Three-Hour Brand Sprint Template
Turn abstract ideas about your brand into common language. Evaluate your brand positioning during a 3-hour brand sprint.
About the Brand Sprint template
A brand sprint is a three-hour meeting comprising six activities to align your team with your motivation, values, audience, personality, and competitive landscape.
After completing the brand sprint workshop and filling in the template, your team will have a simple cheat sheet that will help you communicate your branding philosophy and work more seamlessly in-house or with a branding agency.
Keep reading to learn more about branding and how to run a three-hour brand sprint.
What is a brand sprint?
A brand sprint is an exercise that allows you to distill your disparate ideas about your brand into a comprehensive profile. By answering a series of questions about your brand, you clarify your brand's mission statement, roadmap, and much more.
Brand-building is a high-stakes task. Organizations live or die on how customers and potential customers respond or connect to their brand. Whether your company is building a brand from the ground up or revamping an existing brand, a brand sprint is a valuable tool.
Why use a brand sprint template?
People use a brand sprint template to build a profile for the organization. Brand sprints enable you to think about your roadmap for the future, your values, your audiences, and why your company exists in the first place.
These exercises help you define the attitude and style of your brand and compare your brand to companies operating in the same space.
How to run a Three-Hour Brand Sprint
Running a three-hour brand sprint is not easy, but anyone can be a brand sprint facilitator and help with the prep work.
You should generally aim for two to six people for the three-hour brand sprint, including your CEO. Ideally, the co-founder, marketing, or product head should also be in this meeting.
Designate someone as the “decider” and find one or two extra facilitators to help whoever leads the brand sprint.
If you are the brand sprint workshop facilitator, schedule a block of time where you and your team can work uninterrupted. As the name implies, most brand sprints take about 3 hours.
To start, select Miro’s Brand Sprint template. This will be your framework. Then, follow the steps:
Step 1: 20 Year Roadmap Have each participant write down their own version of that roadmap, then invite everyone to share it. Of course, these don’t have to be exact; no one has a time machine! But this exercise should get you to think about the lifetime of your brand.
Step 2: What, How, and Why
The “What, How, Why” framework consists of three concentric circles. The outside circle is labeled “what,” the middle circle is “how,” and the inside circle is “why.”
Go around the room and ask everyone to answer three fundamental questions:
What does your company do?
How do you do it?
And why?
Step 3: Top Three Values
Write down your company’s top three values. Rank the decision-making principles that matter to you.
You can set a timer for this section and ask participants to vote on the values they most agree with.
Step 4: Top Three Audiences
List your top three audiences. Have everyone in the room write down their own answers to this question, then bring everyone together to share.
Step 5: Personality Sliders
Now it’s time to start thinking about your brand’s attributes. The Personality Sliders exercise invites you to position your company’s attributes between brand extremes, such as Friendly and Authority or Mass Appeal and Elite.
Step 6: Competitive Landscape
Finally, analyze your competitive landscape. Ask your team these questions:
What other organizations are operating in your space?
What are they doing right?
What can you do differently?
Where did the brand sprint originate?
The brand sprint was popularized by the team at Google Ventures and written about in detail by Jake Knapp in the book Sprint. The ideas included in the brand sprint come from various sources, including Steve Jobs’s 1997 internal meeting at Apple, Stewart Butterfield’s essay We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Simon Sinek’s TED talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action.
Want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of running a brand sprint? Read about how Miro went through the brand sprint process during a rebrand with a remote team.
How do you define brand strategy?
A brand strategy is a long-term plan for developing a brand, and the ultimate goal is to have your consumers identify with it and choose your brand instead of others. Businesses and organizations run brand sprints to set the stage for their brand strategy.
How do I know my brand personality?
Running a brand sprint is a great way to discover your brand personality. You can find out about your brand attributes after doing a Personality Slider exercise that invites you to position your organization between brand extremes such as Friend and Authority, or Mass Appeal and Elite. Using adjectives and mood boards will help you and your team identify your brand personality during your branding sprint.
When should you run a brand sprint?
The Google Ventures team recommends only running a brand sprint when you have a trigger event such as naming your company, designing a logo, hiring an agency, or writing a manifesto.
Get started with this template right now.
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