Determining what the essence of your brand is starts with an intentional discovery effort that focuses on your company’s values to build a brand that will resonate with your target audience.

Brand discovery is a subjective process and one that GRAYBOX thoroughly enjoys sinking our teeth into. We relish any time when we can have a fundamental impact on a company, and what better path to doing so than with determining what a company’s brand is going to be.

To make the subjective more tangible, GRAYBOX leverages structure design thinking methodologies and exercises to align key stakeholders and ensure that we’re all speaking the same language. As consultants, brand discovery efforts involve a great deal of “human-to-human” translation — oftentimes people are saying the same thing, but sounding very different in their perspectives. Our primary job within brand discovery efforts is to draw out the common threads across everyone.

This process involves both in-person interactive workshops, as well as rapid prototyping sessions as a follow-up to move into documentation and visual exploration while things are still fresh. There isn’t a solution we provide to companies in which continuous involvement from all key stakeholders is more important. Maintaining alignment at each stage of the discovery effort is critical in keeping everything moving.

As we get to more and more fidelity around your brand positioning, voice and tone for content, and ultimately the visual identity, we move closer to the “aha!” moment in which everything gels together. GRAYBOX isn’t in the surprise business and this holds no truer than during brand discovery. Our goal is to delight our client-partners in the progress made at each checkpoint. At the end of the process, everyone should feel that the final brand is exactly what they had all been striving for all along.