What Is a Brand Brief?
A brand brief is a detailed explanation of what a brand is and isn’t. It explains your brand’s objectives, goals, values, and vision, allowing anybody engaged in generating brand assets to express the business’s direction, purpose, and positioning as clearly as possible. To ensure a consistent brand message across its long-term plan, a corporation prepares a brand brief, often known as a brand architecture or brand strategy Roadmap. This document is critical for building and managing a brand’s perceived worth, also known as brand equity, in the eyes of its customers. You can utilize the brand brief examples to save you time as opposed to starting a document from scratch.
Reasons to Have a Brand Brief
Your company may have a chance to operate even without a brand brief but its success would depend on whether or not you could keep track of each progress you have made. If you are new to the business or have only recently begun your operations, you can find that a brand brief is efficient to have. Curated below are some of the reasons why you should have this piece of document present for every company you are part of or every project you are initiating or even involved with.
Define Your Company Brand: By dedicating effort to developing a project brief, you will be expected to provide a precise concept of the brand. Whether you are creating a new brand or redesigning an existing one, the brand brief is an excellent opportunity to define the brand and how the project will sustain and strengthen it. Every component of the campaign must be consistent with the brand’s objective, and by outlining each step, you will be forced to consider how each step will reinforce that mission. If you can’t clearly describe how each approach contributes to the larger goal, it’s time to modify or adjust the tactic so that it does.Identify Audience: Your brand brief should also specify who you want to target and what that audience is searching for. Many businesses conduct extensive research, ranging from focus groups to Data Analysis, to determine how a certain demographic group responds. If you are looking for a teen audience, for example, you will want to know what your potential consumer is watching, listening to, and wearing. Language and allusions, forms of communication such as social media, and finances are all important elements to include in the brand brief so that you can explain to your client how your campaign will reach them.Clarify Vision: A brand statement may frequently be encapsulated in a line or two. When that brand is transferred across platforms, though, it might lose its definition. Spend time at the start of a project laying the groundwork for the campaign’s Vision. It’s all too easy to go off into tangents that don’t adhere to the initial idea, especially when there’s a lot of emotion and imagination involved. By resolving these issues immediately, you will save yourself and your customer a lot of time, money, and effort later on. Express an account that has a beginning, middle, and finish. Every aspect of your project must contribute to telling that tale.Anticipate Issues: Another advantage of creating a brand brief is that it allows you to see discrepancies and predict difficulties. When you write the brief, you may also better allocate employees and resources. It is significantly easier to alter and scale down at the planning stage than it is after everything has been constructed. An example of this situation is to determine what marketing and advertising materials you will be utilizing for the campaign. If you are looking into releasing a video for the digital campaign, you may need to set aside a Budget for the three stages of production that goes into it.Iron Out Your Message: To reach your target audience, your messaging must be consistent across all media. A brand brief can give the fundamental script that everyone participating in all elements of the campaign can use. What you provide and what you want your audience to accomplish must be communicated through messaging. Every platform requires a call to action. You may have a more extensive messaging style guide. Perhaps you always address Board of Directors members by their first names, or you compose all copies in the second person. The brand dictates these style decisions, whether they are casual, business-like, or edgy.Look and Feel: Your illustrators or branding specialists will assist you in developing a branding guide that will ensure a site’s uniformity across all platforms. Colors should be coordinated and dimensions for logos and themes should be identical. If there is a lot of turnover in the office, the brand brief is a great place to include instructions on Palette colors, fonts, and other elements of the brand’s appearance. If there is a lot of turnover in the office, the brand brief is where new members can go to get exact guidelines on maintaining the site and all of the other materials.Save on Budget: A brand brief is a test run that shows the client your concept. It can also be modified. Assume your customer chooses a different color scheme or wants to stress a particular issue in their slogan. Your team may experiment with all of these components before adopting any of the concepts, saving money and ensuring you and your customer are on the same page. The process of fine-tuning the brand brief pulls you and your customer even closer together. You may discover more about their likes and dislikes, as well as what influences them and what they actively despise.Define Metrics: The brand brief also includes precise metrics that might assist you in demonstrating your performance. Determine how many viewers you want to drive to the client’s site in the first month, first quarter, and first year if that is your goal. The analytics will show you if you are on the correct track or whether the Campaign needs to be tweaked. Predetermined metrics allow you to quantify your outcomes so that your client can know exactly what they are paying for. Reading metrics will also help you to plot your brand brief ahead of time, which can help when you are merely conceptualizing and have yet planned to integrate the plans or contents of the brief.
Key Components of a Brand Brief
A brand campaign brief is not made up of random parts and sections, there are specific components that make it a note-worthy brand brief. Skipping these parts is ill-advised as they are meant to guide you into the process and each of them is vital to the completion of the final output. If you are feeling puzzled still about the contents of this article, checking out the company brief description sample could help you picture how the contents would appear and how they are formulated.
Core Values: Core values are the basics of the brand that serve as the foundation for the company’s fame and success. They might include providing quality products and services to customers, the affordability aspect through delivering fair rates, creativity, authenticity, durability, or reliability. They contribute significantly to the document. Ironing out the core values could help you to determine what works well for your company or client and what doesn’t.Vision and Mission: The vision statement discusses the brand’s long-term and short-term ambitions and goals, as well as where the promoters envision the brand in the present. The mission statement specifies the brand’s operating model and strategy for achieving the goal. The vision and mission statements serve as a focal point for everyone in the business, ensuring that everyone is pursuing the same Objective. This contributes to increased organizational efficiency and production.Brand Promise: It is the brand’s declaration to existing and prospective customers about what they can anticipate from the products and services given and how the brand’s offerings will be able to address their problems. The more a company’s ability to deliver on that promise, the greater its brand value in the minds of consumers and workers. Following through on the promise will increase the company’s profitability and credibility, which in return, increases the number of loyal customers or patrons.Corporate Guidelines: The company’s corporate guidelines highlight the voice, tone, imagery, color scheme, and how to use and display the logo, visual identity, tagline, and other brand elements in promotional and advertising collaterals such as brochures, placards, newspaper advertisements, radio or television commercials, social media, and online marketing channels, among other things. Stating this within the brief will help clients or other partners know how to consistently present your company’s identity.Target Audience: Every brand is mandated to identify the specified target audience and target market to whom the items and services will be supplied in order to achieve the company goals and objectives of sales and Profits. You may identify your target audience based on a variety of factors. Gender, age, education, and income are just a few instances of audience segmentation. Divide these audiences into three groups for the greatest research results: demographics, interests, and purchase inclinations.Competitive Advantage: There are several brands in the market that offer comparable lines of products and services, but each brand has a unique selling proposition and certain key aspects that distinguish it from the competition and let it command a premium. It is also critical to determine the brand’s major rivals in order to undertake accurate market research and studies and develop marketing objectives and sales targets.
How to Write a Brand Brief
With the components and reasons stated above, you can now proceed to the process of building a brand brief. Take it easy and slow to ensure you did not overlook any parts and each is defined appropriately. If you want to view a sample or intend to use a pre-made one, then you can view what the site has to offer on a brand creative Brief Template.
1. Explain Your Objectives and Motives
Begin your brief by describing the project’s history and branding. Write one or two phrases that explain the company’s or individual’s purpose, followed by a few sentences that provide history on the brand and why it is starting this initiative or campaign. This material might be included in one or two paragraphs, or it could be separated using headers.
2. Highlight Particular Goals and Problems
The following portion of your brief should focus on the brand difficulties you intend to address and overcome through the project. Following the introduction of those difficulties, you may go into further depth about how your campaign will handle and overcome them. This area will help the creative team grasp the project’s expectations.
3. Define Your Target Audience
The following stage is to determine who the campaign will target. You should include demographic information such as gender, age, and demographic location, as well as motives for why they would buy a product and what pain areas the solution will address. If the customer already has a thorough buyer persona, you may use it for this area.
4. Review Market Competitors
It is critical to provide information about rivals since it may assist a creative team better their approach and coming up with fresh advertising concepts. This section should provide a brief list of rivals and their offerings. Examine the parallels between the client’s company and its rivals, as well as how the client has distinguished itself. Knowing who your competitors are and what they supply may assist you in differentiating your products, services, and promotion. It will allow you to set competitive rates and react to rival Marketing Campaigns through your own strategies.
FAQs
What are the different types of brand briefs?
There are two types of branding advertising briefs that you may write: legal and creative. A legal brief is an argument presented to a court in order to persuade it to decide in favor of its client. It outlines particular legal concerns pertaining to the case, gives evidence, and asks the court to take a certain action. A creative brief is a one- or two-page document that covers the project’s aims, mission, problems, message demographics, and other data. It aids in directing the creative team and other relevant parties on how to achieve the campaign’s objectives.
Who is responsible for creating the brand brief?
When it comes to assembling the brand brief, the individual in charge of producing the brief within the creative team should have good communication and Project Management abilities to incorporate crucial information such as the brief business background. As brand knowledge and views emerge throughout the organization, they should stay hands-on and analytical. They should also have a great sense of brand awareness and design, as well as a strong emphasis on outcomes.
What is the difference between a brand brief and from creative brief?
Both documents may be utilized to explain innovative ideas concisely. A brand brief is a detailed description of what a brand is all about, where it is going, and what it may become. It is a live document designed to guide the development and implementation of all brand-related assets and activities. A Creative Brief for brand identity is an outline of a brand-specific project. A creative brief would include a project-specific mission, goals, and objectives, as well as how a creative team expects to accomplish all of these things.
Incorporating a brand brief into your company and projects is essential to ensure that every detail is thought of so that upon its presentation to the client, no information is lacking and time won’t be wasted to request for a follow-up discussion. So invest in the creation of a brand brief so you can impress your clients and have a successful working relationship.
