Did you know that over 50% of your brand’s first impressions are visuals?
How about the fact that over 80% of consumers need to trust your brand to consider engaging with it? These statistics emphasize the need for effective brand development, which is significantly influenced by your brand book.
Your branding strategy determines how your brand looks, feels, and sounds and the brand book acknowledges that this isn’t only influenced by your marketing team’s actions. It is also affected by users such as:
- Marketing agencies
- Freelance designers, and
- Affiliates, among others.
That’s why you need a comprehensive brand book design strategy that creates a framework of cohesion and consistency for all your brand development activities.
What Is A Brand Book?
A brand book is a comprehensive document outlining how a brand is represented across all communications, whether online or offline. It defines your brand, detailing its mission, vision, and company values, and provides key guidelines on brand identity elements like:
- Logo
- Imagery style
- Typography
- Colors, and
- Tone of voice
The brand book serves much like a user manual that ensures your brand is consistently portrayed. This consistency facilitates coherence that significantly reinforces brand recognition. Now that you know what it is, let’s dive into how to build a brand book.
A Step-By-Step Guide On How To Build A Brand Book
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Define your core identity
The first step of building a brand book is establishing what your company is all about. This entails clarifying the following:
- Mission statement: What does your brand stand for, and what is the problem(s) it solves?
- Vision statement: Where your brand is headed, where you see it in the future, and its impact.
- Core values: Highlight key principles that shape your brand’s culture and decisions, such as innovativeness.
- Brand personality: Define your brand’s traits, such as determining if you like it to be relaxed and playful, luxurious, or professional.
- The target audience: This lets you narrow down your ideal audience based on their interests, lifestyle, pain points, age, or gender, among other demographic and psychographic considerations.
The aspects above sound much like the basics of every marketing strategy, but they are critical as you develop a brand positioning book. That’s because they influence how you tailor and deliver your message to create awareness and leave a memorable impression. Without clarity on the above areas, you can hardly create a compelling story that communicates why your brand is unique.
Here are brand book examples illustrating how brand identity influences awareness and recognition:
- Red Bull: This brand leans more toward its personality, which is playful, adventurous, and energetic.
- Tesla: The company focuses more on showcasing its vision, which is a world driven by sustainable energy.
- Nike: The organization’s key point in “Just Do It” is its mission, which is to innovate and inspire every athlete. This approach aligns with other users striving to break boundaries, making targeting a wider audience easier.
The above organizations are among the most easily recognized brands globally based on their identity, vividly showing how important it is in your branding strategies.
2. Establish the visual identity
Visuals are a brand’s most memorable elements and are often the first point of contact. As such, when building a brand positioning book, you must focus more on the visuals and design a cohesive style guide. The guideline will ensure consistency and help create a professional and memorable first impression. The key branding essentials at this point are:
The first point is to create guidelines for displaying the primary logo and its variations. This states how users display the logo, such as icon-only, or position it horizontally or vertically. From here, your brand book should specify essential elements, primarily the scaling rules, and spacing, that ensure the logo doesn’t feature any distortions.
If the logo includes a tagline, its position, size, and typography should also be specified for uniformity. The guideline must also specify the background color options, which facilitates consistency. Among the brand book examples that illustrate this strategy is Spotify’s logo, as shown in the images below, with variations of the green and black colors.
One of the areas you can’t afford to take lightly on how to create a brand book is the color palette, keeping color psychology in mind. Besides being memorable, the color palette influences user moods, which emphasizes the need for consistency across all platforms. As you build a brand book, you must clearly define the primary and secondary colors with HEX, RGB, and CMYK codes. A good example is Spotify, as seen in the logo and other areas, which uses Green (#1DB954) and black (#191414).
Brand fonts are crucial not just for aesthetic appeal but also for how they impact message delivery. This is why they are a must-check on your list of how to build a brand book, noting that clear typography makes the message easier to read. Defining the primary brand fonts, secondary, and acceptable substitutions ensures that everyone involved uses legible typography. You can, for example, set the primary option as Monstrerrat Bold, secondary Open Sans Regular, and Proxima Nova Bold as the substitute.
Photography, illustrations, and other graphic materials can influence how your brand is perceived. The top branding essentials to pay more attention to at this point include:
- Appropriate media to use, like icons, pictures, and pictures
- Dominating color scheme
- Dimensions
- How logo and taglines are integrated.
The quickest way to ensure that the guidelines are observed is to enrich the brand book with examples of the right and wrong media uses. This step’s bottom line is to define the brand’s visual identity and clearly communicate how its various elements should be used.
At this point, you might wonder how the style and brand guide come together. The style guide vs brand guide may seem like two distinct items that could even compete, but they instead complement each other. The style guide mainly focuses on the visuals, while the brand guide goes deeper into an organization’s broader identity. It encompasses mission, vision, value, personality, target audience, and the visual elements covered in the style guide.
3. The tone and style
Your tone and style determine how you connect with your target audience. This is why every marketer strives to select a voice that resonates with the target audience, and the same strategy applies when building a brand book. The key aspects to focus on here include the vocabulary, speech patterns, and terms that define your communications.
As you develop the brand book, point out the terms you want to be associated with the brand on social media, email, or ad copies. This means defining whether users should use a friendly and conversational tone or a professional style. An example of this is the McDonald’s brand tagline, “I’m Lovin’ It .“ This straightforward tone easily communicates to the broader audience the brand targets, and its catchy and memorable nature significantly boosts brand awareness, recognition, and trust.
Conclusion
Every smart marketer knows that brand development is not an afterthought. It is critical because even with the most inventive product/services, you can’t win more customers if they don’t trust your brand. That’s why you should invest more in branding, and with a branding book, you’ll have an easier time keeping everyone in sync to facilitate consistency all around.
A well-crafted brand book can help unlock unlimited possibilities as you effectively reach more people and leave a lasting impression. The clear guidelines in the brand book help not just your marketing teams but all the parties that spread your brand’s message across online and offline channels. It facilitates a cohesive and consistent brand voice that supercharges your exposure, showcases credibility, and wins trust, driving more consumers to your brand.
These three steps are the foundation stone for a practical brand book. Once you’ve designed the brand book, ensure you review and include real-world examples to which the users can easily relate. Also, keep the book simple, clear, and concise to eliminate confusion.
Once you’ve crafted the book, the task isn’t all done. This is keeping in mind that brands evolve, and you must keep the book updated and fresh to represent your brand accurately. Updating the brand book and all your branding aspects can be overwhelming, which is why it is best to work with a reliable professional like ReVerb.
ReVerb branding and review services will help you stand out in the competitive market. Our experienced experts handle all the branding heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on your core business functions. Whether you’re looking to build a brand book from scratch or update an existing one, you can trust ReVerb to meet, if not exceed, your expectations.
