042. How to Write a Branding Brief (Tips)

How to write a branding brief for a designer

It’s important for your designer to fully understand your business inside and out before going into the development stage of a project. We advise looking into doing a Sprint workshop before starting. But if you haven’t got the budget or the time to do this, then take a look at our points below and consider every one when briefing your next branding project.

Company name

This is quite obvious, the designer wouldn’t know your company name at this stage. Unless you would like the designer to come up with a name for you, but this would be charged as an extra within the quotation.

Your story

Within Create8, we like to develop brands around meaningful stories. Knowing the reasons you set up your business gives a creative vision for a designer to work from. What’s your passion, your background, your dreams for the future. We want your brand to be as inspiring as you see it.

Describing your company, service or products

Describe the type of products or services you will sell. Give an indication on the size of your company and what your products actually do, this can inspire the route our branding team will go down.

Your industry

This is great for us to start our research phase. Once we know your industry, we can look at other companies in your sector to see what works well and what doesn’t. You can also advise us on what competitors you definitely like and don’t like. You’ll want to stand out amongst the crowd so let’s take a look at the competition.

What do you like?

We aren’t asking for a logo to copy; there are so many different styles of logos, sending over some examples is a good way to get to grips with what you have in mind. Helping to avoid wasting any time on a style you already know you don’t want.

Your brand values

On a scale of 0 to 5 how you would rate your brands personality. This would give us a good understanding of what you’re thinking about your brands’ personality.

Mature – O O O O O – Youthful

Playful – O O O O O – Sophisticated

Economical  – O O O O O – Luxurious

Literal  – O O O O O – Abstract

How would you like the culture of your company to be?

Professional, Fun/Quirky, Tech, Strict, the list is endless.

Who are your main competitors?

Listing your main competitors gives us a good understanding of how the level you rate your business or want your business to be.

Describe your current target audience

Understanding your target audience gives us a great idea of who your branding is aimed at. If you’re finding it hard to figure out your target audience, just put what you want your target audience to be or the common type of person that uses/will use your services. At this stage it may take a little bit of research to find out exactly who that is.

• Age Group:
• Gender:
• Locations:
• Income Level:
• Educational Level:
• Occupations:
• Ethnic Backgrounds:

Colour preferences or existing brand colours

If you have an existing brand and are having a rebrand from us, you may have colour(s) you want to keep. If not, we can choose specific colours that suit or match tour industry and brand.

Do you have a company tag line?

Some companies use tag lines and some don’t, it depends on how you want to brand it. If you don’t have one but want one, have a good think about what works not only with your company but with the branding too. Stuck for ideas? Speak to us about coming up with your tagline, this would need to be included in the quotation.

Inspiring brands

What brands inspire you? This could an older brand or a start up. If you like the way a certain brand portrays itself online and offline it would be worth mentioning this upfront.

Deadlines

Deadlines give us an idea of how long we have to research, create and develop your idea until it’s perfect. Depending on the project as a whole we suggest giving the designer a good amount of time.

Do you require brand guidelines?

Brand Guidelines are a set of rules in which your brand should abide by, for example certain fonts, photography, logo rules, colours etc. This helps your brand stay consistent throughout every department, internal or external.

Budget?

If you have budget for your branding project, mention it in advance. This gives the designer an idea on time, extended identity and everything else.

If you’re looking to start your branding project, talk to us about how we can help.