Redesign the Brand Sprint
2019 | #Facilitation #Process Design
The Brand Sprint is a 2 day sprint format that brings a team together and provides enough brand foundation to allow the entire company to make coherent brand decisions. We created this replicable process for brand development and communication by combining and structure well known tools and methods.
My role:
Process Designer and Facilitator. My role was to keep the discussions and processes flowing in the right direction. My contribution was mainly on how the envisioned Brand Sprint process could be structured and give it a user friendly structure for anyone to facilitate.
The Issue:
Brand development is a complex process that requires years of experience and loads of knowledge. Startups founders, scaleups and established smaller companies do not have the resources to develop the necessary foundation to start building a brand.
Existing processes are either too long and complex or merely shallow conversation starters.
The Desired Outcome:
Having an easy-to-follow and extensively replicable Sprint structure that empowers early stage brand owners to build a brand foundation. A process that creates an MVB (Minimal Viable Brand).
The Process:
With experience from how effective product validation can be done with Google Ventures Design Sprint and being inspired by the smart iterations of AJ Smart we got to work. We started to develop a process that would allow early stage brand owners - startups, scaleups and other companies to lay the communication foundation to start building a brand. The name was easy - the Brand Sprint. Google already had a “3-hour Brand Sprint” but we found it insufficient for the clients we worked with.
The team was assembled by several brand, storytelling and facilitation experts.
Research was done on existing methods and research. We especially looked for the simplified and reduced versions, but kept the textbook heavy theory in mind. We looked back on our previous processes to find effective structures that had worked.
Me and a colleague made a rough draft on what the Brand Sprint could look like. We also designed a process on how to collaborate internally on the creation of the Brand Sprint.
The team gathered and started cutting and pasting in the structure we had proposed. We role played the customer and discussed potential scenarios. This process was repeated some 2-3 times.
We did a test and ran through the entire 2-day sprint and found many challenges and flaws in the Sprint design. They were then iterated on a few more times and then tested again, this time with external clients.
I left the Sprint development (in good hands) before it was officially released.
Process Challenges:
Gathering and synthesising experiences, existing methods and theories for brand development and crunching it down to a fraction of their intended time or making them workshop friendly.
Facilitating the decision making process with several strong expert wills.
The outcome:
The outcome was a 2 day intense Brand Sprint structured in 4 different sections. It provided enough brand foundation to allow all disciplines, from marketing and design to HR and management to start making coherent (brand) decisions.
When I left the process the development was at a beta stage, the Brand Sprint had gone through several rounds of iterations and tested internally and externally.
Read more about the process and outcome here.
The Brand Sprint - http://brandsprint.nl/