How to Do a Brand Discover Process Without Hiring a Branding Agency

A lot of companies, CEOs and executives think that brand discovery requires the expertise of a branding agency, but branding agencies can be expensive and not always cost-effective.

For small and even medium-sized businesses, it’s not always the best way to spend your money. However, branding is important – definitely one of the most important aspects of a company.

Before hiring a branding agency, it’s best to do the work yourself – or at least try to do as much as you can yourself. It will bring clarity and understanding to what you do and how you do it.

A brand allows you to distinguish yourself from your competition, making sales easier and allows you to charge more money. (Just think of Apple products.)

Thankfully there are ways to carry out a brand discover process without hiring a bunch of experts.

Brand discovery is an essential part of your business strategy; the purpose is to align your goals with specific methods while looking at long-term (sustainable) success.

t is essentially an audit of your business, focusing on brand image, consumer protection, communications, and competition.

A glance at the various processes involved in brand discovery will make you think that it’s way too complicated to handle yourself.

But that’s not always the case. All it takes is figuring out the right questions and coming up with answers to them. Some of these questions are relatively easy to answer, such as:

• What does your brand stand for?
• What type of customer do you best serve?
• What type of customer do you enjoy serving?
• How do prospective customers feel about your brand?
• What are your core values?
• How does your brand convey those core values?

Although it requires attention, effort, and time, brand discovery is crucial because it gives purpose; it defines your brand’s personality and helps you deliver what consumers want from your business or company.

Moreover, brand discovery is the most efficient method in figuring out your business marketing objectives based on consumer behaviour and insight.

The end game is a personalized strategy that achieves two goals: business growth acceleration and building customer loyalty.

How the Brand Process Works

Brand discovery adopts a market research methodology, although it comes with several new approaches.

The goal is to obtain a complete perspective of a brand – understanding what works, what’s not, and the challenges in the foreseeable future. Like all research methodologies, it uses both qualitative and quantitative data.

If you at least have tried to listen to a branding agency’s pitch before, then you probably have heard them ask questions like what’s your business, who you’re trying to reach, and what other people say about it.

The answers to these questions are your basis for building brand identity in line with what you already have in place.

You think that you know your brand down to the smallest details. In reality, there is so much more to learn about it.

You’re aware of your partners, stakeholders, and target audience’s feelings about your brand, but you often forget to assess it with impartiality.

Determining Your Brand’s Identity

The brand discovery process begins with the question, “who are we?” Once you answer this, you open up a whole new world of possibilities for your brand to grow. It also leads to the second most critical question: “who do you want to become?”

You have to build a distinctive presence in the market.

By understanding your brand’s true identity, your prospective customers find reasons why they should choose you over the competition.

Put in the effort and time in identifying the message and image your brand sends to the intended audience.

The next step in the process is to figure out if you, your supervisors, and staff share a uniform brand story.

If so, is the story accurate enough for everyone to have a harmonious understanding of the brand’s objectives?

The purpose of this question is to see if there’s a unified brand identity within the people running the business.

If you’re wondering why this is important, the reason is that you want everyone in the company to epitomize and represent the brand in the same way.

Analyzing the Competition

No matter the niche or industry, there’s always stiff competition.

But you can use the highly competitive landscape to your advantage in your brand discovery. You can’t settle with the answer to the question, “who are we?”

It’s as important to ask who your competition is. The purpose of a competitive analysis is to identify your direct competitors, figure out their edge over you, and discover their weaknesses.

You don’t need to do any fancy competitive analysis. A simple Google search will determine who your competition is.

Look at their websites. See if they have pricing on their site and if they do, how does it compare to your pricing. Look at their logo and colours.

What do you like about them? How does your website stack up against it?

Customer Information

The brand discovery process requires that you figure out how your audience views your brand. Your target audience usually doesn’t have access to the information needed for them to choose your company.

It’s the reason why you must identify which information they have about you and which ones they actually need. Part of this inquiry is to learn their perceptions towards your brand or even know it exists.

This is the only way for your team to ensure that your brand is correctly represented to the target audience.

Answering all those questions establishes brand authenticity. Assuming that you’ve managed to collect the information needed, you eventually determine if your brand lives up to what you and your audience expect.

Brand authenticity matters in a highly competitive industry because it provides a sense of direction to your company’s marketing efforts.

Sure, you can hire a branding agency to make the process easier since you won’t be doing the heavy lifting.

But is it worth your money?

We don’t necessarily think so. We’ve heard too many horror stories about companies going through brand discovery processes with branding agencies and come out just as confused the other side.

Brand discovery is feasible if you’re blessed with an organization comprised of people who share the same dream of growth and success.