In this article, you’re going to learn exactly what brand discovery session is and why they are the key to building effective brand strategies. Just to give a bit of context here, let’s say you were to walk to a doctor’s clinic and you were to go in and see a doctor that you had never seen before and you told the doctor you are not feeling too well and he handed you a bottle of pills and told you to take two of those a day and you would feel much better. Would you leave that doctor’s clinic feeling that you trusted the doctor and that these pills were going to help you in your particular situation? Well no, you wouldn’t because what usually happens when you walk into a doctor’s clinic, the doctor has a look at you and asks you some questions about how you’re feeling before he decides what it is that he needs to do to fix the problem. That diagnosis phase is really important when it comes to your health but it’s also important when it comes to businesses as well. There are a lot of businesses out there that offer off-the-shelf solutions and for some circumstances, they’re perfectly okay but in other circumstances, you need to really take the time to understand what the problem is before you go ahead and offer a solution. One of the major problems with the branding industry itself is that a lot of prospects, entrepreneurs, business owners, their closet specialists think they know what’s best and they self-diagnose their problems and come to you with it all figured out, knowing what their problem is and knowing exactly what they need. But a discovery session does not only help you to gather the information you need but it is also an opportunity for you to ask some questions to this prospect and help them to question their own logic. That’s a really important aspect of the discovery session, yes you are there on a fact-finding mission to gather all of that information but you’re also there to change the perspective and change what your prospect has in their head about what branding is and about what you can do for them.
What is the Brand Discovery Session?
The word session is just another word for a meeting. Essentially your brand discovery session is a brand discovery meeting. In this meeting, it’s not about talking about logos or typography or colors because you know this is just a very small part of building a brand. To build a strategic brand there are a lot more elements at play and a lot more that you need to understand before you can strategize on the best approach. You need to understand the situation from an elevated point of view. You need to understand the business and its operations; you need to understand who this business is trying to appeal to and then work at a solution to bring the two together based on the current market conditions including the competitors that are already in the market. The discovery session is all about gathering that critical information needed to strategize on the best approach for the brand.
Discovery Session Styles & Participants
The discovery session styles vary depending on your business, your brand and the position you take in the market and of course the business that you’re trying to help so that you could be dealing with a larger business that has multiple c-suite executives and you can do this discovery session face to face with them in the conference room or you could be dealing with a smaller business where you’re dealing with just the business owner and you can do the discovery session over the phone or by video conference. Regardless of the style of your discovery session, who you are dealing with, the size of your brand, it doesn’t really matter. The main point here is that the key decision-makers are there during this discovery session. It doesn’t necessarily mean that some big decisions are going to be made within this session, in fact, they probably won’t because this really is about gathering all of the facts. But this is the part of the overall process and during this stage, you do have the opportunity to earn some trust and to show your level of expertise. If the decision-makers come into the picture later on down the track, they’re not going to have that added advantage of seeing you as an expert or to have that trust in you. It’s really important that the key decision-makers are there from the very start.
The goal of the Discovery Session
The goal of the discovery session is twofold; the primary goal and the secondary goal
The primary goal is all about understanding. You want to understand everything you can about their business, about the people that they’re trying to help, about the conditions of the market including their competitors, and about their goals. If you do that well enough then you will have a very clear indication and all of the information at hand that you need to go and build a strategic brand.
The secondary goal of this discovery session is to really solidify your prospect of becoming a client. It’s part of the sale process because you, get the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, you get the opportunity to show empathy and to make them feel comfortable about doing business with you. If you do this well enough, your client and your prospect will be open to what you have to offer them.
The discovery session is just one part of the overall brand building process but it is the very beginning of that process. It’s really important because the information that you gather during this session will set the foundation for the brand that you’re going to build. If you don’t do a good job gathering that information then the brand that you build is not going to be aligned to the goals that your client has. Make sure you take the time to ask the right questions, take loads of notes, and make sure that you’re building and gathering that information that you can build your brand from.
There are many different ways to hold a brand discovery session and some people like to include the brand discovery session and the sales process in a single sitting, other people like to divide it up over a number of sessions and keep the discovery and the sales session completely separate. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. It’s simply a case of understanding what it is you need to gather. You need to go out and gather those facts so you can build a strategic brand accurately and you also need to take the time to help your client understand that you are the person to do business with and they should warm to what it is that you have to give.
Well explained