My true love: training

I love all kinds of training. Strength training, endurance training; training others, being trained. Anything designed with the sole purpose of improvement is a good, good thing.

This extends to conducting brand training. Strategy and creative work is lovely, and we have a grand time behind conference room doors: mapping things out, getting whiteboard marker all over our hands. And it's a thrill when direct clients—often savvy brand and marketing folks—"get" what we've come up with.

But the point of all that pondering and processing is to produce something useful. Something that connects with everyone at the business. Everyone. When a client believes enough in the work we do to ask us to turn into a training session (or series), I value that above all else. Because training on anything brand-related, whether it's a new brand strategy, voice, messaging, naming style, means it's time to take the content out of whatever academic framework it might reside within, and make it useful. For anyone. And if a client believes we can convert even their most skeptical audiences (usually, it's their lawyers), we can help brands tell a united story.

I had the honor and pleasure of joining my colleagues in training Girl Scouts of USA on the voice and messaging that we developed. Representatives from around the country came to learn to speak Girl Scouts and tell their own stories through the lens of the message—over 130 in total. I got to run an afternoon session on giving creative feedback, and can honestly say, Girl Scouts Brand Camp was almost as fun as actually going to summer camp. Girl Scouts put together a video about the day (which is sweeter than sweet), and it's a treat to take in the reactions of some of the folks who gave us two full days of their time.