What are some good resources for growth and acceleration of a child-based education/creative brand?

I believe past history is a great predictor of future work, so I would ask 1) Have you worked with anyone in our industry or similar project? 2) Ask for their complete portfolio 3) Ask them how many full time vs. contractors 4) Ask them who on the team (or individual) did the work you like and if they would be available for your project? 5) Ask them to asses your idea and come back with 3 highlevel ideas via email or powerpoint. If you're going to be spending $10K+ then I think it's fair to ask them to do a bit of work to demonstrate how they would approach your project. My rule in life "I can't work with you, till I work with you".

Your strategy should encompass at least four components: (A) Complete Visual/verbal/social/technical audit to find/create needed assets for transition: know which assets need to be retired or replaced and what transitional assets are needed to bridge the gap. Prioritize: not everything always needs to change at once and the more you have the longer it will take or cost. Plan to convert brand book concepts/guidelines into tangible or digital deployables: how much "stuff" do you need?; vendor selection; budgeting; designing production files; ordering; quality assurance etc... (B) Internal (team) awareness & asset deployment program and monitoring compliance. (C) External publicity plan: aimed at existing clients & prospects, and any other stakeholders: social networks, media, affiliate partners, etc... Timing should be coordinated with industry / sector calendar (trade shows, if applicable), and major app update for maximum effectiveness. Do you need specialized short term PR/AD help? How can you leverage your 10K+ users to buy in / get the word out? (D) Technical migration & Monitoring Plan: seo strategy & tracking including all affected url redirects, landing pages, email changes, whatever is affected. Monitoring & analytics to see how effective the transition is (compared to old name stats) and when transitional assets can be retired.

Several things to consider when coming up with your product's brand identity: 1) Who is your customer? That will drive the look and feel, as well as the language of your brand. 2) Who are you? If at a gut level, you and your company(employees) are rednecks making the highest quality broadheads for elk hunting, you aren't going to button up your brand in a shirt and tie or develop an artsy-fartsy website. (See Duck Dynasty) 3) What specific aspects of your product and/or service are different than the rest of the market offerings? Ie. Why are you special? These 3 questions, answered candidly, begin to make up your brand story. The most powerful brands have learned that their messaging, packaging, sales process and customer experience delivery is less about what their product or service DOES, and more about how it makes the customer or user FEEL. Branding a product or service is about carefully crafting a story(or a promise), that you are confident you can deliver on once they choose to buy. In other words, branding is the discipline of aligning what you say about your product, service, team... with what customers actually get on the back-end. Once you get really clear on these big picture questions, then the tactical stuff becomes rather easy (what should our website look like, colors, advertising channels, promotional pricing, referral programs, warranty language, etc, etc, etc.) Of course you may be smart to hire a specialist to help you brainstorm and execute on this stuff- but the actual decision making becomes pretty obvious: which option in front of us best reflects who we are?

If you are going to lead the workshops: Start with personal branding. Workshops and coaching are by experts and I'd recommend building a personal brand first. People should build trust in you. Then your offerings. Each offering that you have - a workshop, a coaching program etc. - should have it's own branding. You may even have separate websites for each of your offerings. If you are only organizing the business and not going to lead the programs yourself: then you got to do a corporate branding. So people relate to the organization more than individuals delivering the programs. The coaching / self help / personal development / health industry is full of examples of both branding strategies. If you study a few cases, and their business models, you will gain better insights on why they chose their branding strategy. And you can even question if the strategy worked or not. I hope this gives additional perspective to what you are thinking. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss this further.

Walmart calls it "Pay from Scan." Also "Guaranteed Sales." Sam's Club calls it a "Road Show."