How to Run a Brand Sprint in One Day: The Facilitated Workshop We Use
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A brand sprint condenses what agencies used to drag across multiple weeks into a single focused day. If you’re a founder who needs to get aligned with a co-founder, a small team that keeps arguing about direction, or a marketing manager whose brand guidelines haven’t been touched since launch, a brand-sprint workshop is one of the most efficient things you can do for your positioning. At Choco Media, we’ve adapted the brand sprint format — originally developed at Google Ventures — to fit the realities of small and mid-size brands: tighter budgets, fewer stakeholders, and less tolerance for frameworks that don’t ship into actual work.
This post walks through exactly how we run a brand sprint in a single day. You’ll see the five core exercises, why each one exists, and how the output feeds directly into a usable brand brief. This is not a theoretical overview — it’s the working process we use with clients.
What a brand sprint workshop is (and what it isn’t)
A brand sprint is a structured, time-boxed session designed to answer one question: what does this brand stand for, and for whom? It draws heavily on the format Google Ventures published in their design sprint methodology, adapted for brand work rather than product design.
It isn’t a logo exercise. It isn’t a colour palette session. A brand sprint sits upstream of those decisions — it defines the strategic territory before anyone opens Figma or argues about typefaces. When we facilitate a sprint, we’re working to produce three things: a clear long-term goal, a concrete picture of who the brand is for, and a set of words that reliably separate this brand from its nearest competitors.
- What you get out: a filled brand brief (or the equivalent in sticky notes and photos) that a copywriter, designer, or AI tool can use immediately
- What you don’t get out: finished creative assets, a completed website, or resolved logo debates
- Who should be in the room: the decision-maker, one or two people who understand customers well, and optionally someone who does the brand execution work
- Who shouldn’t be in the room: more than five people total — clarity comes from constraint
Before the sprint: the 30-minute prep that makes everything else work
A brand sprint can fall apart before it starts if participants arrive cold. We send a short pre-work email 48 hours in advance with three questions: What’s one thing our brand does better than anyone? Who’s a brand in a different category that you admire, and why? What’s a word or phrase that would embarrass us if a competitor used it?
The answers don’t need to be polished. We’re seeding the room with material so the first exercise doesn’t start from a blank page.
What to prepare as a facilitator
- A timer visible to the whole room — digital or physical
- Sticky notes in two colours (one for individuals, one for votes)
- A printed or shared template for each exercise (we use Notion or a Google Doc projected on screen)
- A camera or phone for capturing completed exercises — you’ll want a record
We run sprints in-person when possible. Remote works, but it requires a shared digital board (Miro or FigJam) and stricter time discipline. Budget an extra 20 minutes if you’re running this over video.
Exercise 1: The 20-year roadmap (30 minutes)
This comes directly from the Google Ventures brand sprint, and it remains the most important exercise of the day. The question is simple: if this brand is still here in 20 years, what has it done?
Participants write individually for 5 minutes, then share, then the group votes on the phrases that feel most true. The facilitator captures a working long-term goal statement: “In 20 years, [Brand] has [outcome for the world / the audience / the category].”
This exercise does two things. First, it forces the room to think past this quarter’s campaign or this month’s launch. Second, it reveals disagreements that are better surfaced now than after you’ve commissioned a rebrand.
- Common mistake: writing an operational goal (“we have 10,000 clients”) instead of a meaningful one (“we’ve made honest marketing the default for SMEs in Scandinavia”)
- Good output looks like: a sentence that would still feel true and motivating to a new hire ten years from now
Exercise 2: The audience definition (45 minutes)
Brands fail to resonate not because they’re unclear about what they sell, but because they’re unclear about who they’re for. This exercise produces a primary audience portrait — not a demographic persona with a stock photo, but a specific description of the person’s situation, frustration, and what they’re hoping the brand will do for them.
Each participant writes three versions of the audience: a stretch audience (people we’d love to serve but can’t quite reach yet), a core audience (the people who buy from us and stay), and an exit audience (people we’re tempted to serve but probably shouldn’t).
The most useful thing a brand exercise can do is give you permission to say no to certain customers. Every brand that tries to be for everyone ends up being for no one in particular.
The group then compares portraits and builds a single core audience definition. We look for the situation and frustration specifically — these make copy sharper and creative briefs more actionable than demographic data alone.
What good audience output looks like
- Situation: “A founder of a 10-person B2B company who’s been doing marketing themselves and knows they’re leaving something on the table”
- Frustration: “Every agency they’ve spoken to has quoted €5k/month minimums and talked in jargon they don’t recognise”
- Hope: “Someone who can actually run this for them and tell them the truth about what’s working”
Exercise 3: Competitive landscape mapping (45 minutes)
This is the exercise that brands most frequently skip — and the one that most directly informs positioning. We ask participants to map five to eight competitors or reference brands across two axes. The axes are chosen before the sprint based on what actually matters in the category: price vs. quality, traditional vs. progressive, generalist vs. specialist.
The output is a 2×2 map with competitor logos placed across it. Then we look for open territory: where can this brand sit that feels true and unoccupied?
- We’re not looking for differentiation for its own sake — we’re looking for a position that’s both genuine and distinct
- Participants often discover that their perceived differentiation (“we’re more personal”) is claimed by every competitor they placed on the map
- The map makes the discussion concrete: you’re arguing about quadrant positions, not abstract concepts
Our branding and logo service always starts with a version of this exercise, even for clients who come to us saying they already know their position. In client work, we’ve found that the mapping step changes the answer about half the time.
Exercise 4: Brand personality sliders (30 minutes)
This exercise establishes the tone and character of the brand — the stuff that informs copy voice, design temperament, and how the brand behaves in difficult situations. We use five sliders, each with a named opposite at each end:
- Formal ←→ Casual
- Serious ←→ Playful
- Established ←→ Emerging
- Mass-market ←→ Niche
- Traditional ←→ Innovative
Each participant marks their position on each slider independently. Then the group compares. The interesting part is rarely the average — it’s the disagreements. When the founder places the brand at “casual” and the CMO places it at “formal,” that’s a conversation that needs to happen before any content gets made.
Using the sliders in practice
Once the group has reached consensus positions (or documented the deliberate tensions), these sliders become part of the brand brief and directly inform how we structure prompts for AI content creation. A brand that places itself at “serious” and “niche” needs different prompt instructions than one that sits at “playful” and “mass-market.”
Exercise 5: The three words (30 minutes)
This is the closing exercise and the most remembered artefact from the sprint. Each participant writes three words or short phrases that they believe should define the brand — not aspirational words about what the brand wants to be, but honest words about what it is when it’s at its best.
Words are collected, grouped by theme, and voted on. The goal is to leave with three agreed words that will function as a filter for brand decisions: when someone asks whether a piece of content, a campaign, or a design feels right, the question becomes “does this feel [word one], [word two], and [word three]?”
- Good brand words are specific enough to exclude: “trustworthy” excludes nothing; “direct” is better; “unflinchingly direct” is better still
- Avoid adjectives that every competitor would also claim: “innovative,” “customer-centric,” “quality-focused”
- The three-word test: if a competitor could plausibly use your three words without looking foolish, go back and find sharper ones
How the sprint output becomes a working brief
By mid-afternoon, you have five completed exercises. At Choco Media, we spend the final hour of a sprint day converting those exercises into a brand brief — a single document that captures:
- The long-term goal statement (from Exercise 1)
- The core audience definition with situation, frustration, and hope (from Exercise 2)
- The competitive position on the map and the territory the brand claims (from Exercise 3)
- The personality slider positions and any deliberate tensions (from Exercise 4)
- The three brand words and a short rationale for each (from Exercise 5)
This brief becomes the source document for everything downstream: the copy voice guide, the visual identity brief, the AI prompt library for content teams, and the onboarding document for new team members. If you want to go deeper on using this output to build brand consistency with AI tools, the post on how to build AI workflows that respect brand voice covers the next step.
What to do with disagreements that didn’t get resolved
Not every sprint ends with full consensus. Sometimes the founder and the head of marketing have genuinely different views of who the brand serves. Our approach: document the disagreement explicitly in the brief and flag it as a question that needs a decision before certain types of work can move forward. Unresolved positioning questions don’t disappear — they show up as inconsistent copy, confusing campaigns, and design work that goes through twelve rounds of revisions.
Running a brand sprint without a facilitator
If you’re doing this without an external facilitator, appoint a dedicated internal facilitator who isn’t the CEO or founder. The facilitator’s job is to keep time, prevent the dominant voice in the room from anchoring every exercise, and document outputs. If the founder is also facilitating, the exercises tend to converge on the founder’s existing views rather than surfacing genuine team perspectives.
We’ve run effective remote brand sprints with teams of three using nothing more than a shared Google Doc, a timer, and a video call. The exercises scale down to fit the resources. What doesn’t scale down is the time discipline — the constraints are what make the output land.
For brands that want support running this process, we offer brand sprint facilitation as a standalone engagement and as part of our broader positioning and brand strategy work. We typically run these in a half-day intensive followed by a written brief delivered the same week.
Common mistakes in brand sprint facilitation
After facilitating these sessions with clients across retail, SaaS, and professional services, the failure patterns are consistent:
- Too many participants: above five people, exercises slow down, voting becomes political, and the output reflects compromise rather than clarity
- Skipping the competitive map: positioning exercises done in isolation produce aspirational output rather than distinctive output
- Treating the output as final: the sprint is a starting point, not a concluded strategy — the brief should be tested against customer language before anything gets built from it
- Not protecting the time: a brand sprint that gets interrupted by Slack and calls produces half the clarity of a protected day — treat it like a surgery, not a workshop that pauses when someone needs to check email
A brand sprint done well should feel slightly uncomfortable. If everyone in the room is nodding throughout, the exercises aren’t surfacing anything new. The value is in the productive friction — the moments where two people who thought they agreed discover they had different things in mind.