5 Brainstorming Exercises to Strike Branding Gold
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The perfect (brain)storm
You have your snacks, sticky notes, white board and all the right people in the room for your branding brainstorm. They’re all staring at you, anxiously awaiting this collaboration session to start building that brand you’ve all been dreaming of. Now what?
Start with a review of your ground rules, put away all the technology, get your note taker poised and ready… then jump on in to these exercises to get you and your creative dream team to the branding goal line. (Please forgive me - sports metaphors are not exactly my strong suit.)
Exercise #1: The Basics
In our blog on choosing the right name for your brand, I covered five basic questions to kickstart the brainstorming exercises. This exercise is simple and a great start to the day. I recommend asking these questions to the room then writing down their answers on the white board, question by question.
Once you’ve answered all the questions, start whittling down each section to 5 or less words. Then stop and revisit this at the end of the day. This is your jumping off point for the rest of the exercises and your final stop to see if anything has changed after you go through the other exercises.
What do you sell?
What problem(s) do you solve?
What are the key benefits of your product or service?
What makes your product or service unique?
What words or phrases come to mind when you think of your brand?
Exercise #2: Your Brand’s Personality
The personality exercise can be done from one of two angles: What is your brand’s personality OR What would you like your brand’s personality to be? The direction you go in here depends on where you are in the brand development timeline.
Start with this list (one I actually send my clients), add your own words and give it to the group to choose the top 5-10 words each person thinks describes your brand. Let them add their own if they like. Then take a poll and keep the top 5-10 that everyone agrees on. These personality traits give you so much insight into the most important aspects of the brand which will ultimately determine elements like fonts, colors, imagery and messaging.
Exercise #3: I Aspire To Be
This exercise has three simple parts but is incredibly effective. Lead the group through these three questions and see where it takes you:
What brands do you admire most?
Why?
How can we apply this to our brand?
This is an easy one and can be a quick exercise or lead to great, lasting conversations. Just make sure you’re leading the conversation in a productive way - always back to your brand - to keep people from just talking about which brands are the biggest or coolest in the market. One way to do this is to continually go back to question #3 - “What aspect of [Brand Name] can we apply to our own brand?”
Exercise #4: The Fun One
A lot of people like to have this exercise right after lunch when everyone is getting a little tired and needs a rousing pick-me-up. Take your pick from the following questions and add your own - these types of questions force people to think past “corporate speak” and see the brand in a different light.
*Note: This exercise is a great conversation starter - don’t force everyone to the next question after a set amount of time, and don’t worry if you never make it past the first question. Let the conversation flow organically. I promise - you’ll end up with some great material after everyone loosens up!
If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be? Why?
What’s your brand’s favorite color?
What kind of music does your brand listen to?
What does your brand do on the weekends?
Where does your brand travel?
What is your brand’s hobbies?
What’s your brand’s favorite movie/book/TV show?
What does your brand like to eat? What does it like to drink?
Does your brand have any pets?
Exercise #5: Craft Time!
If you prepped for this session as we suggested in our blog “How to have a productive brainstorming session,” then you brought magazines with you to the meeting. You’ll need scissors, tape and sharpies as well. Break the group into a few teams (size all depends on how many people you have in the room - groups of 2 or 3 are ideal).
Now pass out those magazines - I recommend a variety of visual design, news and lifestyle magazines - you never know what is going to strike a chord with someone at the table. Hand each group their supplies, then instruct them to build a mood board for the brand: Cut out pictures, fonts, colors and words that resonate with the group and represent the brand, then tape them all to an empty wall or paper easel.
Give each group 20-30 minutes to complete this exercise, then have them present their mood board to the group. Have other groups react and respond to the mood boards and encourage a conversation about what they think fits and doesn’t fit from each mood board. Take copious notes to reflect on later.
Don’t forget to take pictures of these mood boards before you leave the room! Your creative team back at the office is going to get so much inspiration from them.
The End of the Brainstorm
Once you’ve made it through these five branding exercises, you’re done, right? Ha! You know that this is only the beginning. But what a great start you have now.
End the meeting with a recap of what you’ve uncovered in each exercise and get as much consensus as possible on the key elements you want to walk away with. After the meeting, follow up with an email to all of the meeting attendees that includes the group consensus on each exercise, highlights of the day and fun pictures that you took. Include an invitation to the follow-up meeting, which will be much shorter this time and can be held onsite at your office. Ask attendees to review everything in the email and bring thoughts, concerns and new ideas to the table for consideration.
The follow up meeting can include naming brainstorms if you need that step or it can just be a review and finalization of key brand elements and messaging. Then send it off to your creative team/agency to begin developing key creative materials to present to the group - this could include official mood boards, logo designs, font and color selections and messaging/taglines.
And don’t forget - keep coming back to the Umlaut Blog each week for more in our Branding Basics series.