📎 The Brand Listening Tour (& Template)

When talk is cheap (but listening is money)

Hey all, On Brand is back! I spent the last two weeks moving and unpacking and doing various home improvement projects; a real change of pace after living essentially nomadically for the past year. 📦 I’m back in Oakland—and will I be here for two years? Ten years? Two months? Nobody knows! When you change your life dramatically, it feels easier to pick up and do it all again. For now, it’s nice to be settled back “at home,” but we’ll just see what the future brings, won’t we?

In other news, I’m opening one last cohort this year for my Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders, though it’ll run in January just after the holidays. Enrollment’s now open. Keep your eyes peeled for a Maven sale on their top courses next week!

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

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Just in time for 2025 planning—it’s template time! Today, we’re diving into a critical but often overlooked tool in brand strategy: the brand listening tour. The last template I shared was just as foundational—why you need a corporate strategy, and why all your brand and product marketing and PR/comms work should really start there.

📎 Why You Need a Corporate Strategy Summary (& Template)

Whether you’re considering a rebrand, launching into new markets, or just trying to align your organization around brand strategy, the brand listening tour is one of my best frameworks to help you gather the insights you need to move forward with confidence.

What is a brand listening tour?

A listening tour typically refers to a structured period where a new manager meets with key stakeholders to ask questions, hear concerns, and build rapport. But the Brand Listening Tour is more strategic—it’s a systematic approach to understanding how your brand is perceived and interpreted across your organization.

Think of it as an internal ethnographic study: you’re not just collecting opinions, you’re mapping out the territory of your brand’s current state and future potential through the eyes of those who shape and deliver it daily.

When do you need one?

The short answer? More often than you might think. Some key moments when a Brand Listening Tour becomes invaluable:

• Before undertaking any major brand work (especially a rebrand)—listen, if you have 6 figures to spend on an agency, you can’t afford not to do this first

• When entering new markets or targeting new audiences

• During significant product launches or pivots

• After mergers or acquisitions

• When there’s misalignment between brand strategy and execution

• When you’re new to a brand leadership role

The strategic value

Back in 2019 at Brex, our team conducted a brand listening tour just months after launching out of stealth. It’s a technique I learned from my User Research partner when we were first exploring the possibility of a rebrand—or at the very least, foundational brand strategy work. At that point, there was a brand, and a lot of PR coverage—and minimal formal documentation around the brand. But we knew we needed to evolve to support the company’s growth ambitions, especially to scale upmarket and into enterprise.

This exercise became the foundation for all our subsequent brand strategy work. Here’s why it’s so powerful:

1. Uncovers hidden alignments and misalignments: You’ll discover where different departments and levels of leadership agree and disagree about your brand’s identity and direction (and get a really good read on your stakeholders’ comfort level with this whole process).

2. Builds trust and buy-in: By involving stakeholders early and genuinely listening to their perspectives, you create allies for future brand initiatives. You will need them!

3. Creates real accountability: In many organizations, there’s plenty of talk about brand vision and values, but these conversations often stay abstract. A listening tour forces leaders to articulate and commit to specific directions. When you document and share these perspectives, it becomes harder for stakeholders to walk back their statements or shift positions without explanation. This accountability is crucial when you need to make tough calls about brand strategy later.

4. Provides evidence-based direction: The insights gathered become powerful ammunition for making strategic recommendations—nothing convinces leadership quite like their own words reflected back to them.

5. Surfaces institutional knowledge: You’ll capture valuable historical context and unwritten rules that could very likely otherwise go undocumented.

How to run an effective brand listening tour

The setup

1. Target the right mix of participants: Aim for 5-8 individuals across:

   • Executive leadership and board members

   • Key brand/marketing/revenue decision-makers

   • Customer-facing team members (sales, support)

   • Product and research teams

2. Structure the sessions:

   • 30-60 minute interviews

   • Small groups (ideally just you, the interviewee, and one other key stakeholder)

   • Record sessions for later reference

   • Take detailed notes

The questions

The template below will give you a thorough list of questions, but you should generally cover the respondent’s brand understanding, market position, future vision, and customer perspective. A few examples:

• How would you describe our brand to someone who’s never heard of us?

• What values do you think our brand represents?

• Who do you see as our main competitors? Where do you think we win/lose against them?

• What is [our company] in 10 years? What is [our company] in 2 years?

• How do you think customers perceive our brand?

• What about [our company] is hardest for customers to understand?

The follow-up

The real work begins after your interviews are complete. Here’s how to turn your findings into action:

1. Analyze for themes:

   • Use Claude to help you look for patterns in individual and aggregate responses

   • Note areas of agreement and disagreement; where you have strength in alignment, or misalignments that could affect strategy

   • Identify gaps between current state and desired future state

   • Compare executive/C-suite responses against non-executive responses

2. Create a compelling report:

   • Include direct quotes (these are especially powerful)

   • Organize findings into clear themes

   • Highlight critical insights and implications

3. Develop clear recommendations:

   • Prioritize issues to address

   • Suggest specific next steps

   • Include timeline and resource needs

4. Share back strategically:

   • Present findings to all participants

   • Frame insights as opportunities and include an action/follow-up plan and timeline

   • Use the report to build momentum for necessary changes

At Brex, our early brand listening tour findings were later validated by our agency partner Gretel, who conducted their own internal interviews as part of their onboarding. Their summary slides beautifully organized the insights into actionable themes, proving that good listening tour results can:

• Validate your strategic direction

• Build confidence in your recommendations

• Create a shared language for discussing brand challenges

• Drive alignment across stakeholders

A summary slide of Gretel’s internal interviews with Brex, reflecting similar takeaways to our initial survey (and the power of direct quotes).

One pro tip: Always include actual quotes from your interviews in your strategic summaries. When decision-makers see their own words (or their peers’ words) reflected in your recommendations, they’re more likely to feel ownership over the process and support your proposed direction.

Gretel’s listening tour takeaways helped firm up our overall strategic direction when it felt like the possibilities were wide open.

This isn’t just another checkbox exercise. I couldn’t imagine setting out to do foundational brand strategy or product messaging work without this background. Not only does it give you critical insight into how stakeholders are thinking about the brand today, it also builds rapport and creates a safe environment for them to share their hopes and dreams for the brand and for you to ask questions with little (yet) at stake.

A well-executed brand listening tour creates the foundation for all your future brand work by:

• Building relationships with key stakeholders

• Creating a safe space for honest dialogue about the brand (not right when decisions need to be made)

• Gathering the insights needed to make strategic recommendations

• Developing the buy-in required for successful implementation

Most importantly, it demonstrates that you’re approaching brand strategy with rigor and intentionality—showing that you’re not just “doing brand,” but building it with purpose. 📎

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I’ve packaged everything you need to run an effective brand listening tour into a comprehensive Notion template. It includes:

• Complete interview guide with tried-and-tested questions

• Session planning and scheduling framework

• A condensed version for running as an async survey via Typeform for Google Forms

• Analysis guidance for identifying themes and a reporting template that drives action

How to get access:

📌 For paid subscribers

• Look for the “Open Template” button below to copy directly to your Notion workspace

• Monthly subscribers get access to any paid templates I’ve shared on Substack

• Annual subscribers can access any paid templates I’ve shared—DM me if there’s a template you see in the Notion Marketplace you want now (that I haven’t shared on Substack)

🛍️ For everyone else

• Find this template (and others) on the Notion Marketplace

• Purchase individually or expense through your company (pro tip: use your L&D or tool budget if this’ll help you do your job better)

• Check out my free templates to get a taste of what’s included

If you liked what you read, consider:

• saying hi or dropping a question in the comments!

• connecting with me on LinkedIn: 👩🏼‍💻 Kira Klaas

• sending to a friend 💌 or coworker 💬