Absolutely not. The results may help determine if your brand identity/logo is truly reflective of your brand and proposition, but we don’t start with that assumption. In our long experience of working with founder-led brands, we know that the majority of businesses are not fully leveraging their brands – even when they know the importance of brand to customer engagement. The reason for this is both a lack of understanding around what ‘brand’ is, and a lack of structure for evaluating their own brand. That’s what Brand Anatomy addresses.

Nope. One of the biggest misconceptions about ‘brand’ is that it’s all about the logo. Brand is all about the associations and expectations someone might have with regards to a business and its products or services. So if you’re just starting your business, you already have a brand – because you, as a founder, already have associations and expectations about what your business will offer and how it will operate. Understanding the connection between business and brand is a great way to accelerate growth through improved focus and deeper engagement with your target audiences.

Brand Anatomy addresses symptoms we see across all types of business, at different stages of growth and development. The start-up that wants rapid growth; the SME that’s struggling for bandwidth to market and promote their themselves; the scale-up that’s losing focus due to rapid expansion; and the big businesses with cracks appearing in their team cohesion following a buy-out, or acquisition.

That’s why we offer three different levels of access to Brand Anatomy. SLT is for leadership teams of SMEs, COHORT is for larger organisations and our 1-1 Clinics are aimed at helping start-ups and SMEs.

Brand Anatomy SLT is aimed at leadership teams, with ideally no more than 10 people. Depending on the size of the organisation, we may recommend second and even third workshops with attendees from across the workforce.

The point of Brand Anatomy is to derive an honest reflection of how the brand is perceived by those responsible for upholding it. Because if they don’t know what the brand is, their target audiences won’t either. That leads to confusion, lack of confidence, poor cultural alignment and a lost of wasted time and effort.

So, we start with the SLT, but might suggest we take a wider look across the business too.

CEOs and MDs exist to lead. Their very presence influences the actions and behaviours of those around them. That’s not what we want in a Brand Anatomy workshop. We need everyone to feel enabled to share their insights, thoughts and opinions, and simply put, they won’t do that if the CEO is sat there.

CEOs and MDs should welcome this though. The results of the workshops pinpoint where there are both agreements and friction in their organisation, providing a measurable basis for remedial actions thereafter.

It’s typically a little more than two hours, but we try to bring it in under three. The workshops consist of a number of exercises designed to get attendees thinking about their brand rather than their business, and reflect on what that brand means to those working with it, or benefitting from it. The exercises have been refined over the course of dozens of workshops, to focus on those that deliver the most powerful insights. They look at brand personality, motivators, attitudes and the effects on end users.

Discussion follows each exercise to look at why certain options were chosen, and hear accounts or evidence to back them up. All of this information is collected and processed into the final report and recommendations.

After the workshop you’ll receive a comprehensive report. This details the results of each exercise, along with analysis explaining what it might mean for your brand. Finally, all of this insight is brought together in a description of your brand for both internal and external audiences and including your value proposition. We compare that to how your brand is currently presented. The missed opportunity for your business lies in the difference between the two, and we provide recommendations for how to address those.

For Brand Anatomy COHORT – which surveys your entire workforce – we gain hard data on how your brand is perceived across your organisation, but by asking respondents to (anonymously) let us know their age range, gender, time with business and seniority, we can identify specifically where alignments and tensions exist, enabling SLT to target actions to address these.

That’s entirely up to you. EllisJames is able to support you in addressing the action plan we propose, but there’s absolutely no obligation to do that. Brand Anatomy was born out of a desire to enable effective reporting on the state of an organisation’s brand – like revenue, turnover, productivity, profit margins etc. The way to do that is turn insight into data.

That’s what the core Brand Anatomy assessment is all about: giving you a baseline score against which you can measure the effectiveness of the actions you take to address the report’s findings.

Founders, start-ups and smaller SMEs don’t always have an SLT to run a workshop with. Often, they are solely in charge of their brand and personally and emotionally invested with its well-being.

The symptoms they often suffer with include lack of bandwidth, so want to be able to focus more effectively on a narrower range of prospects; low confidence around what ‘brand’ is and in particular, what their brand is all about; and poor perspective (being so personally invested in the business), so they don’t know when they’ve ‘got it right’.

A one-to-one structured conversation helps them download, and for Si to start giving them some clarity on what their brand is, what its proposition is, and where and how the business might best focus its efforts.

Absolutely. As a small, specialist team of brand, design and content professionals, we represent a high-value, cost-effective strategic partner, supporting brands across the board from brand identity to audience engagement.