Discovery Playbook
The key ingredients for your brand story
Questions to answer before you rebrand, build a site, or create your investor deck.
Design is, at its core, fun. And when the opportunity comes for your team to design something for your firm or company, whether it be a website, a new logo, or your investor deck, the temptation is to dig right in. Someone will start collecting examples they admire, searching for good templates, or seeing what Claude might come back with. However, without agreement on the story underneath those designs, reviews turn into debates about personal taste, and the work goes through round after round of revisions because nobody shares a standard for judging it.
Spend the time on establishing your brand story first. When your team agrees on who you serve, how you’re different and how you want to be perceived, decisions about what works visually get easier and faster because you are aligned on the message they are there to convey.
How do you do this?
Get your key people (particularly the ones who will be most opinionated about the outcome) to answer questions about who you really are, what you bring to the market, who your audiences are, and why they should care. We typically have people answer on their own via email first, and then bring everyone together to discuss. Leaning in on where people differ are often where the best brand messages begin.
Once you have alignment on these questions, then it’s time to bring in a designer, firm, or even get your favorite AI involved. Your output will be much more aligned before a single color swatch is considered.
Part 1: The fundamentals
The first set of questions covers what you do, who you do it for and why it matters to them.
- What does your product or service do? Explain it as if you were speaking at a conference where most people understand your industry.
- Who is your target customer, and why?
- What keeps them up at night?
- How are customers finding out about you today?
- How do you make money, and who is the buyer?
- Who are the other core audiences for your story, such as investors, partners or future employees, and why do they matter?
- How do you decide which markets to expand into?
- In rank order, what are the five most important things people should know about you?
- What are the top five personality traits of your company? (A personality trait for Gatorade might be relentless. For Duracell, it might be reliable.)
- What is your mission statement?
- What are your core values?
- What are your biggest challenges and hurdles?
- What is driving this brand exercise now?
Why it matters for design
The ranked list of five things becomes the backbone of your messaging, and the personality traits become a brief for the visual identity. A company that describes itself as precise, calm and trustworthy should look very different from one that calls itself bold, fast and irreverent. The traits give designers a direction and give your team a way to evaluate concepts.
Part 2: Market positioning
A brand only stands out relative to the companies around it. The next set of questions defines your place in the market.
- Who do you consider your direct competition? List five to seven, with their websites.
- What do you do better than they do?
- What do they do better than you?
- What is your current reputation in the market, and how do you hope it will change in the next three years?
- How do you want to be perceived?
- If you had to choose one word to define what is unique about your product, what would it be?
- Can you complete a simple positioning statement? For [target customer], who [has this need], [your company] is the [category] that [key benefit], unlike [competitor or alternative].
Why it matters for design
Knowing how competitors look and sound tells you which visual conventions your category relies on, and where you have room to stand apart. The gap between your current reputation and the way you want to be perceived is often the clearest description of the job the new brand needs to do.
Part 3: A visual review
Finally, choose three to five companies in your space and rate each one from one to five on aesthetic, colors, attitude, voice and logo. Include companies you admire and companies you want to look nothing like.
Why it matters for design
Scoring specific attributes gives your team a shared vocabulary for visual preferences. “I like their colors, and their voice feels too casual for us” is far more useful feedback than “I like that one.” Reviewed alongside your answers to the earlier questions, the ratings show whether your visual preferences fit the story you want to tell.
Getting the most from the exercise
- Have several members of the leadership team answer the questions on their own before comparing notes. Differences in their answers are worth discussing early.
- Include people who talk to customers every day, such as sales and customer success leaders.
- Be honest about challenges and about what competitors do better. Candid answers lead to a sharper strategy.
- Keep the completed answers. They become a reference point for every brand decision that follows, from messaging to design reviews.
Companies that start with a clear brand story move through visual identity work faster, with fewer rounds of revision and more confidence in the result. The story gives everyone, from your leadership team to your design partner, the same standard for deciding what’s right.
