The Agile Brand Development Training Course

Overview

Brands used to be refreshed every few years through a single agency project. This Agile Brand Development course shows marketing teams how to build and evolve a brand in short, testable iterations instead. Participants organise brand work into a backlog, run two-day brand sprints, prototype positioning statements and visual directions, test them with real customers through quick surveys and A/B tests, and hold sprint reviews with stakeholders before scaling what works. Teams of four work as a brand squad on a fictional product launch, with each day following a mini sprint rhythm of planning, build, customer test and review. This course is delivered by Agile Leaders Training Center.

Who Should Attend

• Brand and product marketing managers responsible for positioning and identity
• Marketing team leads adopting agile or Scrum
• Creative directors and in-house design leads who own visual identity
• Growth and digital marketing specialists who run experiments
• Start-up founders building a first brand

Departments and Industries

Suited to teams that need their brand to keep pace with fast-moving products and channels.

• Brand, marketing and product marketing departments
• Creative and design studios, growth and digital teams, and customer insight units
• Consumer technology, apps and financial technology
• Direct-to-consumer retail and food and beverage
• Media and entertainment

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply Scrum roles and events, and the Kanban practices of visualising work, limiting work in progress and managing flow, to brand work.
• Build brand hypotheses and user stories for positioning, naming and identity.
• Use a brand sprint to produce a positioning statement, archetype and tone of voice.
• Build quick prototypes of logos, taglines and landing pages and test them with customers.
• Evaluate A/B test, survey and social listening results to decide what to keep.
• Use a living brand guideline and sprint-level brand health metrics release by release.

Course Agenda

Day 1: Agile Foundations for Brand Teams

• Why waterfall rebrands fail and what iterative branding changes
• Scrum roles, events and artefacts, and Kanban practices (visualise work, limit WIP, manage flow) for marketing
• Building the brand backlog
• Writing brand hypotheses and brand user stories
• Squad formation, sprint planning and the first sprint goal

Day 2: Brand Sprint One: Purpose and Positioning

• Customer jobs, pains and gains as positioning input
• Drafting competing positioning statements
• Choosing a brand archetype and tone of voice
• Testing positioning options with quick customer interviews
• Sprint review and retrospective

Day 3: Brand Sprint Two: Identity Prototypes

• Rapid naming and tagline exercises
• Moodboards and low-fidelity logo and colour directions
• Five-second tests of identity prototypes
• Preference testing and guerrilla customer interviews
• Sprint review and retrospective

Day 4: Brand Sprint Three: Launch Experiments

• Designing A/B tests for landing pages, ads and email subject lines
• Reading survey results alongside test data
• Social listening and sentiment as feedback loops
• Deciding to scale, pivot or drop based on test evidence
• Sprint review and retrospective

Day 5: Scaling and Governing an Agile Brand

• Living brand guidelines and versioned brand assets
• Brand health metrics per sprint and per quarter
• Governing brand decisions across squads and agencies
• Squad presentations of sprint outputs
• Setting up a brand backlog at work

Practical Exercises

These suggested activities use the course's sprint templates on the fictional product launch or on the participant's own brand.

• Suggested activity: fill the brand backlog and sprint board templates with hypothesis and user story cards.
• Suggested activity: complete the positioning statement and archetype canvas and test it with a rapid customer test script.
• Suggested activity: plan an A/B test on the planning sheet and record results to decide what to keep.
• Suggested activity: start a living brand guideline file from the sprint outputs.

FAQs

Do I need prior agile experience?

No. Day 1 introduces Scrum and Kanban as they apply to brand work, and the rest of the week practises them in sprints.

Is this course specific to one industry?

No. It is about how brand work is organised, not about a particular sector's messaging.

Who plays the product owner and stakeholders?

Instructors act as product owner and stakeholders during sprint planning and sprint reviews, and give feedback at each retrospective.

Conclusion

Participants practise agile ceremonies on real brand problems, test ideas with customers during the course itself, and leave with a positioning statement, identity prototypes, launch experiments and sprint templates their team can use to run agile brand development from the following Monday.