Discovering Your Brand’s Core
Effective brand development starts with diagnosis. Before making strategic decisions, you need a real understanding of how your brand is currently perceived by customers, prospects, and your own team.
My Brand Discovery and Customer Research services uncover the raw insights required to make confident decisions about your brand’s direction, distinctiveness, messaging, identity, and growth.
This phase is about surfacing truth, what your market actually thinks, what your team believes, and what is currently driving or blocking clarity and commercial outcomes.
Through primary research and structured analysis, the Brand Diagnostic service gives you evidence, not assumptions. It provides a strong foundation for an evidence based brand strategy.
A) Market Discovery
This phase reveals how your customers truly perceive your brand, surfaces your brand’s distinctiveness, and what is missing with your current market presence.
By understanding your brand through the eyes of your customers, you will gain crucial insights into:
- Your Perceived Value – Understand what your audience values in your brand.
- Your Product or Service – Surface common friction points, frustrations, unmet expectations, and strengths.
- Customer Purchase Drivers – Identify the real reasons customers choose you.
- Brand Differentiators -Diagnose whether your audience sees your brand as different or interchangeable, and on what basis.
- Customer Language – Capture the actual words and phrases your customers use when describing you.
The goal is not to validate assumptions, it is to find what is hidden. This phase gives you diagnostic clarity about how your brand currently lives in the minds of your market.
Workflow
Together we identify your ideal customers for interviews and run structured, recorded video calls to uncover how they perceive your brand.
As an external resource, I can ask questions your internal team can’t which uncovers honest, actionable insights. Each interview is summarised into a clear diagnostic report, revealing crucial insights about how your brand is perceived.
How It Works
We identify ideal customers to interview who best represent your target audience and can provide actionable insights.
I’ll conduct recorded, one-on-one video calls with these customers. These conversations are carefully structured to uncover their experiences with your brand, their needs, their language, and what truly drives their purchase decisions.
Following each interview (or a batch, depending on the package), you’ll receive clear and concise summaries highlighting the key takeaways, direct quotes, and actionable insights taken from the conversations.
This deliverable summarises customer information into an easily digestible format. Across multiple interviews, I identify overarching patterns, common pain points, and consistent language that contribute to your brand positioning, competitive knowledge, and perceived unique value.
B) Internal Discovery
Understanding how you and your team see your brand is as important as noting how the market sees you. This part of the diagnostic process captures your internal narrative; what your brand believes, where it came from, and how it’s currently being packaged and delivered.
This isn’t strategy. It’s reflection. And it ensures we’re working with real inputs, not assumptions or generic statements.
This service will uncover the foundational elements of your brand. Deliverables include:
- Brand Heritage – Uncover the key moments that shaped your company’s identity.
- Founder Story – Document the journey behind the brand, often lost over time.
- Working Brand Philosophy – Identify what values and behaviours actually show up in decisions and actions.
- Aspirations – Capture your long-term intent.
- Internal Market Perspectives – Hear how your team sees the market, the category, and the competition.
- Provisional Brand Narrative – A narrative that captures how your brand is currently understood internally.
.
Benefits
- Organisational Clarity – Understand the disconnects and alignment across your team’s view of the brand.
- Foundational Awareness – Capture the unspoken stories, beliefs, and motivations that shape your current brand.
- Customer Reality Check – See your brand as customers see it, warts and all.
- Onboarding Tool – Use session recordings and summaries to bring new hires up to speed with how customers currently see your brand.
The foundation for a strong, evidence-based brand strategy.
How I Do It
We’ll conduct recorded video calls (or multiple sessions, depending on the scope and team involvement) dedicated to exploring internal perceptions of your brand. I lead structured conversations, asking insightful questions designed to uncover the brand’s history, the brand’s core values, market insights, and future aspirations of the founder(s)/leader(s) and key team members.
Following the session(s), you’ll receive a comprehensive summary document capturing the key insights discussed including the brand heritage, founder story, core values, brand, and internal market perspectives. This document serves as a foundational reference point for all future brand development activities and lays the foundation to build the brand strategy upon.
Why Me?
What if I'm not sure about my brand's core values or vision? I wouldn’t even know what to say to you.
That’s normal. Most brands are making strategic decisions instinctively which is why I’ve built a framework that turns those instincts into clarity. The session feels like a relaxed conversation, but it’s designed to surface exactly what we need.
Will I be able to see the recordings of the customer interviews?
Yes, all Zoom video calls are recorded, and you will be given these recordings. It’s imperative we record these to reference during development of your brand strategy.
How long does the Market Discovery process typically take?
The timeline for Market Discovery depends on the number of customer interviews I do. During my history in brand consultancy, this usually gets completed between 1 – 3 weeks.
Do you include internal brand perception (e.g. employees, sales teams) in your diagnostics, or is it purely external-facing?
Yes, that is part of the internal discovery process. Both market discovery and internal discovery need to be used to create the most effective brand strategy.
I’m still unsure, is there any way we can test this on a small scale?
Yes. I offer a service where I do two customer interviews so you can see the value for your brand before committing to further interviews and brand development work. Get in touch and we will arrange this.