Studio Missive 30: Behind the scenes of a complete strategy deck
Hi friend,
Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week.
What’s inspiring you?
- I loved this piece about Van Gogh and yellow. Over the course of my career, yellow has gone from my least favourite colour to my favourite. It’s an extremely interesting colour to work with, and it’s fascinating to see one of the masters use it so extensively.
- A couple miscellaneous things. First, I finally watched The Brutalist this week and fell in love with its photography. A gorgeous film. Trailer here. And while everybody else was in love with the MacBook Neo commercial this week (which is super well done, for what it’s worth), I fell in love with the commercial for the new MacBook Pros, which is this grainy, jazzy 100 seconds of joy, with music from Antonio Sánchez, the jazz composer behind the score for Birdman. I’ve watched this commercial 20 times. The syncopated editing is unreal. I just like the vibe. A lot.
- I love the unusual clocks in [Christopher Butler’s collection](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4. There is more than one way to track time.
What are you working on?
This week, I am starting work on some major strategic projects for clients. I have completed a first pass at the strategy for Mount Hamilton Baptist Church, the church project I’m working on. I’m presenting the strategy in detail this weekend so I can move on to phase two: stylescapes.
The hardest part of the strategy is always figuring out where the client sits in the competitive landscape. Where will they naturally end up going without careful thought and analysis? How do they plan on getting or maintaining a competitive edge? A good strategy impacts every part of your long-term planning and your future business.
This strategy ended up being about 100 pages long, and covers a lot of ground: everything from the competitive landscape, strategic direction, and brand tone of voice all the way to photography guidelines and archival instructions, a process for writing and updating copy on the future website, and notes on how the brand will impact the visual elements of the website.
It took about 8 – 10 hours of consultative meetings to get to the point where I could write the strategy. It would have been longer were I not an existing member of the church, and if I wasn’t already familiar with other churches in the area. I would have easily tripled the research time investigating other churches and interviewing church members to ask questions and probe for more information.
The meat and bones of the strategy, outside of the competitive analysis, are the personas. There are four main personas that we decided attend the church, and we got very specific about who they are and their habits. I’ll use these personas to craft stylescapes. The team will review the stylescapes, pick what they like and don’t like about them, and then review one final stylescape that merges all their favourite ideas so we can land on a visual direction for the brand identity and website.
More to come on this in a future video (months out at this point, but happening along with the rebrand of this studio). Keep your eyes on this space.
Talk to you next week,
Nathan