What The Heck Is A ‘Brand Bible?’

Branding is important.

But you already knew that. That’s why you’re here.

Building a brand that has recognizable and cohesive assets, content, and visuals is what will ultimately set you apart from your competition and earn you loyal customers that will support your business for years to come.

This is where your Brand Bible comes in: Simply put, your Brand Bible is a collection of your company assets that outline what you stand for, what your goals are, how your company is to be perceived by the public, and items that visually relate to the experience you’re trying to create for your customers. 

In order for us to build a successful brand (and Brand Bible), we must first start with some studying.

Pre-game Analytics and Studying The Field – Part one of your Brand Bible

It should go without saying that before we put pen to paper (or brand to bible?), we need to do some research. We understand that no one knows your brand better than you (even if your overall concept is still slightly murky to even you) and YOU are our greatest resource (and your own) for better understanding our project and what we’re trying to create. This is why we always start our branding projects with an in-depth call with our clients (which can last anywhere from 1 hour +) where we ask you questions in order to learn more about your brand, your competition, and your audience. We then take everything you give us and dig even deeper. We analyze your social channels and how your audience interacts with you. We check up on your competition and see what they’re up to. We consult with our team. We write. A lot.

Once we complete our initial round of questioning, analyzing of your competition, audience, and current branding, we’re ready to continue to phase two – the basics.

The Basics of Branding – Part two of your Brand Bible 

The basics of your branding would include your company name, logo, tagline, values, goals, mission, typography, colors, patterns, and icons. This combination of attributes allows us to see the foundation of the brand we’re creating and further build upon these basics. We put these in your Brand Bible and use these assets throughout the bible to create a cohesive design that both displays how these assets should be used and how they work together.

Visuals and Voice – Part three of your Brand Bible 

Now that we’ve laid out the basics, we can create brand visuals and voice keys that stay consistent with our basics and help us create a brand with more depth, layers, and characters. Visuals would include Business Card Designs, Letter heads, Social Media Designs, Post Templates, and general creative services to create the image of the brand that we want to create. We use the previously found basics (logo, colors, icons, typography, etc) to create these visuals in line with your brand. Voice creation for your brand would be considered the ‘personality’ of your brand and the type of content you create. For voice, we take a deeper look at your brand’s integrity – what kind of words promote the culture we’re trying to create? Should your content be written in an up-beat, sassy, tongue-in-cheek manor, or should your voice remain mature and authentic? This can be helpful for brand owners who may need help maintaining consistency and focus when creating content or this could be helpful to supply to anyone you may outsource to create content for your business. If someone does not understand your brand, they cannot help you build it.

Implementing and Culture – Part four of your Brand Bible 

The fourth and final part of creating your Brand Bible, focuses on implementing all of our previous work and presenting your new brand to your existing audience while creating a space for your new audience to find you. We implement all of our previous work by starting with changing all of your old branding assets to your new ones. We update your social channels and write guidelines for how your artistic direction and product styling should be done, as well as help you go over these changes and answer any questions you may have. Finally, we supply you with what we like to call a hashtag bank, which is a collection of relevant hashtags that you can use on your social channels and when publishing new content to grow your audience and increase your reach.

Aced’s overall goal is to make your Brand Bible so concise, inclusive, and organized that you could give it to anyone (an employee, graphic designer, your spouse, or even a stranger) and once they read it, they have a crystal clear vision of your company, a deeper understanding of your purpose, and guidelines for how it should all be maintained. Brand Bibles are not just important for understanding your brand, but they’re vital to maintaining the consistency that your customers will identify with, which will keep you winning for years to come.

Ready to get your own Brand Bible? Aced is here to help.