Brand Strategy Workshop

About the Brand Strategy Template

Arek Dvornechuck, a branding expert and founder of Ebaq Design, created the Brand Strategy Template to help creative teams develop killer brand strategies for new or existing brands. His framework contains essential exercises for businesses to clarify their brand purpose, position, and identity.

What’s the Brand Strategy Template?

The Brand Strategy Template is a framework that helps you define your brand core, positioning, and persona. These three core brand areas include nine aspects of the brand that are essential for a healthy brand strategy:

• Brand purpose

• Brand vision

• Brand values

• Target audience

• Market analysis

• Brand awareness

• Brand personality

• Brand tone of voice

• Brand tagline

In this template, you’ll find nine exercises for defining each of these areas that will help you when building brand strategies.

Who should use this Brand Strategy Template?

Creative professionals, brand strategists, designers, copywriters, creative directors, etc., can use the Brand Strategy Template to embark clients on the brand identity discovery journey.

This template is an excellent tool for in-house brand teams to run brand strategy workshops with stakeholders and understand the brand strategy better.

As a facilitator, use this template when:

• Startups want to come up with brand-building strategies.

• Existing brands want to reposition or rebrand themselves.

As an in-house team:

• Organizations that want to redefine their brand identity.

• Organizations want to create a new brand.

The benefits of a Brand Strategy Template

Brands are the connection between your product and users, and over time, the brand is what will develop a long-lasting relationship with your customers. Here are a few of the benefits when you have brand-building strategies in place:

• Brand purpose, values, voice, and personality help you foster connections with your consumers and audience, and it helps to build trust long-term.

• Brand vision ensures your business is moving in the right direction.

• Market research helps you guide decisions, fill the gaps, and define what differentiates you from competitors.

• Brand awareness gets you closer to your audience, making it easier to sell when launching new campaigns.

• The brand tagline makes your brand memorable.

• When you define a target audience, your marketing efforts are maximized.

How to use the Brand Strategy Template

Select this template, and add it to your Miro board. Work on the workshop area.

Here is how to run the nine exercises:

1. Purpose

To find out your brand’s purpose, run Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle exercise. It consists of three circles where you answer these three questions:

• Why: what’s your brand's core belief?

• How: what are the actions that make you stand out?

• What: what are you trying to sell?

The most challenging part for many brands is to figure out the why. To help you with that task, the following frames on this exercise will uncover a cause your brand supports and your brand’s purpose statement.

2. Vision

Plan on a timeline where you see your brand in 5, 10, and 15 years. Write a vision statement that translates your vision.

3. Values

Dig deeper into your brand’s values, mapping out all the negative and positive experiences and feelings your brand evokes.

4. Audience

Find their goals, problems, desires, and fears to know what resonates with them. This exercise contains a template with four quadrants where you add your audience’s goals, problems, impact (what impacts them), and desires.

5. Market

Take this time to map out your competitive landscape. Market analysis is an essential step in your brand strategy workshop because it will also define your strengths and what problems you are solving that nobody has been able to. At the end of this exercise, write a positioning statement that will make that clear.

6. Awareness

Brand awareness is how people get to know your brand. It's crucial when developing marketing strategies to get the word out there. In this frame, you’ll add which channels are more suitable for your brand strategy.

7. Personality

Your brand personality will bring people together and make them relate to your brand. Use the archetypal wheel to define your brand’s personality traits. To help you shape your brand personality, write some attitude statements at the end of this exercise.

8. Voice

This frame contains a scale where you can evaluate where your brand is in terms of humor, formality, and enthusiasm. After you see where you fall in that scale, project your tone of voice by writing what you are and what you’re not.

9. Tagline

How do you want people to remember you? Spend time crafting a great, memorable tagline with which everyone will recall and connect.

Pro tips:

• Plan your brand strategy workshop ahead of time.

• Each exercise takes 30-40 minutes, and we recommend you schedule three sessions for each brand part (core, positioning, persona). Each session will last approximately 2 hours.

• Run this workshop in real time. Create a safe space where ideas flow without judgment, say at the beginning of your brand strategy workshop, so that no one can veto ideas.

• Choose one person or facilitator to add the ideas to the template.

• Write down every idea that comes up in the workshop, and edit and select the best ones later on.

Brand Strategy Template FAQs

How do I start a brand strategy?

If you are a creative professional or brand strategist, get your team together and run a brand identity workshop. Arek Dvornechuck, the founder of Ebaq Design Studio, created this brand workshop template to facilitate this process, allowing brand managers and creative teams to easily develop their brand core, positioning, and persona.

How do I create a brand identity template?

The brand identity template should cover the following aspects of your brand: purpose, vision, values, personality, voice, and tagline. If you run a brand strategy workshop, you’ll see they are all included in the Brand Strategy Template.