With the Brandpress you can create projects and administer professionally curated branding exercises in a matter of minutes. The responses from these specially designed exercises will give you powerful insights and help you develop more meaningful brands in less time.

In account settings you can upload your personal or agency logo, and favicon. You can also choose the primary and secondary colors you would like to display in the exercises. The primary color is the button color and the secondary color is the button text color.

The first thing you will need to do when starting a new branding project, is create a project. A project can be an individual or several stake holders of a new branding initiative. Essentially, a project will include anyone involved in the branding of a product, company or service. Give the new project a name and a brief description to help you distinguish it from other projects. Next, you will select the exercises you would like to administer to this new project. There is more information about the brand exercises below.

Sharing

Once you create a new project a unique URL is generated and can be viewed by clicking on the Share link in the project details page. Copy the unique URL and paste it in an email, chat, or text to the project members you would like to complete the brand exercises. Feel free to distribute the link anyway you see fit, but remember, anyone with this unique URL will be able to submit responses.

Editing

At any time, you can select the Settings link from the project details page and modify the project name, description and brand exercises. Click Update project after you've made changes to save the updates. You can also delete the whole project. Once you delete a project, all the data will be lost and there will be no way to recover the information again.

Presenting

If you would like to go through the exercises in person with your clients, or to view the exercises available to the project, you can select the Present link in the project details page to open the brand exercises as they will appear to anyone with the unique project URL.

The Brandpress gives designers a valuable look into the minds of their clients. All the information gathered from the brand exercises will be collected and displayed in the project detail page. The available brand exercises are listed in the left-hand column and the individual responses are presented to the right. Use the Previous and Next buttons in the top, right-hand corner to select individual responses, if there are more than one.

Interpreting the data

At the moment, the designers will be required to analyze the data manually and look for patterns and keywords that appear. In the near future, the Brandpress will be able to generate automatic reports to help designers categories and measure the most popular attributes gathered from the project members.

Many of the branding exercises have been developed and shared by experienced branding professionals with a proven track record of created meaningful brands. Each branding exercise has been specially designed and tested for specific responses, as a result, the exercises are more powerful when the designers understand the purpose of each exercise. Detailed descriptions and explanations of the branding exercises can be found below.

The purpose of the Origin exercise is to establish the setting of the new brand. This exercise is optional, since these details are usually shared in the initial meeting or brief. However, if the details seem uncertain, it can be useful to compare the responses of multiple stake holders to help them align on basic business directions.

The Archetype exercise consists of ranking attributes from a curated list of 24 adjectives. Each adjective correlates to a specific brand archetype outlined by branding professionals Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson. By asking each stake holder to rank the value of each adjective, the Brandpress can determine if there is a predisposition to any of the archetypes. Usually there is a strong affinity to one or two archetypes as well as a clear aversion to others. For more information about brand archetypes, read The Hero And The Outlaw by Mark and Pearson.

The Personality exercise forces your clients to choose between two positive attributes, thereby establishing the most important characteristics for the new brand. Each pair of adjectives corresponds to a dimension of human personality as established in modern psychology. These dimensions of personalty work on a spectrum. The Brandpress uses Thoroughness, Extroversion, Openness, and Friendliness to pinpoint the personality your clients are imagining for their new brand.

The Automobile Analogy forces your clients to think abstractly about their new brand. By asking them to imagine the brand as something else entirely, your clients will have to approach the identity of the new brand with a new perspective. The available selection of cars also correspond with the brand archetypes mentioned previously.

Perhaps the easiest way to give a new brand a personality is to assign a well known personality to represent it. The Celebrity exercise gives your clients a chance to pick popular personalities to represent their new brand. Celebrities already have strong personalities with loyal followers, so the choice your clients make can be very insightful to the type of customers they are trying to attract. The choices for the celebrity spokesperson also correspond to common brand archetypes.

There are many national brands across many different industries with strong brand identities. The Brandscape exercise is designed to see if your clients admire any of the national brand identities many of us are already familiar with. A great brand will never survive by simply copying another brand, but it is possible to find inspiration from others, especially in unrelated industries.