Step 1: Research & Discovery

Welcome back

If you missed the first email in the campaign, you can view that here — it’ll provide a bit context for the entire series!

This week we are talking about the first step in designing a brand: Research & Discovery!

The goal is to understand the landscape at large, where your unique business fits in and where it could stand out.

At this stage we are conducting user-interviews with your team, customers, and any other key stakeholders. We want to know what people think of your business and more specifically how they feel when they think about your brand.

This week, we’re going to guide you through our process, providing tips and tools and even some examples of the power of investing in this first step. 

Brand Design for Bold Businesses: Research with Intention

When we start the research and discovery phase, we try to start wide and then narrow it in. This means starting by looking at the competitive landscape. What are the current trends? Who is making in roads on the problem you’re solving? How are they positioning themselves? How are they talking about the problems and solutions? Your competitors, especially your bigger competitors, are trying to answer similar questions — it’s good to know the conclusions they’ve drawn.

From there, we map out the different positions in the market and where we see opportunity gaps, core differences in product, and even core differences in what the actual problems are.

After we have a broad understanding of the industry at large, and where obvious gaps exists (not in product — presumably your business exists because you already knew where the product gap was) in positioning, we dive into your data.

This data comes in many forms — it can be user-interviews with key customers, team interviews, partner interviews, social media audit, sales & marketing material audit, consumer insight data, etc. We want to understand if there is deep alignment on things, if there is a misalignment on others. We also want to see if your positioning is consistent and meeting the gaps in the market at large.

From this internal and external data, as well as knowing your larger grown goals, we present various positionings that your brand could take!

Some questions to ask/research during this step:

• What do you think of when you think of our company? - ask this to users & team members

• What problem(s) are we solving?

• What do our competitors claim the problem is? What is their solution?

• How do we talk about the problem internally? How do we talk about it on our website? In social media?

• What is our current social media content? Who are our followers?

• How do people come to our website?

• What trends do we see in our industry? Why?

• How do users talk about their problems?

• How do users feel when they think about this problem?

• How doe us solving the problem make them feel?

Story Time

One of the most interesting rebrands of the last few year is Abercrombie & Fitch.

As a millennial teen, A&F were everything. The stores were dark and the models were hot and for a clothing brand, wearing very little clothing. It was also intentionally exclusive with their CEO saying in 2006:

And in the early 2000s this strategy was effective — this was the same era of young women in media being roasted wildly unfairly and an obsession with thinness. From 1996 to 2007, their market cap grew from nearly $0.84B to capping out at $6.77B in 2007.

Then from 2010 through 2022, this strategy failed. Hard. The market had changed dramatically and consumer, especially the young women A&F were targeting, were growing up and sick of being told they weren’t good enough. And their market cap reflected this failure to adapt to the new market. By 2022, their market cap had fallen to $1.12B even with the meteoric rise in e-commerce due to the pandemic.

Today? In 2024, just 2 years later, their market cap is at $6.70B almost matching their hey day of 2007 and making up the gains of nearly 20 years. And how did they have the pivot of all pivots?

They invested in understanding their market and overhauling their entire positioning strategy.

Long gone are the days of fierce exclusion, Abercrombie & Fitch is for everyone. Get in loser, we’re going shopping.

TLC Brand Bites: Things to think about during Research & Discovery

• Hope to be surprised in your research. The goal is find nuance and new opportunities — it’s hard to do that with the same information you had at the start of the process.

• Contradiction isn’t bad. Most things are neither black nor white. Great branding can play in the grey.

• You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If all of your competitors are using a certain phrasing, there might be a reason.

• There isn’t one magical position to take. There will probably be a few that could work. But you have to choose which makes the most sense for you.

• Your brand should evolve — what connects today won’t connect in 10 years. That’s okay. Your betting on tomorrow, not 15 years years from tomorrow.

Final Thoughts

I wish we could say that with enough research and discovery, you will have guaranteed success. But there is no guarantee in business.

But that’s not the goal. The goal is to make more informed decisions. To better understand the market, your customers, your team and to have an idea of how to communicate and reach them all.

Your idea is 1% of your success. The execution is the other 99% (definitely not our quote but we do deeply believe this).

Your research is only a part of your potential success. The execution is the rest.

In next week’s Brand Design Deep Dive we are talking about how you take all of this fabulous data you’ve collected and actually start designing your brand.