Brand Orienteering Workshop

I was looking forward to the Brand Orienteering workshop which was hosted by Owen Stevens as I was working on A D&AD brief for the Body Shop, and although it was based around packaging design I felt that the workshop would help me to understand the Body Shop brand better.

I sadly missed the beginning of the workshop because my train mission from Crewe to Stockport was delayed by a cow on the line! On arriving late I explained the reason for my lateness to Owen, who was very helpful and gave me the information I had missed and a quick catchup on what he had been talking about.

Owen Stevens is the founder of Brand Orienteering Ltd and works with companies to understand branding and to create strong branding solutions. His workshop was interesting as it made you look at the brand as a personality, a character and to make associations as to how the character would behave and what their beliefs and thoughts would be. 

Working in groups we discussed a brand (Body Shop) and spoke about which character traits we believe the brand would have, choosing from 5 main categories, Trusted, Exciting, Leading, Sophisticated and Rugged, we chose sub words within these categories which we felt described the brand. This exercise made us look at the brand differently, allowing us to think inside the brand. After choosing the words which best described The Body Shop we were asked to think about their core values and compared these to the words we had chosen scoring them to find the strongest character category.

I found the workshop very helpful and I found that sometimes you become to involved in the details of the brief and lose the personality of the brand, whereas the workshop brought this to the forefront. We were each given a work sheet called the Brand Journey Planner which I will definitely use when working on future briefs to try and get inside the brand before I work on the details of the brief.