“how can you possibly launch as a brand if you don’t have any customers or marketing outreach and—obviously, since you just launched a new offering—you have no legacy or advocates? The simple answer is by design.”
—Fabian Geyrhalter
A brand is a set of expectations. Essentially a promise. A promise to deliver something valuable, in a specific way, to a specific group of people. A promise needs these three elements to be complete:
WHAT do you do?
What is it that you do? What’s your product or service category (the real, unromanticized version of it)?
HOW do you do it?
What do you look and sound like? How do you want us to feel? How are you different from the other thousand options competing to solve the same problem for us? Why should we pick you?
For WHOm?
You know you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. So who’s your promise for? What do they want? What do they care about? How do you fit into their days and the stories they tell themselves and their friends?
These are the questions I need to answer as a designer to create a distinctive brand identity that resonates with your team and your audience. Everything should reflect and reinforce the answers to these questions. When the what, how, and who are clear and your brand identity aligns with them, your brand becomes easier to understand, recognize, and trust.
When I started out as a brand identity designer, I had the twisted belief that my job was to have or find all the answers to the three questions myself. My clients would tell me, “I need a logo,” and I would disappear into the Batcave for a few days (at the time, it was the bedroom I shared with my two brothers) to do some googling, conjure up some magical design solution and then go back to the client for the big ta-da!
Sometimes, I left my clients speechless, but not in a good way. I often got confused looks, pushbacks, and a barrage of opinions about what color things should be. Without a solid foundation to refer back to, it was very hard for me to anchor design choices into real, shared insights, and every conversation about the work felt like a thug of war that I could never win. Not that I should have always won, to be honest.
I soon realized that if I wanted to provide value for my clients without ending up despising my job, something had to change. I looked around me for answers, and all my peers at the time seemed to swear that a simple questionnaire had changed the course of their creative careers. The breakthrough idea was that a few simple answers to a few simple questions could provide the blueprint for the success of any creative engagement and finally teach designers and clients how to speak the same language and work together as a team for the sake of award-winning design work!
I knew it sounded too good to be true, but I anyway put together a laundry list of questions about target markets, competitors, mission, vision, unique value propositions… What are three brands you like and why? What are three brands you don’t like and why? Cringy, I know, but I was sure my questionnaire was well thought out and included all the important questions. I was so proud that I even branded it with a pretentious name: “The Atlas Brand Strategy Workbook.” When I emailed it to a client for the first time, I had a strong feeling that my professional life would never be the same again.
Unsurprisingly, after having “nudged” the client several times a few days later, I got the answers back, and my life was still the same. At first, I thought it was just bad luck if this client, for some reason, “didn’t get it.” So I kept sending the questionnaire to all the clients that came knocking, but the results were all the same and far from what I expected. I tried tweaking the questions many times, but nothing changed. Some clients barely filled in the blanks with short and vague answers. Others sent over pages and pages of writing that proved impossible to sift through. Others skipped the questions altogether and simply attached the PDF of their company brochure to a blank email reply.
I soon had to accept that even though it gave the illusion of professionalism and thoroughness, the questionnaire wasn’t making it any easier for me to discover the insights I needed to do a good job. I felt a cold shiver run through my back when I realized I had to be there live to guide the conversation if I wanted to make this work.
My introvert self rebelled. I became a designer so I could withdraw from the world of the living into the world of picas and pixels. I didn’t even feel any need to go on vacation to tropical places because constant and prolonged exposure to screens gave me a beautiful blue-light tan all year round. But I loved my job enough to bite the bullet, and although the idea of talking to people horrified me at the time, I was cornered.
I wish I could tell you I had cracked the code at this point, but interviews came with a new set of problems. They were clearly a step up from my fancy questionnaire, but I quickly discovered they were a double-edged sword. Clients loved talking about their vision, dreams, and aspirations, just as anyone would—sometimes for hours. And I loved listening to them, but everyone was dead tired at the end of every call, and I would be drowning in frantically scribbled notes that I couldn’t entirely make sense of.
In my struggles to get to the core of what a brand is so that I could guide the conversation in my discovery sessions, I learned where to look for real insights and developed a few tricks to shine a light in the most unexpected corners. I had learned how to find the ideas my clients and I didn’t even know we were looking for. But I still had to find a way to avoid boiling the ocean in order to find them.
At the time, an organization I was volunteering with offered training for facilitators, and I was invited to participate as a student. There, I learned a lot about structuring workshops and managing team dynamics, and I even had the chance to practice in the real world. It felt natural to apply these new skills to my work, which soon led me to run my very first discovery workshop.
Instead of filling out forms or sitting through endless interviews, the idea was to have my clients participate in structured, interactive exercises that made the process of discovering the brand promise efficient, engaging—and, dare I say, fun.
In the years since, I’ve been honing my skills as a facilitator and constantly experimented with new exercises for my discovery workshop while refining the most effective ones. I noticed my industry making up complicated proprietary frameworks and processes to help companies come up with vision, mission, purpose, north star, avatar, archetype, onions—I know, it makes me cry, too.
The exercises and process I’m about to share instead, are designed to bring brand clarity to small teams like yours. These are the kind of teams I’ve worked with and been inspired by for over a decade. You are unique: nimble, resourceful, and deeply invested in your work. But you’re also busy, stretched thin, and juggling hats. That’s where this process shines.
I stripped branding down to its essentials. The following exercises are fun, efficient, and purpose-driven. These four exercises will help you uncover your brand promise without getting bogged down in vague terminology, drawn-out deliberations, and endless cycles of iteration.
Meet your customer profiles.
Identify and understand the key people your brand serves. By defining who they are, you’ll know what they care about and how to position your brand as the solution to their problems.Draw your competitor landscape.
Position your brand in the market by mapping out competitors and identifying where you can stand out.Define your brand personality.
Clarify your brand’s personality by selecting the words that best describe it. Establish a shared language for your team and set clear creative boundaries. This prevents confusion and helps keep your brand voice consistent across every touchpoint.Write your brand Manifesto.
Articulate your brand’s values and turn them into practical, actionable guidelines to shape every action you take — from hiring decisions to marketing campaigns.
I’ll be sharing the exercises in the coming weeks. My promise to you is that you’ll walk away from this process with a solid foundation to build your brand identity upon and a renewed sense of ownership and excitement.