Determining the direction for a brand is critical. Brand strategy encompasses its position in the marketplace, goals, definition of customers, and its overall personality.

For GRAYBOX, it all starts with strategy and there’s nothing more fundamental than brand strategy. A company’s brand strategy can be looked at as documentation of everything core to being able to articulate where a company is coming from and where it’s going. It encompasses a wide variety of specific things, including brand positioning, target customers, and definition of brand voice and tone as part of your overall personality.

Gaining insight into a brand’s overall strategy is key in understanding who you are and how we can best work together. Alignment from the beginning ensures that we’re all operating from the same playbook and can guide decision-making for everything from marketing strategy down to on-site content to tactics around outbound sales.

We follow a specific process that gets at your brand strategy. It involves a series of collaborative sessions in which we’re unpacking the essence of your company with key stakeholders, taking copious notes, and using plenty of sticky notes. For something that oftentimes feels intangible like a brand strategy, the more we can codify physically, the higher the likelihood that we can uncover the right things to include in a final brand strategy.

Our interactive workshopping process starts with getting the right people in the room. Usually this includes ownership and/or the C-suite to get the right voices involved from the start and avoids opportunities for diverging in the future. If we’re not starting on the same page, then feedback along the way will always be rooted in a fundamental misalignment about overall direction. We look at where you are positioned in the marketplace, who the competition is, and who your customers should be. We dive into the kinds of things you say in your day-to-day interactions as a team and with customers to get at how you talk about yourself and identify core traits and values that are common threads across the business.

Over the course of 2-3 half-day workshops, depending on size and diversity of the key stakeholders, GRAYBOX documents each session with a comprehensive capture document that allows all parties time for reflection as to what we accomplished and validation that our team heard everything shared in the workshop environment. Collaborative brand discovery sessions can be exhausting; taking a step back after a day or two always affords additional perspective that you may not have had in the room.

As we move through the workshopping and capture documentation process, GRAYBOX starts honing in on an overall brand strategy to be able to start validating with our client-partners. We move from broad and wide to narrow and precise around how you want to talk about your brand and incorporate your feedback along the way. At the end of the day, the distilled brand strategy shouldn't be a surprise. It should be a summation of everything the team knows to be true, with an added nudge to get there.