The 3 Hour Brand Sprint

Find your company's why with your team and have fun doing it.

I've recently been obsessed with the 3 hour brand sprint by Google Ventures, written by Jake Knapp. I'd like to thank Peggy, the Head of Communcations from Monk's Hill Ventures for introducing it to me. 

In 2013, when Jake joined Google Ventures, (GV), he began working with many startups in GV who were thinking about their brand for the first time, from designing logos, creating visual identities to naming their companies. Jake had a design background coming from Microsoft, Oakley and Google, but no branding expertise. He thought brand exercises bordered on being "a total waste of time". Two of Jake's colleagues in GV at the time, Laura Melahn and Daniel Burka, are brand experts. Laura helped name Calico and Daniel helped design the Firefox logo. 

Adapting the design sprint at GV for product and marketing challenges, the team placed key brand exercises into a 3 hour sprint format any team can use. Ideally you'd have a marketing stakeholder facilitate, and have a C-level stakeholder as a decision maker. Max team participation is 6 pax to keep the sprints nimble. Immediate benefits in running this sprint: this is a massive time and cost saver for startups that can't afford expensive brand agencies to do their brand work for them. Even for a mature technology startup, brand workshops and brand strategy documentation can take months and run into tens of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending which agency you work with. I’m thankful to GV and other folks in the tech startup ecosystem who have contributed to this open source documentation for other startups to run their brand sprints on an affordable scale.

Having run 2 of these brand sprints already, I can testify that the brand sprint has been extremely helpful in getting teams together to brainstorm on a company's what, how and why. Everyone gets to feel like they have contributed in shaping their company’s brand, which enables stakeholder buy-in. This sprint is also designed to be friendly to non-marketers, which means other teams like BD, product, tech, customer experience, etc can contribute meaningfully to the brand sprint without a marcomms or branding background.

I’ll focus on one core exercise from this sprint: Simon Sinek's Golden Circle, a classic framework used to define purpose. Deceptively simple, this is where teams would often get stuck at the longest, for up to an hour or more, so be prepared to allocate extra time for this. Sinek wrote a whole book on “Find Your Why” so trying to condense an entire book into a 5 minute instructional brief during the sprint can be challenging. The best way to illustrate Simon’s Golden Circle is with real life examples. Jake and Simon used iconic brand examples such as Nike and Apple.

At the core of these iconic brands, the values and purpose of these companies are driven by the passion to make the world a better place. There is a strong ethos of social impact to create value. Apple’s core value of honoring those who “think different” still resonates to this day in their iconic 1997 branding campaign which featured change makers such as Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali. The campaign was a massive success and later went onto win a 1998 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial. In his speech, Jobs talks about Nike’s commercials honoring great athletics and honoring great athletes:

Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign won the 2019 Emmy for the same category. Notice the Nike brand narrative which Job references in his 1997 speech, still very much alive 23 years later:

Mars, a family owned American global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products (and the 6th largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes), shared this 2020 perspective on purpose:

A growing number of companies are adopting "purpose" as a way to leverage brands as a force for social impact. As we move into 2020, the point of difference on purpose marketing will be demonstrating meaningful, measurable difference; and not just talking about it. As the practice grows increasingly common, consumers will be quick to spot a company that appears to say a lot but do little.

Purpose-driven marketing and advertising is one piece of the puzzle, but it's not where purpose starts. At Mars, we believe purpose must be genuinely embedded in the roots of a business and should be a filter which informs all decision-making, and a measure of our overall success. For example, Pedigree has placed its goal of ending pet homelessness at the heart of the brand's meaning, seeking to find loving homes for all domesticated pets and hopefully drive growth for the brand along the way. We have set tangible goals to deliver against this purpose, such as finding five million shelter dogs a loving home each year, and are taking active steps to create a better world for pets.

People take precedence over technology

While the hype for new and emerging technologies won't stop in 2020, we're seeing failures and successes in implementation that mean we need to remember this: to make technology work for us, we have to put people first.

AI, automation and machine learning are still only as "good" as the humans that are using it. On their own, these tools are overrated in their ability to transform a business. Humans will be at the heart of everything; it's only when people embrace these digital capabilities that we ourselves can deliver value at speed.

Companies will always be in business because of its customers, not because of its tech. As Sinek famously said:

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.