, but we can also help existing brands to re-evaluate or reposition if they’re not achieving what they should. Very often we hear the same sentiments being shared, these include:

• Our market and customers have changed, and we haven’t.
• We are losing our market share to competitors.
• Our company has restructured, and this isn’t reflected in our brand.
• We offer different/more/new services but still look like we used to.

So, what would a workshop achieve?

Any workshop needs to have clearly defined goals from the very beginning if it is to have any chance of being effective. If you were to contact Toast, we would always suggest the first step should be a chat to find out why you are interested in a workshop and how best we could tailor it to your specific needs. But in its simplest form, a workshop should focus on:

Define – a no holds barred investigation into every aspect of the brand.

Before moving onto…

Think – developing what has been discovered into a relevant and workable solution.

So what brand workshop do I need?

Your requirements should dictate the workshop you get; you shouldn’t settle for ‘cookie cutter’ solutions.

Talk to your design agency and ask them what workshops they deliver and what their outputs are.

The first step for either option is to talk to Toast for a free, no obligation chat about the challenge you face.

Written by.

Simon Browne

My title at Toast is Brand Strategy, but what I do is a lot simpler – I help people solve problems. Sometimes I have to identify that problem, sometimes they know already and want me to just come up with the solution and help them apply it.