How to Get Brand Identity Right Every Time
If you're running creative strategy, you can't afford sloppy brand identity. Inside Foreplay's Briefs, you can lock in everything from fonts and tone to taglines and high-res assets so your creators hit the mark every time without endless back and forth.
If you're a marketer or an agency offering creative strategy services, you need to nail the brand identity every time.
Jumping into Foreplay, I'll show you how it's done using Briefs.
Briefs in Foreplay allows me to tell my creators what I want them to do. Whether that's a UGC content creator, it's a designer who's graphically designing our ads or it's a photographer.
Anyone who's creative on your team who's making media for you, we want to make sure that we give them the best information so they hit every single time.
Once you open Briefs, I recommend creating a brand profile. Once you've built this, you never have to build it again, it'll be attached to every brief you make.
In this example, we're using the brand Gold Hinge, they make women's athletic wear.
Once we've added brand colors, we can add in a brand guidelines.
Maybe you have something in Google Drive or you have it in Canva. You can attach them in your brief, that way they'll be attached to every brief that you create and sent to every creator you brief to make assets for your brand.
We can see fonts as well. In this example, you can see I've attached the link for the download to download their brand font. We recommend that you don't just specify the font.
What if they go to a website and they download the wrong font?
Before you know it, you have the wrong font in all of your creatives.
Maybe they got it from a dodgy website, and then unfortunately, you don't have the right font.
We want to link the font so they can download it directly from the brief.
Then we have music genres. What kind of music do we want in our creative? If we have making video creative or audio creative, we want to specify what kind of music is permissible.
We can remove this entirely, or we can add in music that's appropriate for our brand.
Then voice and brand personality.
What does your brand sound like?
This is very hard to communicate sometimes. We have to use adjectives that are very descriptive, and we don't want to spend huge amounts of time.
For Gold Hinge, we have sophisticated as the voice. This is one adjective I think perfectly describes this brand, but maybe you're more whimsical.
Maybe you're more trustworthy, romantic, rebellious, playful?
If this is how you would describe the voice of your brand and how every piece of creative that speaks to your target customer, then select it here in your brand profile.
You can also add a tagline. If you don't have a tagline, you can use a mission statement, or feel free to leave these blank.
This brand does have a tagline, "Are you a Gold Hinge girl?"
It's a question, makes them think, are they part of the club?
It might be a good idea to have a tagline to attach this in there, because then your creatives can lean on this when they're putting together ad creative for you.
They might not just be ad creative, it might be photography, it might be videography, but they have that idea of what the tagline is and what you communicate to your customers.
Think about Nike, what's their tagline?
"Just do it".
Most brands aren't Nike, and not everyone knows your tagline, so you might want to communicate this in your brief.
Then, moving down into web properties, we can link your website.
You'd be surprised how many brands go wrong here and accidentally don't link the brand when they're briefing their creators and then suddenly their creators have picked up the wrong branding.
They've got the wrong logo.
They've got the wrong, identity.
They've got the wrong address.
They've got the wrong product entirely.
It's very important to link your website because if you have another brand that sounds like yours, they might accidentally end up on that website.
Then we can add the Facebook URL, the Instagram URL, the TikTok URL, this is great for any creator that you're working with that needs to do research on the brand and LinkedIn Twitter and Pinterest, if that's appropriate to.
We can also link in brand assets. You can link specific assets that might be photography, videography, logos so that creators have them. You want to provide your creators with the highest quality assets.
You can imagine if they go to your website to download them, they might get low quality versions. So linking assets can save you a laborious and time-consuming and ultimately very expensive back and forth process.
We can add multiple asset links here as well so that you never run out.
And finally, additional information. You might want to include some additional information that might be a loom video that's relevant to the brand identity.
And that's how you can nail brand identity for the brands that you're working with, whether you're a marketer or you're an agency every single time.
