How to run a successful brand workshop for your tech company

Are you struggling to clearly articulate your unique value proposition? Do you need guidance understanding how your brand can stand out in a very competitive market and convert more prospects into clients? Are you looking to attract more clients? Would you like all the hard work to be recognised and appreciated by your audience? Most tech brands don’t invest time in the language of branding. This is dangerous because word of mouth and first-hand experience have more of an effect on user love than well-toned advertisements. Branding is more important than ever. How do you get your tech company into productive conversations about it? Find out how to run a successful brand workshop for your tech company.

Prepare to success 

Preparation is key to running a successful brand workshop for tech company. Find a half-day or days where you can sit together with your team. Get the meeting scheduled and set expectations by telling them they don’t have anything to do in advance other than being prepared for some important and fun conversations about how your tech brand should be experienced by users.

Before the meeting, gather a collection of tech-related images to hang on the wall of your tech company. There is no specific number of images needed, the amount should be enough to engage in a diverse range of things to talk about. The images you collect need to relate to a theme. Choose a theme that is easy to start a diverse conversation with, something that many people use or know and is easy to find beautiful images that illustrate different variations on the theme. These images give your workshop a chance to talk about whether their brand should feel fast and showy, practical, precise and prestigious, extreme luxury, or friendly and reliable. Be sure to include talking about competition and how your tech brand can differentiate itself. 

Make them vote

During your tech brand workshop, you need to give your team 20 minutes to stand up, study the pictures, and mark directly on the images. Green marks are for images that have something that’s desired, red for undesired. Give your team the freedom to express their thoughts, don’t get stuck in structuring and rules for this part of the workshop. Ultimately the making is just a way to prioritize and frame the images your tech company is going to talk about later.

Facilitate a conversation

Once your team is done with marking the images, try to create a conversation amongst the group about why they chose the ones they did. Start with those who have the most reds marks, since people often find it very easy to talk about what they don’t like. Move to the ones that had a lot of greens to highlight more positive attributes. After the positive greens, start with those who have a mix of both colours. This is where your skills as head of the workshop will come in hand. Discuss the input from the red and green opinions and work them through any conflicting opinions.

During all this active brainstorm session, a colleague should capture key adjectives that come up in the session. Write them down on a whiteboard or a piece of paper that you hang on a wall. Keep track of the words that are mentioned more than once. Wrap the meeting up and thank everyone for their participation. Make sure you have saved the information you gather about your tech brand. 

Synthesise the results

Back in your drawing board, analyze the results, taking into account things like the competitive landscape, and other tech sub-brands, if there is one. Try to get down to a list of 4–5 adjectives that can capture the heart of the brand. Take care to intensify any adjectives that seem hygienic, underwhelming, or won’t differentiate it from the competition.

Share it back with your team 

Once you’ve gotten down to your handful of attributes, it’s time to present them to your team again. Help your audience understand what you mean when suggesting what the brand should be. An image or a quick drawing can make it easier for them to understand since words can be slippery things. Compare your findings to those of the competition to show how customers should understand the differentiation. Capture your tech brands findings in a “word cloud” that can hang on the wall of the design team.

At the end of your brand workshop, you want everyone to feel that you have the right ones because you’re going to use these as guidelines for visual style studies, a touchstone for the final chosen style, and a measuring stick for the final results. The attributes are an agreement that helps you ensure that this is the way that the user understands the brand when they use the product or service.

Develop your tech brand

Now that you know what your tech brand stands for, you can start developing your brand with the help of visual designers. You can use them to structure the brand. Try to keep the word cloud that you made with your team on the wall, for moments when the brand experience needs to make the call between different design directions.

The next time you show your tech brand, the audience will know exactly what your brand is and what you do. Now you know the basics of running a successful brand workshop for your tech company. You can help a team get to words so they can design a target for how their experience should feel.  Have you heard about our brand strategy workshop? Click here for more information.