Turn your own brand into the case study
A live, applied leadership workshop where your marketing and brand team, or your whole
organization, works through a real brand decision using the MV System™, and walks out
with actual strategic territory ideas, not just a framework.
WHY THIS FORMAT WORKS
Our founder still remembers the day a simple team exercise on an everyday,
commoditized product turned a room of people who had never thought of themselves as “brand people” into fierce advocates for an idea. Split into small groups and handed one deceptively simple challenge, make this ordinary product mean something, the energy in the room changed within minutes. People built a case. People defended a point of view. That afternoon proved something no lecture could: people commit to brand thinking fastest when they are building it themselves, on something real. That is the exact energy
The Meaning Value™ Workshop is designed to recreate.
WHAT IT IS
The Meaning Value™ Workshop is not a training session about brand theor, it is a working session where your actual brand becomes the live exercise. Participants divide into small groups and work through the core moves of Meaning Territory Definition™: diagnosing the tension between what your audience wants and what your category currently gives them, staking a specific and defensible territory, and finding the structural principle, the Cable, that could carry it across the business. Each group builds a point of view and defends it under the same five filters we use with consulting clients: credible, distinctive, durable, expressible, elastic. Leadership walks out with a trained team and real strategic input, generated by the people who will have to execute it.
Marketing & Brand Team Format
Built for the core marketing, brand, and
product organization. Ideal for building shared
instinct and vocabulary inside the function that
owns brand decisions day to day, campaign
leads, brand managers, product marketers, and
creative teams working the exercise together.
Organization-Wide Format
Built for cross-functional leadership: marketing sits
with sales, product, commercial, and executive
leadership. Ideal when brand decisions are made in silos,
a repositioning needs buy-in beyond marketing, or
leadership wants the whole organization operating from
one shared read on what the brand means.
Both formats run the same core method. The difference is who is in the room and how the outputs get used afterward, as team alignment inside marketing, or as organization-wide direction that informs go-to-market, product, and commercial decisions together.
HOW IT RUNS
Framing
A short opening on the six layers of meaning and the specific tension your category creates, grounded in your brand's real market position.
Breakout groups
Build and defend
Present back
Best For
✓ Marketing and brand teams who need a
working session on their own portfolio, not
another theoretical framework.
✓ Organizations preparing for a
repositioning, relaunch, or new product
introduction who want cross-functional
buy-in.
✓ Teams where brand, product, and
commercial functions operate in silos and
need a shared exercise that forces
collaboration.
✓ Leadership that wants the organization to
feel ownership over the brand's direction.
You Walk Away With
✓ A team that has practiced the framework
on real stakes, not hypotheticals.
✓ Multiple strategic territory ideas
for your own brand, generated internally
by your own people.
✓ Cross-functional alignment and
buy-in that outside consulting alone
rarely produces.
✓ Direct, felt experience of what
it looks like when a team starts making
decisions brand-first.
FORMAT & LOGISTIC
Duration
Half-day (condensed) or full-day (recommended for the
organization-wide format)
Group size
Works best with 12–40 participants, split into working groups of 4–6
Delivery
In person for maximum energy and collaboration; a virtual
adaptation is available on request
“The strongest strategic ideas are the ones your own team builds and defends in the room, not the ones handed to them in a deck”
If your organization is ready to make brand-first decisions, not just talk about them, the next step is putting your own brand on the table.