EMBiz: What is a Brand Book?

Laurel Mintz

What is a Brand Book?

Brand Book Basics 

Hi everyone, Laurel Mintz here, CEO of Elevate My Brand. I am so sorry, I have to apologize that we have not had this conversation before. I can’t believe we’ve been around for almost 15 years and I haven’t ever shared with you the outline of a brand book. I feel like a bad marketer, so I’m going to correct that here today. 

Key Elements for Your Brand's Success

So the question of “what is a brand book?” has been coming in quite often lately, and really it’s a comprehensive document that identifies the different components of your brand. There’s a bunch of different sections that should be included in it, and there are really large brand books and really smaller brand books, so what are you for your brand, and whatever your budget entails, like let’s just start with the basics, at the very baseline: logo kit and guidelines, usage, so how you should and should not use the logo– stretching, colors, etc. You want all of your color codes in there, your primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, so you know exactly how to use your colors across different channels. 

Typeface & Graphic Alignment

A typeface guide. Now, one of the things I wanna call out here is making sure that your typeface really plays well both in digital and print, especially since the world is so much more digitized than ever before and your brand guidelines will also have, and your brand book will also have visual dos and don’ts, so making sure that you have very clear graphic alignment and photography that aligns with your brand, so that again, the point is if you hand this over to someone, they know exactly what to do with it and how to run with it.

What Is Your Aboutness?

And the next piece is your about-ness: your mission, your vision, your value statements, taglines, all of the things that you’re going to use kind of on repeat to express who you are, what you do, and why it’s important. 

Messaging Matters

And then of course your messaging: your tone of voice, syntax, diction, punctuation even. These typically are in some of the more detailed brand books when you keep going down that hierarchy, but at the very least your tone of brand should be in there so that someone knows: are you sassy like we are or are you super serious and very polished? Like, what is your brand? That will help you attract the right audience of course, as well. 

Target Audience Strategy

And finally, a target audience strategy, so making sure that you are at least developing a hypothesis around who you believe the demographics and psychographics of your specific audience– again, primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences might be– these then become a hypothesis against which we test, and we play in the paid ad-spend side. So that is the basics around what a brand book is, what it should entail and include, and now you can go forth, build a brand, and be fabulous.