Following on from our communication and branding session last week we had another workshop with Alison. The purpose of this was hone our message and come to a united statment on what Busara should stand for. We spent about four hours in the workshop with some superb results at the end.

Step 1: Vision Brainstorm

To start the session myself and Kin were joined by the guys from Diamond who are stakeholders in the business. We started with a brainstorm answering the question:

“What do you want Busara to do/ be in 2011?” and then “We will get to this by being…”

The first question allowed us to come up with all of the things we are aspiring to, it was interesting to see the wide range of answers. I tended to put quite concrete outcomes e.g. have revenue of £5m, to work for 50 of the FTSE 100 companies, and have operating profits of £3m. Where as Jonny had more philosophical outcomes such as to be united and happy.

It was very interesting to see how aligned our vision for the business was. Luckily there were no real surprises and overall we were all on the same page.

The outcome we all came to was that we are in business so that: “We prosper and are happy”.

Step 2: Vision Statement

From the themes we had generated above we distilled it down into a vision statement. These are the guiding principles for the business what we are aspiring to. It outlines the strategy for the business and makes no guesses as to how we get there (tactics).

The themes that we all had in common were:

• Award winning/ recognition
• Happy/ fun place to work
• Personal growth for the team and ourselves
• Financial objectives for revenue and profits

From these we came up with:

“We want Busara to be a recognised, award winning agency that is a great place to work. A place that nurtures personal and financial growth.”

Step 3: Brand Values/ Culture

Using the vision statement and my having a look at our individual personalities from our last session we tried to draw out the key values for the business.

We came up with a list of values for the business that we want the business and us as owners to embody:

• Creative
• Inspiring
• Happy
• Challenging
• Thoughtful
• Expert

Step 4: Elevator Pitch

Finally we came back to the elevator pitch for the business. This time round we were much more productive and came up with a really concise statement:

“Busara is a creative led agency.
We believe in exceptional design with thoughtful technology.

We are experts in our field.
We produce engaging, elegant solutions to a range of clients that include global brands.”

In the end we decided to keep the reference to technology in the background as I believe that good technology should not be seen; it should just work seamlessly and effortlessly.

Conclusion

Since the workshop we have changed the third sentence to the one shown above, if you look at the image of the flip chart you can see the original one. After testing it with some people and clients the overall consensus was that the use of the word “problem” was not a good idea.

Overall we have come to a really good starting point that we can refine over time. The copy perhaps needs to be cleaned up by a copywriter but the core essence is in there.

This text will be used on static media such as our website, leaflets or brochures. When we talk about the business it will be less rigid and more conversational, but we will try and get across the key ideas which are:

• Creative agency
• Exceptional design
• Thoughtful technology
• Engaging and elegant solutions

Now we need to start living and talking about the brand values, we need to make sure that we embody them and talk about them. A good example of this is the Google philosophy where they really get people to display their values on t-shirts and always talk about what they believe in.
We are going make our values very prominent in the office and make a montage of our vision and values that we can put on the wall so that they are there to hold us to account every day, our client can see them and the people who work for us.

Now the hard work begins …