Brand Discovery FAQs: Finding the Story Behind Your Brand

Why can’t we just start designing?

You can—but you may end up designing around assumptions.

It’s easy for a leadership team to say, “We know who we are.” The harder question is whether employees, customers, members, donors, or other stakeholders would describe the organization the same way. The recent issues Cracker Barrel had when they tried to redesign their stores and logo (to become more modern) could have been avoided. Brand discovery doesn’t tell a company like Cracker Barrel that it can never change; it tells the company what it must not accidentally change. 

Brand discovery replaces some of those assumptions with research. The process combines stakeholder interviews, brand audits, SWOT analysis, competitor research, trend analysis, and behavioral data. 

That means when the design process begins, there is a reason behind the choices being made. You can’t please everyone when rebranding, but one goal is to avoid accidentally upsetting everyone and losing millions in the process. 

Who should participate in brand discovery?

Usually more people than just the marketing department should participate in brand discovery.

Leadership is important, but employees, customers, members, donors, partners, and other stakeholders often see parts of the organization that leadership doesn’t. Interviews and collaborative workshops can uncover strengths, frustrations, and perceptions that otherwise never make it into the branding conversation.

The objective isn’t to let everyone design the brand; it’s to gather enough perspectives to see it from all angles and truly understand it.

What are you trying to learn in stakeholder interviews?

One of the most useful questions is: Why does this organization matter?

Different people will answer that differently. Those conversations can reveal recurring ideas about the organization’s strengths, personality, reputation, history, and value.

Often the most interesting discoveries are things an organization has come to take for granted. Something employees consider ordinary may be precisely what customers value most. 

Recently, Gap clothing store spent years trying to figure out if it should become more fashion-forward, but its customers already had a fairly clear idea of what Gap was. Gap was where you bought dependable American casual basics—jeans, khakis, T-shirts, sweatshirts, denim jackets, and kids’ clothes. When the company began rediscovering and modernizing that existing identity rather than replacing it, sales started growing again.

Does brand discovery include looking at our competitors?

Yes. You can’t determine what makes your organization distinctive without understanding the landscape around it.

Competitor research examines how similar organizations position themselves, what they emphasize, how they communicate, and where there may be opportunities to stand apart. Trend forecasting can identify both gaps in the current market and changes that could affect the brand in the future. 

The purpose isn’t to imitate competitors. It’s to avoid sounding and looking exactly like them, which could create confusion and affect sales.

How does data fit into something as subjective as branding?

Branding involves judgment and creativity, but it shouldn’t rely entirely on everyone’s opinion.

Analytics can show how people actually behave: what content attracts attention, what audiences engage with, where visitors enter and leave a website, and which messages appear to generate action.

Combine those quantitative signals with the qualitative information gathered through interviews and workshops, and the result is a brand strategy informed by both what people say and what they actually do.

Do we need brand discovery if we’re not changing our name or logo?

Absolutely. In fact, brand discovery can potentially reveal that a new logo isn’t what you need.

An organization may have a perfectly good visual identity but unclear messaging, inconsistent positioning, or different departments communicating in completely different voices. As content gets added by different people to the website and to social media and in advertising—and often rapidly—it can be difficult to remain consistent in the best of circumstances, but especially so when the visual identity was never firmly established in the first place. 

Brand discovery can provide the strategic foundation for improving those areas without throwing away an identity that already has value.

What comes out of the brand discovery process?

The most important result isn’t a new logo or typography or color schemes. It’s clarity.

A brand discovery engagement can establish audience personas, positioning, key differentiators, brand voice, SWOT findings, and visual direction. Together, those elements create a strategic roadmap that can guide everything that follows—from website copy and design to advertising, social media, and content marketing. 

When should an organization consider brand discovery?

Brand discovery is particularly valuable before a rebrand, website redesign, major marketing initiative or organizational change. It can also be useful following a merger, leadership transition, expansion into a new market, or when an organization realizes that its current brand no longer reflects what it has become.

Before asking “What should our new brand look like?”, it’s worth answering the more important question:

“Who are we now, and why should anyone care?”

That’s where brand discovery begins.

Learn more about New Target’s brand discovery services.