Director
Matthew Encina
Executive Producer
Ben Burns
Writer & Voice Over
Stewart Schuster
Editors
Stewart Schuster, Kevin Ramlal, Jon Pham
Cinematography
Stewart Schuster, Kevin Ramlal, Jon Pham, Mark Contreras, Ricky Lucas, Jonathan Garcia, Aaron Szekely
Music by
Epidemic Sound
What is a discovery session? How do you develop a brand strategy? What questions do you ask a client? How do you create user profiles and personas? How do you identify your customers? Why do you need a strategy before you design?
The discovery session is the backbone of the entire project. It defines the brand strategy. What comes out of this meeting becomes the foundation for every design decision moving forward.
In episode 2 of Building a Brand, creative director Matthew Encina and brand strategist Ben Burns from Blind, sit down with clients Josh and Crysten Hamilton to define the strategy for Hamilton Family Brewery's rebrand.
In the meeting, they define the goals of the business, identify the customers driving revenue, and define the brand's attributes. All of these exercises will help the design team at Blind develop an effective strategy for their business.
In this meeting, we define the goals of the client, and how we'll measure success. We also pinpoint the challenges that are getting in the way, and explore possible solutions to address them. We then identify who the client's customers are and create user personas to help understand their pain-points and how we can serve them better.
A discovery session is a facilitated meeting between you and the client to create a brand strategy that will positively impact their business. Sometimes this can take hours, other times days. The time spent in discovery is relative to the scope of the project and size of the challenge to be solved.
In this discovery session, we also spend time to define the brand's personality, so we know how the clients would like to be perceived in their market or industry.
Other exercises in the discovery session can include a competitive audit, a revenue audit, as well as an impact-to-effort goal prioritization exercise.
With these tools and exercises, we're able to strategize and recommend what the client can do, to improve the state of their business and brand.
In the first meeting, it's important to facilitate a productive discussion that will provide clarity on how you and your client should move forward. We use a discovery framework called CORE, which you can learn more about here.
