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Brand Baselines Survey

welcome — this survey collects the inputs Echo5 needs to start the analytical layer of your engagement. Plan for 30–45 minutes, depending on your role. Progress is saved, so you can come back things as you have time.

What brand means to you

Your name and role

When you hear the word "brand," what do you think it actually means? Not the dictionary version — what it means to you, in your work, on a Tuesday

this is the single most important question on the form. People mean wildly different things by "brand" — logo, voice, the whole company experience, the feeling someone has after a sales call. We want to know which of those is yours, because that tells us what you're going to expect from this work

A brand — any company, any sector, any size — that you genuinely admire. Why?

cross-industry admiration is more useful than in-category admiration. It surfaces the qualities you reach for, untainted by competitive dynamics

A brand you respect but feel isn't for you — and why

rule-outs are as informative as rule-ins. Helps us calibrate the boundary of where this brand lives

Your aesthetic reflexes

Imagine we're walking through your house. What's a thing in there — a piece of furniture, an object, a piece of art, a record, a book, anything — that you'd actually want to show us. Why does it matter to you?

personal aesthetic taste is one of the most honest signals we get. The things people choose to live with reveal what they actually value, in a way the brand questions never quite do

A piece of culture (film, album, podcast, magazine, novel, video game — anything) that captures an energy you'd want this brand to have somewhere in it

cultural references carry more signal than brand references. They map to the emotional register the brand should live in

A colour, font, treatment, layout style, or visual cliché you'd genuinely want to avoid in the new brand

explicit anti-patterns at intake save weeks of moodboard rework. Whatever lands here gets carried through every visual exploration as a constraint

The icks

What's something other companies — in any industry — do in their brand or marketing that gives you an instant ick? The thing that makes you close the tab, scroll past, or quietly judge

shared icks are one of the fastest ways to align a team on what not to be. We want the petty, specific ones, not the polite generalities

What's something specific to your industry — the actual world your company operates in — that makes you wince? A trope, a phrase, a visual cliché, a particular kind of marketing energy that's everywhere and shouldn't be

every industry has a default brand template that everyone copies. We need to know which parts of yours you find embarrassing so we can deliberately not do them

Conversely — is there something about how brands in your space do show up that you think is actually right, and that we shouldn't run away from just for the sake of being different?

contrarian-for-its-own-sake is its own kind of cliché. We want to know where the conventions are conventions for a reason