Brand Workshop Exercises: The 5 That Do the Work

Most advice on running a brand strategy workshop is written by people who have never had to run one for a client who is paying for the outcome.

I have run these for years, in our studio, in client boardrooms and over video. Below is the actual agenda I use, the five exercises that do most of the work, and the four ways I have watched them fail.

You can run this yourself. Plenty of teams do, and it works. It is worth knowing where the hard parts are before you book the room.

What a brand strategy workshop is actually for

It is not a logo meeting and it is not a brainstorm. The output is agreement.

By the end, everyone in the room should describe the business the same way. That sounds modest until you test it. Ask two people on your team to describe what you do, separately, right now. Two different answers means you do not have a strategy yet, you have a vibe that has held together so far.

Everything downstream depends on this. The website, the pitch, the way your story gets told, the answer a junior gives on a call they were not ready for. All of it leaks if the room never agreed.

Who needs to be in the room

Between four and eight people. Fewer than four and there is no friction, so you learn nothing. More than eight and the quiet ones stop speaking, which is usually where the useful material is.

Sales and marketing both need to be there, and they need to be there at the same time. They almost always have different pictures of the customer, and the gap between those pictures is the most valuable thing you will find all day.

You also need somebody who can make a decision without leaving the room to ask. A workshop that ends in "we will take this away and think about it" has not finished.

A brand strategy workshop outline

Half a day to a full day, depending on the size of the team and how much ground there is to cover. This is the running order I use.

0:00 to 0:30, what we sell and to whom. The five-year-old exercise below. Warms the room up and immediately surfaces the disagreements.

0:30 to 1:15, words we want and words we do not. Word association. Noisy, fast, and it produces the raw material for everything else.

1:15 to 2:00, who we are for. Audience work. Usually the longest argument of the day.

2:00 to 2:15, break. Take it. People stop thinking properly after two hours and the afternoon is where the decisions happen.

2:15 to 3:00, what customers actually ask us. Turns opinion into evidence, and it is the cheapest research you will ever do.

3:00 to 3:45, what we would do with no budget. Loosens people up after the analytical stretch, and produces things you can act on next week.

3:45 to 4:30, decide. Write the sentence. Agree who you are not for. Name the words you will and will not use.

That last block is the one every DIY workshop skips, and it is the only one that changes anything. Everything before it is preparation.

1. Explain what you do to a five-year-old

Everyone writes down what the business does, as if explaining it to a child. No jargon, no qualifiers.

It sounds reductive. It is the fastest way to find out that your team cannot explain the business, which is worth knowing before you spend money telling the world.

We ran this with Haydale, who make advanced materials using patented graphene functionalisation. Their scientists and their marketers had been arguing about the description for months.

What they said: we bring together innovative technology and engineering expertise to unlock graphene using patented functionalisation technology, adding compatible chemical groups to the surface for effective dispersion into the chosen intermediary.

An investor who knows nothing about nanomaterials: sorry, what?

Explained to a five-year-old: we make everyday things stronger and longer-lasting with a special recipe of graphene and plasma.

That second version became a 3D animated explainer that investors could follow. Same science. Different sentence.

2. Word association

Post-its. Everyone writes one word they want associated with the brand and one they want to avoid. Then what they want the business to be famous for.

Put them all on the wall. The pattern is visible in about ninety seconds, and so is the disagreement.

The avoid list matters more than the want list. It is easy to agree you want to seem professional. Watching someone write down the word another person wrote on the want side is where the real conversation starts.

Forrester found that B2B organisations with an aligned narrative see 24% faster three-year revenue growth. Alignment is not a soft outcome.

3. Audience analysis

HubSpot found only 42% of marketers know basic demographic information about their target audience. Most teams are guessing and do not know they are guessing.

Everyone picks one real person. An existing customer, a lost one, or the client they wish they had. Then: what is hard for them, what are they trying to do, where do they look for answers, what makes them hesitate.

Go round the room out loud. Sales will describe someone different from marketing. That gap is the finding, and naming it is half the fix.

If you sell several things to several audiences, run this once per audience. It takes longer and it is the only honest way to do it.

4. What customers actually ask

Everyone who talks to customers lists the questions they get. Including from the people who did not buy, which is the half most teams never collect.

Every question is a piece of content you already know somebody wants. B2B buyers read between three and seven pieces of content before they contact you, and this exercise tells you exactly which seven to write.

It also settles arguments. When someone insists customers care about a feature, the question list either backs them or does not.

5. What would you do with no budget

Two rounds. First, no constraints, spend anything. Then, spend nothing at all.

The second round is where the useful ideas are. Unlimited budget produces campaigns nobody will run. Zero budget produces things somebody can do on Tuesday.

Ask everybody, not just the marketing people. The person in accounts has heard things on the phone that nobody in marketing has, and has never been asked.

Where brand strategy workshops go wrong

The founder speaks first. Everyone then agrees with the founder, and you have spent a day confirming what one person already thought. Founders go last, every time.

Nobody decides anything. A workshop that produces a wall of post-its and good energy has failed. If you leave without a sentence written down, nothing happened.

The wrong people are in the room. Usually too senior, sometimes too few. If nobody in the room speaks to customers directly, you are working from memory of memory.

It gets treated as a creative session. It is a decision-making session. The creative part comes afterwards and is much easier once the decisions exist.

What you should have when you finish

One sentence describing the business that anybody in the room could repeat tomorrow without you present.

A written answer to who you are for and, harder, who you are not for.

A short list of words you will use and words you will not.

All of it written down and circulated. Strategy that lives in the heads of the people who attended is not strategy, it is a good afternoon.

Running one yourself, or bringing someone in

Run it yourself if your team is small, the disagreements are mild, and somebody can chair without steering. Plenty of businesses get most of the way there on their own.

Bring in a facilitator when the argument is between people who report to each other, when it has been going on long enough to have a history, or when the founder cannot resist answering first. A neutral person in the room changes what gets said out loud.

Our Brand Strategy Workshop runs half a day to a full day, depending on the size of the team and how much ground there is to cover, in our studio, at your place or on a call. You leave with a written summary you can hand to the board. If you want to understand what a discovery session covers before deciding, start there. Otherwise book a discovery call and we will talk through where you are.