What is Brand Ideation?

Brand ideation is a critical and formative step in the development of a brand strategy. At its core, brand ideation is about defining the promise the brand will make to the market. It’s the phase where the foundational essence of a brand is conceived, shaped, and articulated.

Of Blind Men and Elephants

Ideation is important because it helps organizations overcome the problem of The Blind Men and the Elephant, a parable that illustrates how different people, experiencing only a part of the whole, misinterpret the nature of the elephant based on their limited perspective. This lack of a cohesive view mirrors what can happen when different stakeholders in an organization each have their own idea of what a brand should promise. Without a unified understanding, the brand becomes fragmented and inconsistent, leading to confusion and a diluted identity, much like the blind men's disparate descriptions of the elephant.

Your Brand is Your Promise

A promise (any promise) has three parts: Behavior, expression and experience. What are you going to provide, and what will you do internally to make sure you can deliver? How will you communicate the benefit of what you’re going to do? And finally, how will your promise be received?

Brand ideation establishes answers to all these questions. 

Brand Behavior: Ideation helps translate the brand promise into actionable principles that guide how the brand interacts with the world, through customer service, partnerships, product design, and internal culture. In essence, it sets the tone for the brand's personality, values and conduct across all touchpoints.

Brand Expression: Brand ideation serves as the precursor to the development of a brand’s written, spoken, and visual language. Once the core promise and behavioral guidelines are clearly defined, they inform the creation of the brand’s messaging, tone, and visual identity. Every word, every image, every interaction is a reflection of the brand's core value, ensuring coherence and alignment across all platforms and mediums. Ideation documents the visible part of the promise and guides the development of brand identity.

Brand Experience: Your customers’ experiences are influenced by what you say about your brand, how you are different from your peers, and the value you provide – relative not only to what you charge, but also your competition. These factors define the position you occupy in the mind of your prospect, and if you don’t manage them with intention, your position will be assigned to you by your competitors.

In some circles, ideation is thought of primarily as a step in the design process, but it’s actually a strategic function that covers the whole spectrum of brand development. Broadly, brand ideation is a product of executive workshops, internal fact-finding, customer research, competitive analysis and creative brainstorming. The result is a guidance document that allows your design team to dive immediately into the work of creating a brand identity that positions you where you want to be, and supports management in reinforcing cohesiveness throughout the whole organization. 

In short, brand ideation is the spark that ignites a brand’s entire strategic development process. It ensures that the brand promise is more than just a marketing concept, but becomes the guiding principle for everything the brand does and says.