Brand Discovery

Brand Discovery

Upstream of every brief, identity, and content plan. Discovery answers four questions: who the brand is for, what they need, who else is competing for that need, and where the brand could plausibly stand that competitors do not.

When to use

• The very first phase of a new brand or website project
• Understanding an audience before any creative work begins
• Mapping competitors and category dynamics
• Surfacing the problem space the brand will operate in
• Generating positioning territories before brief or ideation
• When a creative brief was requested but the inputs are missing

When NOT to use

• The audience and category are already well-understood (jump to creative-brief or brand-ideation)
• Validating a specific design or feature with users (use usability-testing)
• Mapping the customer journey of an existing audience (use journey-mapping)
• Generating brand names or visual directions (use brand-ideation)

Required inputs

• The product, service, or organization being branded
• Whatever is already known about the audience and category (often very little)
• Access to existing materials (sales calls, support tickets, reviews, analytics)
• Any constraints (parent brand, regulatory, geographic)
• A timeline (a 1-week discovery looks different than a 6-week one)

The framework: 4 dimensions

Discovery covers four dimensions. Each has its own sources, methods, and outputs.

1. Audience