Brand Strategy Workshop 2023

One of my biggest challenges is focusing. Not so much on the day-to-day tasks but rather to maintain a clear direction for the business as a whole.

Maybe you can relate.

Energy-draining days where all you do is wonder whether this is the right path. If you can maintain your excitement long-term. And if you should niche down (or go broad, maybe?)

In February, I sat down and spent a whole day going through an incredibly helpful blog post I found on Medium—on how to run a brand strategy workshop. 

Here are my outcomes:

Purpose

"To make learners smile."

That's what I'm here to do. And it feels great to now have a formulated purpose, whenever a podcast tells me to have one.

Vision

"To make entertainment part of all education."

That's the world I aspire to. That's the dream I want to see come to fruition through the work I do every day. When universities, online teachers, and educators of all sorts work entertainment into their materials as a natural part of the process, I've succeeded.

Values

"Fun. Simplicity. Ambition. Competence."

Those are 4 value words that need to flow through all my content. Fun learning, simple explanations, ambition to entertain, and rooted in deep competence.

Brand tagline

"Make the brain smile."

Close to my purpose, I know. But I love the idea of a smiling brain because it symbolizes ease, learning, and entertainment. If you can make someone's brain smile, you've managed to explain something in a natural and logical way that makes sense—and in a way that is fun and disarming.

I also worked on my Perfect Customer Avatar, a competitor analysis, marketing channels, and a few more areas.

The whole point of going through these exercises is to get clarity and to evaluate whether what you are doing right now is the right thing—held up against your future aspirations.

For the last couple of months, I've done a lot of sponsored software reviews on my YouTube channel, and that turns out to be misaligned with what I aim to do; to make learners smile.

So, I updated my channel banner to help me focus:

I'm back on track: To promote fun learning, empower educators to create entertaining and educational content and work on bridging the gap between dry academia and superficial social media.

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I can't recommend this enough. Do a brand strategy workshop for your own business, using the framework from Cojo.

A day of work—a year (at least) of a clear sense of direction.