Our first step to creating brand guidelines - Brand sprint

In the previous blog of this series, I’ve written about ‘Why did we decide to rebrand?’. Read our previous blog here.

When I was interviewing for Saeloun, I asked about the meaning of the company name and why it was chosen. Later I found out that a lot of us had the same question and were keen to understand the meaning of Saeloun and its identity. We realized that we needed to first define the brand identity and for that, a brand sprint seemed like a good start. We followed google ventures’ 3-hour brand sprint for this.

What is a brand sprint?

“A brand sprint is an expressive exercise that helps turn ideas about your brand into a defined brand image. A brand sprint can help your company find its place in the competitive landscape.” Source

It is a set of exercises compiled together and used at Google ventures, to help brands make decisions about naming, identity, logos, and so on.

It consists of the following exercises:

  1. 20-Year Roadmap which helps us think long-term while creating our brand identity
  2. What, How, Why which helps us understand why the company exists.
  3. Top 3 Values makes the why more specific.
  4. Top 3 Audiences helps us prioritize the target for our brand.
  5. Personality Sliders defines the attitude and style of our brand.
  6. Competitive Landscape compares our brand to other companies.

How we conducted our virtual brand sprint?

We scheduled a zoom meeting and all stakeholders were invited. I created a FigJam board for this and added everyone to it. For those who are not familiar with FigJam, it is an online collaborative whiteboard where multiple participants can work together and see each other’s inputs. This way, everyone could work collaboratively and can stay on the same page. We also timed each exercise so that we don’t go past the scheduled time. The most important factor for this to work is the presence of all major stakeholders. Fortunately, everyone was available for this activity and actively participated in it. This was a great exercise to get all stakeholders on the same page and arrive at a collective understanding of the brand.

Screenshot from one of the exercises

What did we derive from this session?

  • Our company’s priorities for the coming years are to keep evolving, focus on internal projects, set better team culture, work on blogs & books, create videos and podcasts
  • Our top 3 values and beliefs are: Being transparent, Growth-oriented & Practical
  • Our top audiences are Rails developers, startups, and enterprise clients
  • Our personality traits are elite, playful (but elegant), rebel, friendly & young, and innovative
  • Most of our competitors have modern and expressive identities

With this great start, it seemed exciting to work and develop the brand identity and culture. Read on to find out how we proceeded with these insights to work on the visual identity in the next blog.

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