How To Run a Brand Workshop & What To Consider First

One of our core beliefs at Overpass is that we're all creative, that is to say that creativity isn't something you have or don't have, but something that you can find for yourself. Much of our business model, in fact, looks to create spaces in which teams can come together and unlock their ideas, providing our designers with the foundational knowledge needed to make timeless work.

We call our spaces "workshops" and "sprints", and in this article we're exploring what you should consider when looking to run one of your own, from format and format to the branding exercises that give you something to actually build from.

A successful brand workshop serves as a collaborative sprint where key stakeholders align on a company's identity, mission, and long-term direction. Brand workshops help create a solid foundation for ongoing branding work by ensuring input from stakeholders who can impact brand performance. And when they're done well, they allow businesses to identify key elements of their brand, understand what resonates with their audience, and clarify any misalignments with their goals.

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Five things to consider before running a brand workshop

1: Online or in-person?

We like to push the boundaries with creative and collaborative online tools, but that doesn't mean we exist only in the cloud. We take the best of both worlds, make them our own, and teach creativity in the hybrid world.

With new digital whiteboard tools such as Figma or Miro, you're now able to host brand strategy workshops with companies you could never reach in person. They're great brainstorming and ideation tools, allowing teams to get ideas onto the page and into a shared domain. 

With "in-the-cloud" functions, they have the added benefit of being live forever, meaning you can revisit discussions long after the session has finished, keeping your clients involved and engaged well beyond the workshop day itself.

These tools also allow you to quickly set up exercises you've used previously and pull together information from all across the web. Not only does this speed up your process, but it means you can go through your competitors, understand your customer touch points, and breathe new life into your value proposition, all without the need for a printer and physical sticky notes. 

When it is possible to meet in person, we still use these tools, getting all the benefits of the digital space whilst being able to converse face-to-face rather than on a video call.

To help you get started, we've compiled a workshop template and guide for all those looking to run a brand workshop here.

2: Who should join a brand workshop?

It can be tempting to invite your whole team, but we've found our brand workshops run best when there are 3-8 people around the table. Avoid excessive participants: too many attendees can lead to clutter and indecision. Here's who you'll need.

• Design team: Brand strategist, lead designer, copywriter.
• Brand team: Founder/CEO, key stakeholders.

A brand strategist's role is to run you through each of the tasks, ensuring not only that you keep to time, but encouraging key areas of discussion for growth. The lead designer takes all of the insights back to the team of creatives who will shape the look and feel of your future brand identity.

Where you're looking for those key language cues and questioning the nuances of your offerings, a copywriter helps ensure that your messaging is consistent and authentic to your brand's mission. From the brand side, anyone with a significant role in the development and structure of your business is a safe bet for attendance, you're after the members of your team who won't shy away from voicing honest opinions about your business and its direction.

There's no wrong answer here. Including a diverse range of participants from different departments in a brand workshop can provide unique insights and perspectives that contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the brand. Bring your most engaging teammates to the table and ensure there's a range of views from different departments.

3: How long should the workshop be?

Brand strategy workshops can be fairly intensive, requiring concentration and careful thought across all areas of your brand. We prefer to host them towards the beginning of the week and the start of the day, trying to catch teams when they're at their freshest.

Workshops can take anywhere from 2 to 8 hours, and it's often beneficial to break longer sessions into two smaller ones to maintain engagement and productivity. 

We'll always split our sessions with a cup of tea halfway. If you're leading the session, mix up the exercise formats, switching between presenting ideas to the stakeholders and hands-on branding exercises. Make sure you know how long each section of the workshop should take and set timers as you go along.

The key to leading a great workshop is knowing when people are going down a rabbit hole, politely stepping in, and bringing the conversation back on track.

4: How to set it up?

Whether it's a phone call, an introduction email, or a pre-workshop survey, we've found it invaluable to start discussions with key team members prior to a group workshop. These conversations will help you build out the relevant exercises and strategy without chasing loose ends.

Preparation for a brand workshop often requires one to two hours for every hour spent in the room. You can expect to spend time looking into a brand's competition, planning the timings, and setting up creative exercises. Whilst both Miro and Figma are relatively self-explanatory, we like to send each participant an introduction video to the platforms using Loom.

Organizing a brand workshop involves identifying the workshop's purpose, creating an invite list of key stakeholders, choosing a facilitator, and selecting appropriate branding exercises to achieve the workshop's goals. Setting clear objectives for a workshop is critical to its success, including defining what it must achieve in either messaging or positioning.

5: How to break the ice?

On top of a video explaining the platforms, we like to send participants a short 2–5 minute exercise or video to watch pre-workshop. The goal is to get people thinking about brand strategy so we can hit the ground running. We like videos such as this.

On the day of the workshop, ensure you've sent the correct link and timings to each participant. We start with a quick introduction to everyone before explaining the key aims and why brand strategy matters. If everyone has done their homework, you should be ready to jump straight in.

How to actually run a brand workshop (B2B & SaaS teams)

Once you've decided on format, attendees, and structure, the next step is to guide people through a clear journey: from raw ideas to concrete decisions you can design from. Below is the structure we use with B2B and SaaS teams, aligned with how we plan websites, messaging, and content in our client work.

Start with goals, not logos

Before you open a Figma or Miro board, ground everyone in why you're there. A strong brand strategy doesn't start with visuals; it starts with clarity on where the business is going.

• Clarify the business goals for the next 6-12 months: revenue targets, product milestones, fundraising, hiring, or market expansion. 
• Agree on what "success" looks like for your brand identity: better clarity of offer, more qualified SQLs, higher demo-to-close rates, or smoother sales conversations. Capture these on your board so every later decision (positioning, messaging, visual elements) can be traced back to a concrete outcome.

A simple exercise: ask each stakeholder to write down their top two goals silently, then cluster and vote. This "Note-and-Vote" process allows participants to map out long-term goals for the company and encourages quieter individuals to contribute, surfacing misalignment quickly and giving you an agreed north star for the rest of the session.

Map the customer journey and key touchpoints

For B2B SaaS, your brand is experienced across a long journey, not just on your homepage. Your target audience doesn't encounter you once, they evaluate you across multiple moments before they ever speak to sales.

• Map the end-to-end journey: awareness, consideration, evaluation, trial/demo, onboarding, expansion. 
• Layer key touchpoints on top: paid ads, LinkedIn content, landing pages, sales decks, product UI, onboarding emails, help docs, events, and newsletters. 
• Ask: "What do we want people to think, feel, and do at each stage?" and "Where do we lose them today?"

This creates a shared view of where design and content can have the biggest impact. Creating audience personas helps in narrowing down the target market by brainstorming possible audience types and refining them to the top three. A fun fact about personas is that even a few exercises like this can reveal significant gaps in how a business thinks about its customers. 

It will directly inform which assets you prioritise after the workshop.

Define positioning and proof

With a shared journey in place, you can shift into sharpening how you show up in the market. This is where brand positioning and brand identity start to lock into place.

• Clarify who you're really for: segment by role, industry, company size, and maturity, and focus on your highest-value customer profile. 
• Articulate your core positioning: problem, category, point of view, and your main point of difference. 
• Collect proof: customer logos, case studies, ROI stats, testimonials, and product outcomes that can be used across your website and sales collateral.

We'll often run exercises like "Why us, why now?" or "Kill the jargon" to strip away internal language and get to clear, buyer-centric statements. The "Golden Circle" exercise is another firm favourite. It helps define what the business does, how it operates, and the reasons it exists beyond profit, giving your brand's characteristics a solid foundation that attendees understand and can act on.

Shape your messaging and narrative

Once your positioning is set, turn it into on-the-page language your team can actually use. Your brand voice is shaped here, and it's one of the most valuable outputs of a well-run interactive session.

• Draft a simple narrative arc: a short story that connects your customer's pain points, your product, and the change you help them create. 
• Write headline-level messages for key moments in the journey: homepage hero, product overview, feature sections, pricing, sales email openers. 
• Sense-check your tone: does it sound like you, and does it match how you want to show up: confident, pragmatic, or playful but still credible?

The cocktail party exercise is particularly useful at this stage. It involves imagining your brand persona as a person at a party, helping to explore its brand personality and how it interacts with customers and competitors. 

Popular adjectives from this exercise often form the backbone of a simple messaging guide you can roll out later. A copywriter in the room is invaluable here: they can spot the phrases that feel true and scalable, capturing personality traits that reflect your brand building goals and can be applied consistently across channels.

Translate insights into content and design requirements

Whilst it's fresh in your mind, jot down the key learnings and insights you think might move your brand forwards. Maybe it was a core human truth you uncovered about your industry. Or perhaps you decided the visual elements don't reflect your values?

Turn insights into a prioritised list of assets: website pages, social templates, sales decks, fundraising decks, product one-pagers, event collateral. For each item, capture what it needs to communicate, who it is for, and where it sits in the customer journey. 

Note any technical requirements or constraints (CMS, Webflow components, integrations, data availability) so you can scope the work accurately afterwards. Conducting a brand audit during a workshop allows participants to evaluate the brand's performance in the marketplace, identifying strengths and areas for improvement that feed directly into this list.

A brand persona exercise at this stage helps define the personality, tone of voice, and values of a brand, fostering a more relatable connection with the target audience, and making it much easier for designers to translate the session's outputs into a coherent visual identity.

Decide who owns what after the workshop

As the workshop remains online forever, remind your team that they can continue to populate the space with new ideas, or even points they may have felt too nervous to share on the day. To avoid your workshop living and dying inside a Miro board, assign clear ownership before everyone leaves the room.

• Nominate a workshop owner: typically the brand strategist or marketing lead, responsible for turning the raw board into a tidy summary. 
• Assign workstreams, for example, "Website strategy and IA", "Messaging and decks", "Product marketing content", "Visual identity refinements." 
• Agree the cadence for follow-ups: weekly status calls, Slack check-ins, or monthly brand strategy workshops if you're running an ongoing design partnership.

Regular brand workshops can help maintain brand consistency, identify opportunities for improvement, and address issues such as decreased employee or customer engagement, so this structure is worth revisiting, not just as a one-off event. 

Internal buy-in is crucial for the success of brand workshops: involving a diverse group of stakeholders and gathering their feedback helps identify misalignments between the brand's current perception and its desired identity, which is essential for achieving real, lasting change.

How Overpass can support your brand workshops

If you'd like support turning your workshop outcomes into real momentum, our team can step in to help. Overpass combines web, brand, and content design expertise for B2B and SaaS businesses; so you're not left staring at a Miro board wondering what to do next.

We use brand workshops just like this to inform visual identity, website design, and ongoing branded content: from sales decks and launch campaigns to paid ads and social templates. Because we work as a fractional design partner, you get access to a senior team who already understand the B2B SaaS landscape and can move quickly without heavy briefing.

If you're ready to run your first workshop, we can help you design the session, facilitate it with your key stakeholders, and then translate the outputs into a clear roadmap of design and content deliverables. And if you've already done the thinking and just need a team to bring it to life, our content design subscriptions make it easy to roll out high-quality branded assets every month.

You can learn more about our brand design, web design and Webflow development, and content design services on our site, or simply chat with us and we'll help you figure out the right next step for your team.

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