People imagine a rebrand starts with mood boards. It starts with listening, and most of what we learn in the first fortnight never appears on a slide. It’s the reason the slides later make sense.
Week one: we mostly shut up
The temptation on day one is to perform, to arrive with opinions and a point of view already loaded. We’ve learned to hold it. The point of view we want is the one that survives contact with what the business actually is, and you only find that by asking a lot of quiet questions and resisting the urge to answer them yourself.
What the first week is really for/
- Reading everything the business has ever said about itself, and noticing where it contradicts.
- Talking to the people who answer the phones, not just the people who sign the invoice.
- Finding the sentence a founder says off-hand, unrehearsed, that’s truer than the mission statement.
- Mapping what customers actually believe, versus what the brand wishes they believed.
The best line in the finished brand is almost always something someone said before they knew we were listening.
Week two: naming the tension
Every business worth rebranding contains a tension, between what it was built to do and what it’s become, between how it sees itself and how the market does. Week two is about naming that tension out loud, in a room, without flinching. The strategy is usually hiding inside it.
