Your Brand is Unique – Let it Shine!
Brand books are the repository of all things creative that make up your brand and business identity. But why does your business need one? It’s simple – because they are the one tool that keeps all of the marketing communication and brand information in one place. These are the forward facing communication that impacts your target audience (clients) directly whether it be a logo or a radio advertisement. But there is so much more that this incredible indispensable tool can do to transform your business.
A brand book is a style guide and contains the brand guidelines.
The brand book “style” information includes:
- Logo designs
- Fonts
- Colors
- Key images that represent the brand
- Communication styles
- Presentations, print layouts, business collateral, etc.
This is the creative guide for your company that keeps all communication consistent across all media and vastly improves the messages and quality impression of your business. It’s a ‘one-stop shop’ of all the key details relating to how the brand looks.
This ensures that both current and future employees have a single guide, which is beautifully packaged as a professional creative portfolio. It can be used to educate and excite new employees as part of the onboarding program, and reinforce and re-ignite the brand ideals to existing employees.
There’s more to a brand book than meets the eye!
A brand book is so much more powerful than just a font and color list. By aligning it with your business strategy you can add power and depth and meaning to your business mission.
A (good) brand book also explains the fundamental elements of the business’ brand strategy and answers these important strategic brand questions:
- Who is the brand?
- What is the brand’s personality?
- What is the brand’s position?
- What is the goal of the brand?
- Who is the target audience?
- What are the key messages?
Don’t let your brand book just be a collection of fonts and graphics.
If you are creating a brand book to just keep the brand identity material organized, then this is a good start, but you may be missing a huge opportunity for your company.
A comprehensive and well-defined and strategic brand book will bring efficiency and organization to your company. It brings consistency, to not only just the current (and future) marketing team, but also keeps other departments such as sales, product design and/or service specialist aligned. It allows you to maintain your brand with outside vendors and provides guidance on all creative materials produced.
Brand books hold the secret of your brand’s power. Your brand separates you from your competition and elevates the perceived value of your product or service. Your brand book influences all aspects of your marketing campaigns, internal and external communications and even what products/services that are created. Which is why you need to get the brand strategy right. A logo won’t help you figure out how to best position a new product, but a brand strategy will definitely guide your team when developing all of their marketing strategies and tactics.
You want to keep the brand alive and thriving. This means having a tailored strategy, consistent messaging and “look” that is carried out and exemplified by all employees. A brand book is the best tool to easily unite your team and support them in ‘living the brand’
How to make a brand book?
At Rainfire Media, we live by one simple rule that applies to all things related to marketing and branding, and of course, these steps are the same for brand book creation:
Step 1: Strategy
Step 2: Planning
Step 3. Design
First, decide on your brand strategy, then planning the market positioning on the brand design. Once you have these three elements then an effective and attractive brand book can be created.
We’ve heard the Brand Book referred to as a company’s brand bible. It’s literally the foundation you need to base your business decisions, marketing direction, style, photography, messaging.
When it’s time for your business to take the next step in marketing and design contact Rainfire Media and we will set you on the right path to success.
