Brand strategy workshop
A brand strategy workshop that ends in a decision, not a deck.
We run a brand strategy workshop with your leadership team. Typically half a day, scaling to a full day or more as the team gets bigger and the business gets more complicated. In our studio in Abergavenny or at your place. The session exists to settle one argument: what your business is for, and who it is not for. You leave with a positioning sentence in writing. Everything after it, identity, website, content, sales collateral, gets briefed against that sentence rather than against opinion.
What happens in the room
The whole thing hangs on who is in the room.
Leadership only.
Not the whole company. The people who can make a decision and make it hold. A bigger team is workable, it just makes for a longer session.
Your place or ours.
The studio in Abergavenny, or your office if getting the team off site is the harder ask.
It is a working session.
We are not presenting to you. Your team does most of the talking and we write down what you actually mean, which is rarely what the current website says.
Nothing gets designed on the day.
No logos, no colours, no layouts. The moment design enters the room the argument stops, and everyone starts having opinions about type.
The two questions it turns on
One is easy. One is the work.
Both lists end up on the wall. The team argues about the second one, and that argument is the reason the session is worth clearing the diary for.
Question 01
What words would you like associated with your brand?
Teams answer this quickly and tend to agree. It is a warm-up, and it is the half most branding processes stop at.
Question 02
What words would you not?
Harder, slower, and the one people skip. It is also where the positioning comes from. A business that will not rule anything out has not decided anything, and its marketing reads that way.
The word-association exercise, roughly an hour in. Everything on the board gets cut down to one sentence before the day ends.
What you leave with
Four things, and none of them is a slide deck.
A positioning sentence, written down
Short enough that your team can repeat it under pressure without checking a document first.
An agreed answer on who you are not for
In writing, with the leadership team behind it, so turning work down stops being a judgement call somebody makes alone.
The words you own, and the ones you have ruled out
Which is what a copywriter, a designer or a new hire actually needs to get your language right first time.
A sequence for what to build next
So the identity or the website starts from a decision rather than a blank page.
Who it suits
Businesses that have outgrown how they describe themselves.
SMEs turning over roughly £500k to £15M. Usually something has changed. A service was added, the business moved upmarket, or it came through a buyout, and the language never caught up.
The clearest signal is simple. If two people on your leadership team describe the business differently, your buyers are getting both versions.
When it is the wrong call
It suits you less if you are pre-revenue, or if one person already makes every decision without needing the room to agree. A call is cheaper and will probably do. We would rather tell you that on the call than halfway through the session.
Selected work
Three brands that started in the same room.
What it costs
From £2,500 plus VAT.
That covers the session itself and everything you leave with: the positioning sentence, the words you have ruled out, and the sequence for what to build next.
Where it lands above that depends on the size of your team, whether the session runs to a full day, and how much work the strategy needs afterwards.
Common questions
What people ask before they book.
What is a branding workshop?
A working session where a leadership team decides what the business is for and who it is not for, and writes that down. Ours turns on two questions: which words you want associated with the brand, and which you do not. Nothing is designed on the day. You leave with a positioning sentence and the words you have ruled out, and everything built afterwards is briefed against them.
How much does a brand strategy workshop cost?
From £2,500 plus VAT. That covers the session and the written outputs. It rises with the size of the team, whether the session runs to a full day, and how much strategy work is needed afterwards. We confirm the figure on a discovery call before anything is booked.
Half a day or a full day?
Half a day for most leadership teams of three to six people. A full day when the team is bigger, the business has several distinct services, or it has just come through a merger or buyout and there is more to settle. We tell you which on the call, before you clear the diary.
Before you book
You can run a version of this yourself.
The five brand workshop exercises that do most of the work are free to use, and if you want to know what a brand discovery workshop produces before paying for one, that is written up in full. If you would rather run the whole thing without us, the guide to how to do your own brand strategy covers it end to end. Where a business sells through a team, there is a strong case for putting your sales team in the workshop rather than briefing them after the fact.
Free download
The checklist we run before every workshop.
Twenty things we check before we start any brand build. Use it to find the gaps in your own brand: where it is vague, where it is inconsistent, and where it is quietly costing you work. Add your email and we will send it straight over, plus the occasional note when we publish something worth your time.
Book a discovery call.
Twenty minutes. Tell us what is not landing and we will tell you whether the workshop is the right starting point, or whether something cheaper would do.