Globe and Mail Features Toronto Branding Agency Distility

While I agree that the principles advanced in this article ring true,
let’s not be foolish enough to suggest that you can make a brand
strategy in a day. It’s hard enough for clients to grasp the art and
science of branding – reducing it to a one day workshop just reinforces
the commonly held notion that brand is a superficial undertaking, like
window dressing. It’s far more complicated than that, deeper than that,
and way bigger than just the marketing department. The one-day brand
may be good for distility’s business but I’m not sure it’s any good for
anyone else’s, whether they’re a client or a competitor.

As someone who has been through Axle’s one day brand strategy workshop, I
can say it actually did work. And as somebody who has been through more
traditional branding meat grinders, I can say I much preferred the one
day approach. 

 
Full disclosure here – I was Axle’s customer
first, then I worked for Distility for a while and watched other
companies go through the process, now I’m off on a new enterprise. So
I’ve seen the one day one brand thing from the inside out. 
 
I
hated a lot of things about the meat grinder branding process. It took
too long. Most of what came back to us from the agency at the end of it
all was what we had told them. And what was new didn’t make sense to us
at all – it seemed totally alien, and nobody liked it. 
 
When
we tried the one day thing, we got all the things we already knew on the
table. But we also generated new ideas. We actually got surprises – and
they came from our own group, so they didn’t seem alien at all.
Everybody in our group understood the new ideas immediately, because
everybody was part of the process. 
 
To tell the truth, it
didn’t occur to us to be surprised that we could do it in one day. It
just seemed like the natural, obvious way to do this. So yeah, this can
be done.

You raise a good point, Will, however Distility’s approach is richer and
more layered than simply being a “workshop”. I say this not as a
recipient of their service, but as an observer of a session with a
client. First, there is a (not insignificant) amount of preparatory work
that clients complete before the session. Second, each client must meet
certain conditions to even qualify (eg must already and intimately know
one’s customer). There are other points, but this gives a quick sense
of their model.  

 
Also important (and something I observed) is
the “ah ha” moment that an experience like this offers. Often a team is
looking for inspiration on which to pivot their business or branding,
and the intensive nature of the session is very conducive to this (Axle
and his team are very good at pulling this out of people).