This week at Fruto, I ran a series of Brand Strategy Workshops with our whole team, helping us to clarify our internal and external brand.
We love running workshops remotely as they keep everyone focused, sharing the workshop’s output is simple and they can be easily recorded.
How we did it
We split our workshop into 3 sessions (following the 3 main components of a solid brand strategy): brand core, brand positioning, and brand persona.
It was very interesting to see everyone’s perspective on the Fruto brand, every team member brought valuable and different points of view to the table depending in their role.
5 top tips
Here are my learnings and tips from running this type of workshop:
More fun means better participant input. Having good energy and a relaxed feel to the exercises is key for participants to come up with good ideas and feel engaged. Try to create quirky, fun, and easy exercises and bring good vibes into the session. Participants will most likely match your energy and attitude.
Give participants some context. Before each session we recorded a very short Loom video to give the team some context of what we were going to do, how and why. This saved us valuable time in the workshop and it helped to give everyone the basic brand strategy knowledge they'd need during the exercises.
Always keep the goal of each exercise in mind. In this way you’ll be able to guide participants through the exercises and get the kind of answers you needed without influencing their input too much.
Use people in the room to help you out. it’s difficult (if not impossible) for one person to listen, write and organise all at the same time (unless you’re our founder, Mariana, whose brain works in nicely organised boxes!). Rely on participants to help you out clustering notes and doing some light cleaning up of the board as you go. You can also call on certain participants when you think their input is most relevant and important.
Play to your strengths and be yourself! Every facilitator will have a couple things they excel at. Plan your workshop around that, rather than trying to be something you’re not. Participants will notice if you’re confident or not.
