Previous small scale research shows that a surprising number of companies in the Action & Adventure Sports market developed their branding in-house. These companies find the process to be difficult, they struggle with limited capacity, and they have difficulties managing many opinions. Naturally, a product to help in-house teams develop branding seems like a decent idea.
The Brandslide tool box is Tailwhip's first product offering. In-house teams can buy the Brandslide kit and have all the tools they need to run their own brand strategy workshop in a day (or less). The kit includes a 70 page user guide, 19 workshop templates, and a "brand lens" pdf document to record results.
Brandslide is a custom workshop that is the result of years of reading, taking notes, remixing classic exercises, developing custom exercises, and testing it all.
A few of the workshop's biggest influences are Marty Neumeier and his books, the Storybrand framework, and Sprint (the book from Google folks).
What was once mostly intuition has become a repeatable process. Brandslide has 5 main sections:
1. Your Goals
This section is a remix of the common "prioritization matrix." It puts goals on a grid, giving them number values. These values are used in a formula and the sum represents the goal's priority. Finally, and most importantly, you don't abide by the numbers. You abide by the reaction you have to the numbers.
2. Your Spark
This is a reskinned Golden Circle exercise (Simon Sinek). The customization here is that there's a 4th part of the exercise to combine the WHAT, HOW, WHY into a statement.
3. Your Audience
This section identifies a few target audiences from a large pool of potential audiences. There are a few custom exercises that generate elements of the Storybrand framework (internal and external problems).
4. Your Competition
Several custom exercises generate a pool of competitors and their notable traits, features, etc. Once there's a good map of the competition and the landscape, the final differentiation exercise remixes the Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas and Marty Neumeier's 12 Ways to Differentiate.
5. Your Style
The last section of exercises has participants narrowing down their brand archetypes, and how to use them, in clever ways.
