Using visualization as a tool to gain an understanding of the  bigger picture in a brand building project.     Challenge  I have led a branding project for a company not used to think in terms of brand building and  what it takes to create a strong brand at all. The client, working in the elderly care sector, had  an idea of what they want to tell about their company – but the need to adjust this message to  customer needs, competitor positions and employees is something they hadn’t thought about.  The starting point for the project was complex – many different customers, stakeholders,  competitors and other factors in the own organization or in the society that all had an  influence of how we best could express the brand and the company. The client had some ideas  of how to serve and communicate to each and every part; most important customers,  employees, and how they differ from main competitors, but to bring everything together to get  an overview and create an overall brand message was a tough task. The client was completely  lost in their own inside perspective and too many details.     Selection  To simplify the overall picture of the business environment in which the company and brand  worked, I choose to work with visualization.  As Stefanie Bauer mentions in the video  Visualization Tool, the beauty of using visualization is that we can tap into a single picture  that makes it possible to achieve a sense of agreement and consensus with people – and this  really proved to be true. Using visualization made it possible to get a common starting point  for the discussion of the overall picture and understanding the outer perspective.      Application  In order to visualize the environment in which we wanted the brand to work, I actually used  suitable Smart Art designs in the Office 365 suite to simplify the description and relations of  customers, other stakeholders, competitors and other factors influencing the client’s business  activities and brand building. In order to make a simplification that was relevant and still  containing the most important aspects, I had to do a lot of reading and desktop analysis of the  business sector and the clients company before creating the visualization.     As this was a totally new way for the client to look at things, there were initial discussions if  the visualization was a possible and correct way of describing the situation. After the client  had decided that this actually was a new and interesting of describing the starting point of the  branding project, we could continue our discussions and after a while find a common  understanding of the role of the brand and implications for how to find a message that suited  customers, employees, the competitor situation and the society.     Insight & Approach  Using the visualization tool made it possible for the client to gain a quicker understanding of  the bigger picture and outer perspective - that branding is not only about what we want to say  about ourselves, you have to take into account what is interesting for the target groups, what  others are saying and what is possible to communication and still be true.      One of the most interesting insight the visualization made clear was the importance of the  employees in the brand building process, and the need of aligning the brand message in a way  that was attractive both internally and externally.

I think design thinking and especially visualization is a very powerful tool - to present  circumstances in a simplified, visual way, that differ from the way you are used to look at  things opens up for many interesting discussions and makes it possible to see new relations  and solutions.    I will use the visualization tool again, as I found it very successful, but bearing in mind that  you sometimes have to take into account the clients own experience of visualization. I once  got the comment from a client, used to long, written descriptions of basically everything, that  he didn’t like visualizations at all, as it could be interpreted in so many ways. Then it is  important to stress the fact that visualization is a fantastic tool to see the bigger picture,  nurturing new thoughts and solutions that then later on can be specified in written descriptions  when needed.

