To me, the value of many brand agencies lies in their ability to distill difficult and often complex organisations into the simplest of words. This simplicity is the holy grail of consumer-facing communication; it doesn’t mean dumbing down, it means straightforward clarity for those unfamiliar with the message.
One popular tool of branding agencies is the Brand Wheel (or ‘Brand Essence Wheel’), which attempts to uncover the simple words through a systematic process. It works best with a mixed group of people who are relatively familiar with the brand or product in question.
Work from the outside in, firstly going around the outer wheel and listing single words that come into mind for each of the four questions (what it does, how I would describe it, how it makes me feel, how it makes me look). Second, go into the middle wheel and again work through the four questions, distilling your original words from the outer wheel into fewer (ideally 3-5 per quadrant). This then provides the basis for the inner wheel, where you summarise and prioritise the words from the middle wheel in fewer words. These words form the basis of your brand proposition.
Take this brand proposition as the building blocks for your communications, whether verbal, written or graphical. How can everything you do reflect these core words, and in turn provide a very focussed, very simple and very effective message to the consumer?
