The Value of Discovery: Overcoming the pitfalls of an assumption-based brand strategy
There are two paths you can take when building a brand strategy:
- To base your strategy on what you think you know.
- To base your strategy based on an identified human truth.
As you would expect, both come with different time frames. In an increasingly time-precious and solutions-minded industry, it is tempting to adopt a solution-first mindset.
When you have GenAI platforms and years of industry experience at your disposal, it is perfectly understandable as to why clients might think this is a suitable course of action. You can now build solutions at speed, led by “informed” hypotheses. These shortcuts may help with efficiency, but they may also seriously impact the effectiveness of your work.
No matter how experienced your team is, how successful your previous strategies are, or how expansive the data set feeding your AI platforms is, assumptions about customer behaviour, market dynamics and brand perception have not been properly validated. They could be outdated or simply incorrect. This is where Discovery is critical. It is not about delaying; it is about fortifying and future proofing your strategy. Abandoning assumptions through the deployment of rigorous, objective customer research
At The Team Discovery is foundational to our consultancy offer. It is the critical first step to building considered, impactful and lasting strategies for our clients.
The hidden cost of assumptions in your brand strategy
Assumptions allow business to move quickly from problems to solutions. They feel safe because they're based on accumulated knowledge and past experience. But this efficiency comes at an enormous cost.
When you do this within your strategy, you stop listening to your customers. The notion of business to business is a bit of a misnomer. Fundamentally what we are always trying to do is connect humans to humans. To build those connections, you need to properly engage with and understand your customers.
- Understand the emotional and rational motivations that drive their purchasing decisions.
- Understand the reasons behind their brand affinity.
- Recognise the market dynamics that matter most to them.
- Identify who your most valuable customer group is.
Investing time, resources and money in a strategy that lacks foundational research exposes a business to major commercial and reputational risks.
This is common pattern of behaviour. Technology brands that champion their functionality or technical features only to ignore the emotional needs of their customer, or legacy brands that believe their brand equity lies in their heritage only to uncover that they are appealing to a dwindling customer segment.
A typical new product development process requires intensive research and testing. Yes, this is in part to comply with regulatory requirements. But this practise of diligence is what we should all be aspiring to in brand strategy.
Why? We see brand strategy as interconnected with business strategy. Brand is a critical lever through which to activate your business strategy and ultimately achieve your business objectives.
The research that shapes the strategy must reflect real market and customer realities.
The role of critical thinking in research
With the advent of large language models, this Discovery component could be automated. But Ai-generated insights are informed by past patterns, not data about your current customers. They are trained on what worked well for other brands, under different circumstances.
AI is an effective tool for synthesising and collating large swathes of research. This is indisputable. As a preliminary research tool, it is invaluable.
But it lacks human intuition. The formula for what makes an effective brand proposition is quite simple:
- It speaks to a recognised and critical customer need.
- It champions a business’s ownable and credible point of difference.
This comes from looking beneath the factual data presented to you. This is exactly what qualitative workshops achieve. Effective Discovery requires human judgement to know which questions to ask, the emotional intelligence to understand the implication of a response and human intuition to be able to form an insight from a series of factual answers.
To understand human motivations, you need a human in the room.
Inside-out meets outside-in thinking
An effective brand strategy is informed by a combination of inside-out and outside-in thinking.
- Inside-out thinking comes from internal business insights – about your strengths, weaknesses, values and genuine differentiators.
- Outside-in thinking comes from external market and customer insights – about purchase criteria, customers behaviour and macro trends.
Inside out thinking gives your strategy credibility – basing it on a promise and purpose you can practically deliver against. Outside thinking makes your strategy impactful – identifying the tangible wants and needs of your customers to influence how you design and promote your solutions and services
Discovery helps to unveil where these two strands interconnect. In short, it reveals the unique formula for your brand proposition – where genuine organisational strengths serve genuine customer needs.
Without Discovery, you risk resorting to purely inside-out thinking. Delivering solutions that validate internal hypotheses but that are neither resonant nor relevant to your customers.
Introducing Sign-up for a Team Brand Vision Camp Bootcamp
At the Team, we believe Discovery is essential to unlocking meaningful strategies – building the right the foundations for long-term growth and business transformation.
Brand Vision Camp is a proprietary workshop methodology we have developed to help our clients objectively and forensically unpack their business as a brand – what they stand for today and their vision for the future.
If you are interested in learning how to imagine a new vision and strategy for growth, contact us at hello@theteam.co.uk
