A more in depth look into the PRIME MOVERS program
The branding workshop is held in the first semester of the PRIME MOVERS program. It focuses on what good and great brands do, and how to create a strategy for creating a brand for your social business.
What it is
Branding can be divided into three rough categories:
- Inception, discovery
- Execution (the actual designing process)
- Launch and the ongoing processes
In this workshop we focus on the inception and discovery part of creating a brand. We unveil the myths of branding and truly understand what branding is and how you can guide your customers to think about your social business in the way you would like. We also focus on the core belief and the ultimate goal of your brand, and create brand attributes that not only helps guide the second stage (execution), but also your brand strategy. Read further to find out how this core belief is used in creating your brand.
“Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they say it is”. – Marty Neubauer, The Brand Gap
Agenda:
- Session Alignment
- Common Mistakes
- Branding and its elements
- What is branding?
- What good brands do
- What great brands do
- Concept of the core belief and the ultimate goal
- Core belief
- Ultimate goal
- Defining brand attributes of ONE DAY
- Creating a design brief
- Creating our core belief, ultimate goal and the moral of our story
This is not a:
- how to design a brand workshop
- how to design a logo workshop
- workshop on the theory of design
In the PRIME MOVERS program, there is a “Introduction to Graphic Design” workshop, where we cover the basics of the theory of graphic design along with an introduction to Adobe Illustrator.
Learning outcomes:
You should leave the workshop understanding what branding is, how to avoid the common mistakes in branding, how to create a design brief and attributes, what your brand’s moral of the story, core belief and ultimate goal is and how you can use these concepts to create your brand and keep a competitive advantage with it.
As with most workshops in the program, this 3-hour workshop is split into two parts: input and practice. During the practice portion, attendees apply their new learnings in creating brand attributes for one of our real social businesses.
Outputs from one of our workshops:
In this particular workshop our team applied their new learnings to creating brand attributes and the core belief of our social startup, kindby.
kindby is an online store, where you can rent ethically made baby clothing and accessories.
Here is some output our team came up with. During the brand attributes exercise we tried to come up with single words to describe each aspect of our brand. Here are some words we came up with.
Brand attributes
Culture (what makes us who we are):
caring
Customers (Who is our customer? What do they think, hear, do, see, say and feel? Talking about parents and people who gift parents):
loving, exhausted
Users (Who is our user? What do they think, hear, do, see, say and feel? Talking about the baby):
safe, fragile and adorable.
Voice (If the brand was a person, how would you describe them?):
Empathetic, giving, reliable.
Emotional benefits (How does the brand make people feel?):
Reassured, relaxed, conscious.
Value (What value do we add to the stakeholders?):
ease, environmental consciousness, support, happiness.
X-Factor (What makes us special?):
grassroots, purpose-driven, impactful, and our people.
CORE BELIEF
Core belief: Your child deserves the best.
What’s next?
Before this workshop, there were a lot of different directions we could have taken with kindby. Not only did it align everyone on what kindby was going to be, but it also took an inclusive approach to creating kindby together with our team, where everyone’s voice was heard.
We discussed how without these attributes, we wouldn’t truly understand who we are and how we want to present ourselves. We talked about how we probably would have gone with the classic organic cotton selling small enterprise brand. We discussed how we want to be much more than that. This is where our core belief comes in. What do we believe in? What makes our brand get up in the morning? Our belief is agreeable by everyone, but leaves us a structured playing ground for defining what best is. We discussed how for us, best means being kind to your baby, and the environment. We decided that our brand will always have an educational aspect, where we are constantly doing our research and working hard to define and offer what the best is for our customers, users, producers, and the environment.
Furthermore, we discussed how organic cotton wasn’t the answer and how there is really not a clear answer when you take the whole value chain of textiles into account besides not purchasing. We talked about how we are always going to be honest and transparent about our value chain.
We decided what we wanted was that we wanted to build a practice for textiles in e-commerce, from a circular economy perspective while providing our community with hard truths, educational tools, and inspiration for people to be more mindful about the way they consume. That’s what we understood as “the best”.
In the third part of creating a brand, we mentioned the “launch and the ongoing processes”. A part of the “ongoing processes” is marketing. How do we look to the outside world? Creating the core belief helped us to explain who we are in a short and understandable sentence. This helps us guide our marketing efforts. We are not thinking what would be cool or engaging in marketing. We are 100% focused on our core belief and soon after started to produce content that aligns with “the best for your baby”.
After the workshop, the kindby team was tasked with creating a digital marketing strategy keeping our core belief in mind. In the PRIME MOVERS program, we also include a Content Marketing as well as a Social Media Marketing workshop, where we crowdsource ideas from our organization for our marketing efforts. The kindby teams filters the ideas and implements them, in the form of social media statuses, strategies, blog articles, videos and more.
We tailor make all our workshops to people who have no previous academic knowledge about the topic, where there is a gradual shift from an introduction to the concepts that are important for our work.
Have any questions? Please don’t hesitate to reach us on Facebook or via email at hello@theprimemovers.org
For more info about scholarships to the program, please click here.