How to prepare a branding brief: a list of questions

A good brief doesn’t have to be long. It does, however, have to answer the questions that design decisions depend on. The list below will help you prepare for a brand workshop — even if you don’t have any materials yet.

The business and the project goal

• What do you do — in one sentence that someone outside your industry would understand?
• Why now? What has changed: a new business, a new market, a merger, a move upmarket?
• A year from now, how will you know the new identity has worked?

Audience

• Who makes the buying decision, and who actually uses the product?
• What do these people think of your industry, and what are they worried about?
• Where will they see your brand most often: on a phone, in a shop, at a trade fair, on an invoice, on packaging?

Brand personality

• Three words you want clients to use to describe your business.
• Three words you don’t want anyone to use to describe your business.
• Brands (including from other industries) whose style you like — and why.

Competitors and constraints

• Your three most important competitors, and how you differ from them.
• Elements that have to stay: the name, a colour, a symbol your clients already know.
• Budget, deadline and the places where the brand must be ready at launch.

The most common mistakes

• A brief written for the designer rather than about the client — too much about taste, too little about the audience.
• Decisions made by committee, with no single person named to sign off the design.
• Expecting a logo “right now”, with no time to test it in real use.

In the brand workshop we go through these questions together, so you don’t need to have every answer. Just set aside two hours and invite the person who makes the decisions.