Workshop with Google on Branding: A simple formula to get started on your brand

As a start-up you're probably busy figuring out your product market fit or building the next prototype. Your brand often gets left behind, because other topics seem more pressing. However, having a clear idea on what your brand is, what it stands for and how it behaves, can make a lot of difficult decisions easier. Making the abstract idea of “your brand” into something concrete, allows your team to develop a common language to describe what your company is all about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier. On top of that it will allow you to develop communication materials in a much faster way, allowing you to test ideas quicker and cheaper than a lot of other ways of prototyping.

In this 90 min workshop you will get the the tools and exercises to create a concrete and agile brand strategy document. You can do these exercises with your own team, without any special expertise. At the end, you’ll have a set of diagrams — a simple brand cheat-sheet — that you can use to make decisions.

First we'll look at your company's motivation:

• 20-Year Roadmap: helps you think long-term.

• What, How, Why: reminds you why your company exists.

We'll then add a little bit more detail:

• Top 3 Values: makes your why more specific.

• Top 3 Audiences: helps you prioritize the target for your brand.
  

As a third step we'll position your brand relative through others:

• Personality Sliders: defines the attitude and style of your brand.

• Competitive Landscape: compares your brand to other companies.

Finally we'll use these elements to create a few communication examples and teach you how to test your branding and messaging in an easiest way possible.

Gaston Serpenti and Jort Schutte have been working in the creative industry for over 15 years advising clients like Nike, Volkswagen, Lego and Netflix with everything between brand, marketing and customer challenges. They're currently leading Creative Works, the marketing innovation arm of Google, helping brands in Northern Europe create more impactful and exciting work on Google's platforms. They're always looking for ways to combine storytelling, creativity and new technologies. Besides helping find these new ways of marketing, they've collaborated with Google [X] on branding a new moonshot company and have been part of the Google for Startup Program.