Brand ✕ Executive Alignment: Interview Guide

Use this template to interview key stakeholders and leaders at your company about your brand’s current strengths, opportunities, and future vision, in order to identify actionable themes and strategic gaps that you can craft a plan to address. This is an essential step when discussing changes to your brand’s strategy or positioning, or considering a brand refresh or rebrand.

So how do you use this guide? Optimally, survey 5-8 individuals: A diverse range of executives or key leaders, plus customer-facing members of your team, such as sales ICs or customer support ICs. Interviews are typically 30-60 minutes each and recorded for later reference. Keep the number of participants in the room small, ideally you—the interviewer and note-taker, your manager or another key decision-maker, and the interviewee.

After collecting these interviews, it’s your job as the brand strategist or researcher to look for themes or gaps in the interview results. Where do you see alignment or misalignment? How significant are the disagreements? If there aren’t obvious discrepancies, are there more detailed nuances or language to dig into?

You should compile these themes into a report with your findings (Tip: Use Notion AI to help summarize your interview notes and identify themes!) that is then shared back with all interviewees and decision-makers on the project, along with recommended actions. If there are major gaps to address, this might mean scheduling a workshop with the relevant stakeholders to talk about how you’ll resolve them or stay aware of them in later steps of the project, such as your rebrand.