Creating a Brand Book A core tool for brand identity management Management summary With this guide we’re going to give you all the insights and practical steps needed to create your own Brand Book. This guide is meant for Heads of Brand, Heads of Design, Brand Managers, CMOs or any marketers and brand and design specialists who hold the responsibility of managing a brand. A Brand Book is related to, but different from a Brand Style Guide. A Brand Style Guide helps the people inside and outside of your organization who use your visual brand assets, to use them consistently and correctly. A Brand Book is a tool for brand management that sits closer to the core of your brand identity. This is because ideally, your brand is built up with the core idea or Purpose of your organization as a starting point. A Brand Book inspires and helps keep people in your organization aligned with the Purpose or core idea of your organization, and helps them think, communicate and act from that Purpose as a starting point. Are you working on a re-brand or do you have the clear need to reinvigorate an existing brand? This guide will show you how you can create a Brand Book that will help you consolidate your brand identity and help you more easily manage your brand, from the inside out. 2 Introduction After reading this guide, you’ll have a far better grasp of: At Lytho1, our Purpose is ‘To maximize people’s talents’ by helping people do what they are good at. We’re a company with 30 years of experience working in marketing, design and brand management – often in and for larger companies and brands with marketing departments collaborating across different regions, countries and continents. We have a passion for marketing and branding. Because of that, we choose to specifically focus on helping people to do what they are good at by making it much easier to collaborate on managing your brand identity. • What a Brand Book is and what it can do for you and your organization, • What a Brand Book should look like, and: • How to go about creating one. You’ll also have a good idea of how to use it to strengthen your brand and how to manage your brand identity more easily – beyond the visual aspects and across the six elements of successful brand management3. If people in your marketing team and in all other departments inside and outside of your organization don’t have to waste time looking for the right, up-to-date visible brand elements, or doing boring, repetitive work related to brand management, it frees up their time to do what they’re good at. This is how you get the most out of your people and out of your brand. That is the reason we created the Lytho Digital Asset Management platform2. Brand Management – Beyond the Visual But we also know and realize through the same years of experience and in working and talking with marketers all over the world who are now using our DAM platform, that creating and managing a brand or brand identity is about so much more than organizing, creating and using always onbrand visual assets. That’s why we like to share the knowledge we have available about how to manage a brand beyond its visible, tangible assets. A Brand Book is a very useful tool to pin down what a brand or organization stands for, to consolidate the work and developments that have led to a current brand or organizational identity and to help manage a newly formed or redefined brand, from the inside out. Why and how to create a Brand Book We realize – from our own experience and the experiences of others – that it can be a very valuable yet challenging undertaking to create a Brand Book. That’s why we’ve pooled and combined knowledge of some our own experts and those in our network to help create this guide for you. 3 What is a Brand Book and why do you need one? A Brand Book helps people grasp the essentials of what a company means and stands for. A Brand Book is an inspirational document that tells the story of your brand in a compelling way. It’s not only a motivational tool for employees, it’s also a way to implement, guard and manage your brand from the inside out. A Brand Book helps people grasp the essentials of what a company means and stands for. A Brand Book is an inspirational document that tells the story of your brand in a compelling way. It’s not only a motivational tool for employees, it’s also a way to implement, guard and manage your brand from the inside out. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll extend that definition with the following: A Brand Book is a physical or digital document that tells the story of your organization and brand, in terms of where you came from; why you’re here; what you do, who with and whom for; how you do what you do; what your vision for the future is, and your plan for how to get there. Your brand and the added value of a Brand Book A Brand Book is one of the various tools and practices we can use to help manage our brand. It is often most useful when either 1. an organization is going through a rebranding, or 2. an organizations’ brand and brand identity needs reinvigorating from the inside out. Look, feel, and location of your Brand Book The style, tone, and visual design of the Brand Book should be the prime example of how to use your visual style, and the document should be regarded as a living document, eventual changes to which will need to reflect changes in your organization and brand as time continues. It can exist next to a – related, but separate – document called a Brand Style Guide, which helps the organization stay consistent in its usage of its visible or tangible brand assets. The brand of your organization should be built from the ground up from the Purpose or core idea3 of your organization, with the visual or tangible elements as a prime identifier for it. The brand of your organization can be thought of as making itself tangible through four vectors: Product, (Physical or Digital) Environment, Communication and Behavior. As a digital document – which may or may not be a duplicate of a physical Brand Book – the most logical place for your Brand Book to live is in your online Brand Portal or Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform. A Brand Style Guide helps the people inside and outside of your organization who use your visual brand assets, to use them consistently and correctly. A Brand Book inspires and helps keep people in your organization aligned with the Purpose or core idea of your organization, and helps them think, communicate and act from that Purpose as a starting point. In some cases, a Brand Book can be used externally to help anchor the meaning, purpose and ‘feel’ of your brand to specific audiences. The definition of a Brand Book As with ‘Brand’, ‘Brand Identity’, and ‘Brand Management’, various definitions of a ‘Brand Book’ fly about the internet and literature. At the core of the matter, a Brand Book does the following: 4 Making the case for a Brand Book you take the project very seriously. There are many ways to go about creating a Brand Book, but as we believe it to be a fundamental tool to reinforce an existing or new brand identity throughout your organization and any stakeholders that you feel it may be of value to, we advise that you take the project very seriously. That means making space, time, and resources available. That means making space, time, and resources available. Think about finding an (internal or external) brand identity specialist and the hours this person needs, but also photography, visual design and styling. You also need to think about the interviews with internal and external stakeholders that will help you answer the questions you need to answer in order to tell your brand story in a compelling, complete and correct way. Making the case for investments in branding - brand stakeholders Making the case for your Brand Book is therefore something you need to take seriously as well: you have to make sure that all relevant stakeholders are on board with the investment it will take to create one. How do you do that? It depends on the situation you’re starting from. Very broadly speaking, it usually makes most sense to create a Brand Book in one of the following situations: Your brand occupies the space between the intangible ‘gut-feel’ that people actually have when they think about your organization, and the way you want them to feel when they do. Your brand identity is most often described as a collection of all of the ways your brand is made tangible – for instance with the visual assets you use. 1. You’re working on a re-brand If you happen to be in this situation when thinking about creating a Brand Book, it’s more often than not going to be relatively easy to make the case for it. A Brand Book is simply one of the tools that you will list in your plan as to how to solidify, implement, and manage the newly formed brand identity. Read more about the ROI of investments for branding in the final chapter of this guide. Brands are intangible assets, but at the same time we know for sure that they carry financial value. You can see this in the valuation of companies on the financial markets and in the models financial analysts use to gauge, monitor and predict a company’s value. You can read more about this in the final section of this guide. But what we need to understand is that the financial value is the external end point: the value of the brand starts within. 2. You want to solidify your existing brand Various internal and/or external circumstances can trigger a desire or perceived need to solidify an existing brand. Perhaps your organization is having trouble in maintaining a consistent brand identity in outward communications. Your brand is based upon the core idea3, the Purpose – the mission or story that drives your organization and the people in it forward. It is the story that binds them to each other and the story that binds your partners and customers to you as well. As such, a brand is not only an asset for marketing; it’s an asset for management, for HR, and recruitment, first, and an asset for marketing and sales, second. That’s because making people in the market feel your brand starts with people in your organization feeling the brand, first. This is all the more true in the open-wide, incredibly transparent internet-era we live in, today. Perhaps you feel employee engagement is dwindling and you need to reinvigorate a sense of pride and purpose for your employees. Perhaps customer satisfaction research has shown alarming facts and you feel that reinvigorating a sense of Purpose and aligning everyone’s connection to the brand and its purpose can be of help. The case for your Brand Book There are many ways to go about creating a Brand Book, but as we believe it to be a fundamental tool to reinforce an existing or new brand identity throughout your organization and any stakeholders that you feel it may be of value to, we advise that In this situation you’ll have to make the case that a Brand Book can help in these areas. 5 What you will need to do is make the case for the Brand Book as if it were any other investment in the invaluable intangible asset that is a brand. In the last section of this guide you will find more information on how to build that case from the viewpoint of (financial) brand value. However, the main argument for creating a Brand Book, aside from its aiding in managing and strengthening your brand from the inside out is: There is no better way to solidify the core idea and the story of our brand or organization than to sit down with the relevant stakeholders, come to a unifying story, and to then write it down. There’s also no better way to guarantee that a newly formed or consolidated brand identity will be properly managed carrying forward into the future, than to have the right stakeholders involved in the process of pinning it down. The single source of truth for your Purpose Lastly, it’s great and very, very practical to have a Style Guide. But it’s at least equally valuable to have one single source of truth as to what the brand’s purpose is, and how that purpose connects everything we do and the way we do it. This is why, regardless the form you will eventually choose, either a physical or cloud-stored Brand Book that everyone can have centralized access to – preferably in a cloud-based DAM solution2 - is a good idea. 6 cuisine diner experience with multiple interesting courses. What are the elements of a useful and inspiring Brand Book? There are many ways to tell a story. Either way, the core of what you want to share should be thought about in advance, and preferably structured in a way that it automatically triggers the pathways in the human brain that recognize a story – these are the same pathways that will help your story be felt and remembered. In order to tell the story of your brand in a compelling and inspiring way, it is almost always the most helpful to tell the story starting in the past, focusing on the present and then looking forward to the future. The core of your brand story At the very core of your brand story should be an answer to ‘Why’: • Why does this organization exist, what is its Purpose? What is the change this organization wants to see in the world? • Why does this organization choose to work toward that Purpose with the activities it pursues, and not others? • Why does this organization work with the people it works with, and not others? • Why does this organization work for the people it works for, and not others? • Why does this organization work with and for people in a certain way, and not in other ways? The core elements of a story are the following: A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s a tension arc, whether disguised or not. This looks something like the following: often there is a somewhat recognizable starting situation, then a problem or a challenge arises; a solution is sought for this challenge; and finally we’re not sure how it’s going to end until we do know how it’s going to end. The end. The narrator or protagonist must have something familiar and recognizable. A good story tells you something new or something familiar in a new way. You remember a good story. And, a good story makes you feel something. An excellent story inspires you on top of that; it makes you want to do something differently than you had been before you heard it. Apart from that, a Brand Book should explain to the reader what value the document itself is trying to add to their life. Why should I read this Brand Book? What are you trying to offer me with this, and why should I care? After reading this Brand Book, what do you want me to do differently, or think or feel differently about? The elements of a Brand Book So, what elements do you absolutely need in a Brand Book? Truthfully, it depends on your situation. However, our experience points out that you will want to use most if not all of the following sections or chapters to construct your book, preferably in following order: These answers can be answered implicitly or explicitly, but they need to be thought of beforehand, and they need to be answered. 1. Introduction. Why this Brand Book, what is it about and what can the reader expect to get from it? Different brands, different Brand Books – always a story 2. Origin story. Where does our organization/brand come from? What is our history? This should naturally lead to: A Brand Book can be big or small, physical or digital and it can be built up out of written text or something completely different. Either way, it’s a smart thing to think about ways to make your Brand Book as interactive as possible. It’s not 1920 anymore. 3. Why do we exist? What is our Purpose; what is the change we want to see in the world? This is often a very logical place to describe your core Value Proposition (preferably in the form of a tagline or slogan), and your Mission and Vision statements. You can choose to add subsections to explain your Purpose/Value add/Mission/Vision further. There’s no reason why your Brand Book couldn’t exist in the form of a video, if your business is in graphic design and production, or a videogame or app if that suits the identity of your organization better than a book. It could even be an haute 7 8. How do we take social/environmental responsibility? In this day and age, the government, tax accountants, potential customers, new employees and business partners all will want to know the answer to this question. The same applies to the employees that are currently with you. To what extent does your organization work towards its Purpose outside of its core business and/or the things it needs to do to keep a healthy stream of revenue and profit? 4. What is it we do? This should be clear to the audience for your Brand Book, and should already be made tangible in your mission and vision statements at least. Still, it can be very helpful to explain clearly ‘why this organization chooses to work towards its Purpose with the activities it pursues, and not others’. It can also be of help to define exactly what your scope is, and what leeway there exists to change or broaden that scope. 5. Who do we work with, and how do we work? In this section it makes sense to say something about the personalities of typical employees and (business) partners for your brand. What do you look for? It also makes sense to say something about your core values and culture, here. Have you done any research as to what your organizational culture is like? What does that research say? What type of culture do you strive for? 9. How do we envision the future and what do we expect to achieve in the next few years? Here it makes sense to elaborate on your Vision as described in 3. What are trends you expect to make a big impact on your organization and its stakeholders in the future? How does your organization plan to navigate these? What are key achievements your organization wants to unlock in the next three to five years? 6. Who do we work for? Here it makes sense to mention some of your customers, to identify characteristics of your (favorite) types of customers, and explain something about why you want to work for certain people/organizations rather than others. It also makes sense to connect this explanation to your Purpose. 10. What can I do? What is my part? How can I contribute? More often than not, the target audience for a Brand Book will be built up largely of current employees of an organization. For each group of stakeholders, you may want to think about a few Call-to-Actions (CTAs) near the end of your Brand Book. What do you want them to do (differently) and how can they contribute to your organization reaching its goals and creating the change it wants to see in the world? What do you expect from them? What is the space they can occupy to have their own personal impact? 7. How do we communicate? All organizations, brands, and people communicate. It is a part of “what you do and how you do it”, but as it relates to brand identity and brand management, it’s essential to treat it separately. In this section you want to elaborate on your Purpose, Mission, Vision and core value proposition from Section 3, giving your audience the tools and guidelines on how to communicate. What is an easy way to explain your organization or brand at a birthday party, for instance? What is a good 1-minute pitch? What is the tone-of-voice we want to use, and why? Do we have a managed visual style, what is it, how does it work and what are the key elements? How do I use it and do we have a Brand Style Guide available? 11. Summary. It usually makes sense to summarize the key points from all of the chapters/sections in your book, and place it near the end or the front of it for easy reference, and to drive your main points home. Summaries help people grasp and remember the key points. 8 All of these elements are helpful to use, and as you can see the following order helps you tell a story that has a clear beginning, middle and end. However; absorb from the above list what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is essentially your own. Inspiration: The 10 most beautiful Brand Books/Style Guides Are you looking for inspiration for your Brand Book? There are plenty of companies that have published their brand books online. We’ve gone ahead and compiled a list to help you get inspired. On our blog you will find a selection of our favourite Brand Books and Style Guides4. 9 Creating a Brand Book So, now that you know what a Brand Book is, how it can help you manage your brand from the inside out and what elements you need, how do you go about actually creating a Brand Book? Manage the project as you would any project, be sure to make the case crystal clear and use the best practices we have collected for you from our years of experience. Project management as you usually would Agile/Scrum, Prince, KanBan, or more traditional project management tools – what do you usually use when you have a larger project to manage? We advise you to approach the creation of a Brand Book as you would any project that is meant to have a serious impact on your business. Apart from that, at Lytho we are used to working with Agile/Scrum and feel the speed and flexibility of creating tangible/visible parts of the eventual completed project/product and being able to collect feedback based on that is very helpful. Managing a project comes down to the following: make a strategic/tactical plan, setup a budget, pick a team and manage the project proactively. Don’t forget; you need a set budget, not only money-wise but also time-wise. Your strategic plan should incorporate a rationale for how things fit into your broader branding, HR/ recruitment/culture and marketing efforts. And you need a plan for adoption and “governance” after introduction of your Brand Book and the newly formed or consolidated brand identity. Making the financial case There are many ways to go about creating a Brand Book, but as we believe it to be a fundamental tool to reinforce an existing or new brand identity throughout your organization and any stakeholders that you feel it may be of value to, we advise that you take the project very seriously. Managing the project properly means making space, time, and resources available. What you will need to do then, is make the case for the Brand Book as if it were any other investment in the invaluable intangible asset that is a brand. However, the main argument for creating a Brand Book, aside from its aiding in managing and strengthening your brand from the inside out is: There is no better way to solidify the core idea and the story of our brand or organization than to sit down with the relevant stakeholders, come to a unifying story, and to then write it down. There’s also no better way to guarantee that a newly formed or consolidated brand identity will be properly managed carrying forward into the future, than to have the right stakeholders involved in the process of pinning it down. Remember, a brand is not only an asset for marketing; it’s an asset for management, for HR, and recruitment, first, and an asset for marketing and sales, second. The financial value of a brand (book) According to Millward Brown Optimor’s analysis, in 1980 almost the entire value of an average S&P 500 company was comprised of tangible assets (chairs, factories, inventory, etetera). In 2010, tangible assets accounted for only 30 to 40 percent of a company’s value. The rest is intangible value, and about half of that intangible portion, close to 30 percent of total business value, is attributed to brands5. Brands irrevocably add value to a business. Managers know it, and financial analysts and investors know it as well. Although even in financial markets the intangible asset that is the brand of a company is getting more and more weight over the last few years, any method or model to gauge it is, essentially, only an estimate. As Wally Olins has said: ‘There’s only one true way to gauge the value of a brand, and that is to sell it.’ We feel strongly that the arguments for creating a Brand Book and investing in it, should be mainly strategic. However, it may be the case that you have more bottom-line oriented decision makers you need to get to agree to your plans. How do you go about it? Various methods exist to measure the value of a brand6, and to estimate the ROI of an investment to increase the strength and value of it. If the stakeholders you need to get on board for your Brand Book project need more convincing than with the information and arguments we have already shared here, pick one of the methods listed here6, do the (tangential) math and give them the final push for persuasion with the expected ‘bottom-line’ numbers. 10 Best practices for Brand Book creation to feel – be sure to incorporate interviews with external stakeholders as well. Be sure to speak to at least three customers and get a sense of what they think what your organization is about, and what really sets it apart from others. Business partners can also add valuable insights, so wherever possible, incorporate their insights as well. Finally, we’d like to share with you some best practices that we find helpful for creating a Brand Book that truly delivers on the promise of helping you manage your brand identity more easily, from the inside out. These best practices have to do with assembling your team, getting the right stakeholders involved, and interviewing. Your brand does not belong to you - it belongs to you and all of your stakeholders. Brand Book project team Make sure to have a person on your team who is a decision maker with the authority and budget to make decisions relating to brand identity. Next to that, a core role is the writer – whether you opt for a physical or digital Brand Book is irrelevant: in each and any case you need to be telling a story. Deep interviewing The interviews you conduct for your Brand Book can be very formal or more informal depending on what suits your organizational culture best. However, we do advise to lean more toward the informal side as this makes it easier to uncover often left unspoken views and ideas that can be very helpful. What you also need on your team is an expert interviewer, preferably this is the same person who will be writing your story. This can be a content marketer, or another copywriter who has experience in interviewing people and a natural propensity to be very, very curious. Make sure the interviewer follows through on questions, asking about the why behind the why, and listens closely to what is not being said, to get the best answers above the table. You absolutely do not have to go through every item on the list of elements we shared in a previous chapter, with each and every one of your interviewees. Rather, choose what is appropriate and ask questions that the specific person or the group of persons they’re representing could logically have a meaningful answer to. The last two roles you absolutely need to fill on your team are a graphic designer who will make sure that everything in your Brand Book is perfectly styled and perfectly on brand, and a project manager, who makes sure that decisions made are executed in proper and timely fashion. At the same time: go beyond the obvious and don’t shy away from asking the concierge what future trends are that he thinks might impact the future of your company. People may surprise you with their thoughtfulness and insight – in the process of creating a Brand Book, you should be looking out for these surprises. Stakeholders Be sure to speak to all of the right and relevant stakeholders when trying to pin down the identity, purpose, and core story of your organization. This means you’ll want to speak to at least everybody on the board of directors, the managers of all teams and preferably at least one executive from every department of your organization – or a smaller sample of your employees as time and budget constraints allow. Finally, make sure there is at least some overlap between the questions you pose to various groups of stakeholders inside and outside of your company. The differences and similarities in their respective answers can be extremely helpful to paint the picture behind the surface of your brand. The main point in getting to speak to such a diverse group of people is getting information from each and every angle and echelon of your organization, so you can craft the best story – but possibly more so, to get buy-in and a sense of ownership about the identity of your organization and thus about the Brand Book you’re creating, throughout the organization. Additionally – as your brand lives in the space between what stakeholders ‘feel’ when they think about your brand and what you would want them 11 Conclusion: the single source of truth for your brand A few things a Digital Asset Management system can help you achieve are: Our aim for this guide has been to give you all of the insights and practical steps needed to create your own Brand Book. We expect that after reading it, you will have an even better grasp of what a Brand Book is, how it can help you manage your brand from the inside out and what elements you need; how to make the case for it and how you could actually go about creating one. • Using one source for all content Instead of scattering your content over different tools, a DAM gathers all your marketing content in one place. This is also why a DAM platform is the most logical place for your digital Brand Book to live • Creating your own designs With a DAM that incorporates ‘Create & Publish’ functionalities, everyone is a designer. Predefined templates make it easy to create advertorials, websites or brochures within your content hub – and always onbrand. • Saving up to 70% of your time Advanced search options and easier feedback processes within DAM systems such as Lytho allow you to spend time on what matters1. We hope this guide has been helpful for you and would love to hear your thoughts. To help more easily manage your brand, we believe it’s highly valuable to have one single source of truth as to what your brand’s purpose is, and how that purpose connects everything we do and the way we do it. This is why, regardless the form you will eventually choose, either a physical or cloud-stored Brand Book that everyone can have centralized access to – preferably in a cloud-based DAM solution - is a good idea. Want to learn more about the benefits of a DAM system to your brand management efforts? • To learn more about the added value of a DAM system for managing your brand, download our whitepaper “Improve your Marketing Performance with DAM.” • To learn more about the Lytho DAM platform and its core capabilities, click here8 or go right ahead and book a demo with us9. It’s free and online, and takes up no more than about 20 minutes. The single source of truth for your brand assets — DAM platforms Especially for marketing teams who are collaborating remotely with each other, their internal and external marketing ecosystem and other internal and external stakeholders, a Digital Asset Management platform like Lytho1 can add a lot of value. Applied strategically, you will be sure to get the most value out of your brand and the related assets by using a DAM system. 12 About the author ing-dam 8. Solution & Features - Lytho. https://www.lytho.com/solution Lytho is the single source to manage, create and publish your digital assets. We deliver brand consistency. Streamline your marketing efforts, and save time creating, finding and publishing your digital content with our Digital Asset Management platform. 9. Book a demo - Lytho. https://launch.lytho.com/book-demo-lytho Lytho is the product of 30 years of experience. After listening to leading marketeers, designers, UX researchers, and anyone who gave us valuable feedback, we decided it was time to create something new. Learn more about us and our DAM platform at www.lytho.com. Erwin Lima is a content marketer at Lytho. He is fascinated with innovation and identity, and a content strategist and copywriter with more than 6 years of experience in the world of content marketing and technology. Suggested further reading/references 1. Lytho homepage – Lytho. www.lytho.com 2. The Lytho Digital Asset Management platform – Lytho. Lytho Digital Asset Management platform 3. The Six elements of successful Brand Management – Lytho. six elements of successful brand management3 4. The 10 most beautiful Brand Books/Style Guides – Lytho. Our favourite Brand Books and Style Guides4 5. Brand Leadership Equals Business Leadership – Brand Strategy Insider. https://www.brandingstrategyinsider. com/brand-leadership-equals-business-leadership/ 6. 6Ways to measure the value of a brand – Brand Strategy Insider. https://www.brandingstrategyinsider. com/6-ways-to-measure-the-value-ofbrands/ 7. Improve your marketing performance with DAM. Whitepaper - Lytho. https://launch.lytho.com/download-whitepaper-improve-market- 13