Forty’s Brand Handbook: How to Understand Your Brand

Have you ever worried that your company’s marketing materials are nice, but don’t reflect who you really are?

There’s a lot more to marketing materials than just design and copywriting. Before we ever begin visual design work, we conduct interviews, survey the competition, brainstorm brand concepts, develop a content strategy, etc. It’s all part of understanding the problem before we begin solving it.

However, we noticed that this background work was sometimes confusing to our clients, who didn’t really get to see it as it happened. We disappeared for a while and came back with really great work, but they didn’t get to see the hows and whys behind it.

We decided it was time to begin showing our work, so we took the results of all the research, the brainstorming, the refining, etc., and put it together into a clear, beautiful, customized package we could deliver to our clients: The Brand Handbook.

Every Brand Handbook is unique.. It covers the background research conducted, as well as the conceptual, verbal, and visual foundations of the brand. Many of the reports we used to deliver to our clients separately (personas, positioning statements, mood boards, etc.) are now all part of their customized Brand Handbook.

Reading through a company’s Brand Handbook (which usually comes to about 20-30 pages) gives you a crystal-clear picture of what their brand is about, how it feels to consumers, why it exists, how it looks, etc. It’s emotional and practical at the same time, embracing all the key elements of a memorable brand presence.

Good design is about knowing what you’re designing for, and the Brand Handbook solves that problem, reducing the sway of individual preference and opinion, and keeping things focused on agreed-upon goals and strategies.

A customized Brand Handbook is a completely portable document that exists not just as part of a single project, but as a resource that clearly and decisively explains your brand to an internal team or external partners or vendors.

We’ve seen such success with this so far that we’ve made it a mandatory step for almost every project we’re involved with. The up-front investment in your brand pays off quickly as you begin to see how clear and focused your marketing materials become as a result.

So, if you’ve ever wondered whether your marketing materials are nice, but ultimately ineffective, a fully customized Brand Handbook is probably exactly what you need to get things back on track.