From your brand’s vision to how your brand speaks, a brand brief spells out the elements that make your brand unforgettable. As an output of the branding (or rebranding) process, a comprehensive brand brief also ensures everyone has a clear understanding of what the brand is about.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to create an impactful brief that communicates your brand identity, goals, and expectations. You’ll learn actionable tips for building the perfect brand brief — and we’ll even share some inspiring examples of brand briefs that have paved the way for unforgettable marketing campaigns and designs.
Looking for even more helpful branding content? This article is part of a series of articles on everything you need to know about branding including:
- Brand management
- Brand briefs
- Brand guidelines
- Brand governance
- Brand compliance
- Brand management software
What we'll cover
Table of contents
- What is a brand brief?
- How a brand brief works in conjunction with brand guidelines
- The 10 essential components of an effective brand brief
- Brand brief vs. creative brief: What’s the difference?
- The benefits of creating a brand brief
- Who is in charge of writing the brand brief?
- How to create a successful brand brief step-by-step
- Inspiring brand brief examples
What is a brand brief?
A brand brief informs your company’s brand identity. It instructs creative teams on how to portray the brand’s objectives, goals, values, and vision to ensure consistency across touchpoints.
This document gives creative and marketing teams guidance and context to develop on-brand assets and messaging. Company leaders and decision-makers also rely on the brand brief to help them support the company’s branding efforts.
We’ll cover the essential components of a brand brief in detail later in this article. But at a high level, within a brand brief, you’ll find the company’s mission, values, and key information about the company’s target audience, main competitors, and what makes the brand unique.
When your company collaborates with external partners, the brand brief is a vital document that helps them effectively portray your brand.
How a brand brief works in conjunction with brand guidelines
Consider the process of building a home. The architect creates a blueprint to reflect how the home will look and function. To bring the blueprint to life, builders must follow all zoning laws and building codes.
In branding, the brand brief is the blueprint and the brand guidelines are the laws and codes. While the guidelines set rules and regulations for implementing the brand, the brief establishes the goals. This includes who the brand communicates with and its messaging.
A brand brief with brand guidelines is the brand’s single source of truth, ensuring consistency, clarity, and professionalism across platforms and materials.
The 10 essential components of an effective brand brief
Creating a brand brief is a team effort that may include marketers, strategists, designers, and copywriters. Once you’ve assembled your team, here are the key elements you’ll want to make sure your brand brief includes.
1. Vision statement
A vision statement describes the inspirational, long-term end-state or future position a brand is working to achieve. It’s a short phrase that communicates your brand’s big-picture impact and includes both long- and short-term objectives.
“To provide access to the world's information in one click.” - Google
“To nourish people and the planet.” - Whole Foods
2. Mission statement
While the vision statement focuses on a brand’s long-term aspirations, a mission statement spotlights what your brand is currently doing to fulfill its purpose. It should clearly state how you plan to achieve your vision.
“We believe that every child in the United States needs — and deserves — healthy food in order to grow and thrive.” - No Kid Hungry
"To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time." - Starbucks
3. Brand promise
Your brand promise is a concise, powerful statement that communicates the experience, feeling, or value your brand consistently delivers. It includes the solutions and expectations your brand aims to communicate to customers and prospects.
“15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance.” - GEICO
“Quiet luxury. Crafted experiences. Intuitive service.” - Marriott
4. Brand values
Every company should have core principles and beliefs that guide operations, decision-making, and overall identity. These are brand values. Examples include integrity, quality, and eco-friendliness.
Disney: Magic, Storytelling, Family
Apple: Innovation, Simplicity, Design
5. Target audience
Your target audience includes the people your brand intends to reach with marketing messages, products, and services. In a brand brief, this section should include information about audience demographics (age, gender, location, income), psychographics (interests, values, behaviors), and purchase intent.
LinkedIn: Professionals and job seekers seeking networking and career opportunities.
Six Flags: Thrill-seekers of all ages and families with teens and young children.
6. Brand positioning/USP
Why should people choose you over your competitor? Brand positioning reflects the distinct place your brand occupies in the minds of your target audience. Your unique selling position (USP) expresses the features, benefits, or guarantees that set your product or service apart.
“Eat fresh.” (Positions brand as focused on food quality and healthy ingredients) - Subway
“Volvo, for life.” (Positions brand as focused on safety) - Volvo
7. Key competitors
Key competitors can include both direct competitors (the businesses that offer similar or identical products and services in the same market) or indirect competitors (businesses in the same category that offer different products or services to solve the same problem).
Toyota: Honda, Ford, Hyundai
Walmart: Amazon, Target, Costco
8. Competitive advantage
This is the edge your brand has over competitors. It can include the attributes, resources, or capabilities that allow your brand to outperform competitors and provide greater value to customers.
Aldi: No frills shopping experience, but unbeatable prices.
Chick-fil-A: Consistent, delightful customer experience and food.
9. Brand voice
A company’s brand voice is the distinct personality and communication style the company cultivates to interact with audiences across touchpoints. Having a distinctive brand voice is critical to differentiating your business, creating a consistent customer experience, and fostering brand loyalty.
Wendy’s: Quirky, conversational, humorous
Dove: Inclusive, positive, encouraging
10. Brand culture
Brand culture includes the values, beliefs, and behaviors that define how your company operates and positions itself in the market. It’s the DNA that shapes every brand experience and touchpoint.
Patagonia: Focused on environmental friendliness and giving back to the planet, hires people who love the outdoors and adventure.
Southwest Airlines: Fun, caring, and prioritizing employees — not just customers.
Brand brief vs. creative brief: What’s the difference?
A brand brief is an in-depth overview of exactly what your brand is about. It guides the creation and use of all brand-related assets and activities.
A creative brief is a living document that gives creative teams direction for projects. It includes:
- Brand or project statement
- Key objectives/challenges
- Target audience
- Main competitors
- Company values/market positioning
- Campaign channels (such as social media, banner ads, and print materials)
- Timelines
- Deliverables
- Stakeholders
- Links to inspiration and resources
- Brand guidelines
- Client vision
- Company/product positioning
- Audience personas
- Project scope
The benefits of creating a brand brief
A comprehensive brand brief gives you control of your brand story. When creative projects reflect that story, you ensure they’re telling it the way you want it told.
Brand briefs eliminate uncertainty about how your brand should be represented and ensure consistent brand messaging across all brand assets. No matter who’s championing your brand, the brand brief keeps everyone on the same page — from external vendors to internal teams.
Some advantages of creating a branding brief include:
- Clarifying and refining brand strategies and values for content creators
- Communicating the ideas of the creative teams to other internal teams
- Offering clear guidance and direction to external contractors
- Obtaining precise cost estimates for branding services
- Having a reference point for all branding decisions
- Ensuring consistency in all external communications to reinforce the brand’s identity
So, what happens if you’re creating a new brand or if your previous branding no longer accurately depicts your brand? You can adjust the brand brief as necessary to reflect the new branding. This is usually orchestrated by the brand manager.
Who’s in charge of writing the brand brief?
Creating a brand brief is a collective effort between a creative team and executive leadership. Founders and other key managers should actively participate in the process — they have the best understanding of the brand vision. The executive team lends information on the brand’s vision, mission, goals, and core values.
Brand briefs are most effective when they incorporate feedback from people in other departments. Never underestimate the value of getting many different opinions! Customers are also a great resource for key insights into how the public’s perception of your brand differs from internal perceptions.
When it’s time to create a brand brief, choose a member of the creative team with strong communication and project management skills. They should remain hands-on and analytical as brand information and opinions arise throughout the business. They should also have a strong sense of brand awareness, design, and a strong focus on generating results.
If you don’t want to tackle this in-house, branding is one area where external branding agencies add tremendous value to the process. They specialize in brand strategy, visual identity, copywriting, and digital marketing and provide fresh ideas and new ways of thinking to inject creativity into your brand.
Agencies aren’t bound by internal politics and policies, which allows them to be objective and unbiased. They help you ensure your brand strategy aligns with customer needs and market realities.
How to create a successful brand brief step-by-step
Step #1: Define your brand brief objectives
Before you even get started writing your brand brief, you should clarify its objective and gather information.
- Is your brand brief for a new brand, a rebrand, a brand refresh, or for a specific campaign?
- What is the purpose of your brand brief? Is it stakeholder alignment, guiding creative teams, or establishing brand positioning?
- What is your product, idea, or offering?
- What problem does it solve?
- Who does it solve this problem for?
- What makes your solution unique?
Your merged answers to this question should be a quick, yet accurate response to the question, “What do you do?”
“We are BRAND NAME, and we create/offer BRAND OFFERING for BRAND AUDIENCE who want to BRAND SOLUTION and BRAND USP or COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE.”
It’s almost like an elevator pitch!
Step #2: Research your target market
Defining your target market allows you to tailor your marketing messages, channels, and strategies to reach those most likely to buy your products or services. Great branding briefs identify the brand’s main persona.
Ask questions like:
- Who are we selling to?
- What problems do they have?
- What unique attributes separate our customers from other people?
- How does our solution alleviate their problem and simplify their life?
But what do you do if you don’t know your target audience?
Start by looking at your current customers. Do the people who buy from you have common characteristics or interests? If so, this is a good place to begin targeting.
Next, consider your product or service. Determine who would benefit most from your solution and your product features. You can also identify your ideal customers. Ask yourself what that person looks like, including their age, gender, income level, marital status, and occupation.
Step #3: Research your competition
Keeping tabs on your competitors is a great way to stay relevant. When you know who you’re competing with, you can gauge what adjustments you might need to make to remain top of mind. Your brand brief template should include at least three top competitors.
To determine who belongs in those slots, you need to do your market research. Find companies offering similar products and services. Gather data on their target audience’s needs, preferences, and purchasing behaviors. You can also explore competitors’ websites, social media profiles, and online reviews to learn more about their offerings and customers.
Step #4: Research your brand’s competitive advantages
Here’s another reason it’s smart to watch your competition: It makes it easier to identify what sets you apart.
- Do you have access to resources that allow you to sell at lower rates?
- Are you positioned in a better location?
- Do you have the best talent working in the industry?
- Do you have a network economy that encourages word-of-mouth growth?
If you’re struggling to pinpoint your competitive advantages, take the time to compare your products to your competitors, and consider asking your customers why they chose your brand over the competition.
Step #5: Research your industry
Understanding the broader landscape in which your brand operates is a must for creating a comprehensive brand brief. Industry research helps you identify trends, opportunities, and potential challenges that could impact your brand's success.
Begin by gathering data on your industry’s current state. Look into market reports, industry publications, trend analyses — anything to get a sense of the overall health and direction of your market. Pay attention to emerging technologies, regulatory changes, and economic factors that could influence your business.
Next, you need to identify key industry players — including suppliers, distributors, and partners — and understand their roles within the ecosystem. This will help you separate the collaborators from the threats.
Finally, stay informed about your industry’s consumer trends. What are the current demands and expectations of your target market? How are these evolving? Use this information to align your brand strategy with market needs, ensuring that your brand remains relevant and competitive.
Step #6: Define the brand mission and vision
Your mission is the who, what, and why of your brand. Your vision is the impact your brand hopes to make. It’s important to define your mission and vision so you can strike a balance between your current and aspirational states.
When defining your mission, get clear on your business's core purpose. Why does your company exist, and what problem does it solve? What does it hope to achieve in the future? Once you answer these questions, craft an action-oriented and impactful mission statement that includes your company’s purpose, business goals, and customer value proposition.
Defining your company vision focuses on describing its overarching purpose and intended future state. It’s a concise statement and should be inspiring, aspirational, and reflective of your company’s values and goals.
At Google, the company vision is to ‘provide access to the world's information in one click.’ Their mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’
Step #7: State your brand values
Your brand values help frame your story and humanize your brand. And more human brands inspire customer loyalty.
One question that will help you express your values: What beliefs does your brand stand for? Ask your employees and customers to weigh in.
By establishing solid brand values, you stay true to your mission and vision. You boost employee performance (who doesn’t want to work for a company with clearly defined values?) and create a memorable brand. Defined brand values will also enable you to better connect with your audience because you can design messaging directly around those values.
Step #8: Develop your brand promise
Once you’ve nailed down your target audience, it’s time to clarify what they can expect from your brand. Generic messaging without a clear strategy is a missed opportunity. Brand promises are simple, unique, and memorable. (Bonus points if they’re also credible and inspiring!)
To create a memorable brand promise, start by listing why customers choose your brand. Select the reasons that resonate most with your ICP and what customers rely on your brand to deliver.
Here’s an example: At Ziflow, our customers choose us because we provide a faster way for creative teams to collaborate and streamline the review and approval process. Our brand promise includes helping creative teams review and approve creative content faster and more accurately.
Need another example? M&Ms has a great ‘no chocolate mess’ brand promise.
Step #9: Define your unique value proposition
This is the ultimate ‘why choose me?’ for your brand.
Sometimes, the value proposition might sound like the brand promise, but it’s not the same.
While the brand promise is what your customers should expect from your brand, the value proposition is the reason they should favor your brand over your competitors.
To pinpoint your value proposition, ask questions like:
- How are my products different from the competition?
- Does my product use fewer resources to achieve the results?
- What features does it have?
- What emotional drivers of purchasing does it cater to?
- What hidden needs does it fulfill?
- What are the rational drivers for purchasing behavior?
Step #10: Establish your brand positioning
Brand positioning defines how your brand is perceived in the minds of your target audience relative to your competitors. It’s a critical step in your brand brief because it lays the foundation for your marketing strategy, messaging, and overall brand identity.
Start by identifying your unique value proposition. What sets your brand apart from others in your industry? We’re talking about product features, pricing, quality, customer service, or any other aspect that provides distinct value to your customers.
Then you should think about how you articulate your brand’s key attributes and benefits. Create a positioning statement that succinctly captures what your brand stands for and why customers should choose you over the competition. This statement should keep 3 C’s in mind: clear, compelling, and consistent. And it should align with your brand’s overall mission and vision.
If you want to see if your brand positioning resonates with your target audience (who wouldn’t?), test it through market research. Conduct surveys, focus groups, or interviews with potential customers to gather feedback. Use this feedback to refine your positioning until it aligns perfectly with your audience's needs and perceptions.
Step #11: Establish brand voice and image
Most companies have their brand’s visual personality covered. But the brand voice is just as important.
Brand voice is your brand’s unique attitude and personality. It’s what makes your brand memorable and creates consistency and harmony across marketing channels.
Your brand voice should reflect your identity and resonate with your target audiences. You’ll want to establish guidelines for the tone, language, and communication style your brand uses across touchpoints. Ask yourself how you want your brand to come across:
- Do you want to be seen as an industry authority?
- Do you want to strike a balance between fun and informative?
- Will your tone be more formal or casual?
It’s helpful to choose a brand archetype or character that aligns with your identity to give your brand a more defined presence. For example, Nike embodies the classic “Hero” archetype with their “Just Do It” slogan and inspirational spirit, encouraging customers to achieve greatness.
Laying down the brand culture
The brand culture is what your company looks like from the inside out. If core values are the heart of your company, culture is the soul.
Here’s an inside look at how Ziflow handled its own brand culture:
It was 2023, and Ziflow had been running full steam since the middle of the previous decade. Our growth had been explosive, our platform was getting better every day, but there was something… off. We’d cooked up a meal of a collaborative proofing platform and used every great ingredient we could think of in the process. But any chef knows that if you use everything, you get no distinct flavor.
In short, our brand had drifted and needed a reevaluation.
So what did we do? We partnered and collaborated with one of the best branding agencies in the space to give us an unfiltered assessment of where we could improve and be the sharpest version of ourselves. It was a meticulous, sometimes constructively frustrating process that pushed us to find what drive’s Ziflow at its core. It’s been a deeply rewarding experience.
You might be wondering why Ziflow used an outside agency to handle our new brand activation, as opposed to internal stakeholders who know the company inside and out. The reason is that sometimes you’re too close to your own brand to be able to effectively (and honestly) solve the challenges of what it needs.
After a few months of internal research, reworking, and testing (brand work shouldn’t be rushed), we landed on the tenants of what Ziflow’s brand is. We’re rolling out our new brand direction now, and you’ll see more of it in the future. Everything we do here is so you can let your content flow.
But establishing brand identity is only the first step. You need employee buy-in. If you want employees to rave about your brand, you must first invest in them. Ziflow did it with our employees, and you should, too. Companies with the strongest brand cultures make their teams feel appreciated and recognized for their accomplishments.
This starts at the management level and filters through to the hiring process. When companies clearly articulate their brand values, they’re more likely to hire people who reflect those values and their overall brand culture.
Establishing a great brand culture ensures that you:
- Attract like-minded employees and dream customers.
- Foster passion and motivation among employees.
- Convert employees into passionate brand ambassadors.
- Create an authentic brand.
Inspiring brand brief examples
Need a little inspiration to get your creativity flowing? Here are a few of our favorite brand brief examples from some of the most well-known brands.
Example #1: Virgin’s brand brief
Virgin’s brand brief begins with a company profile describing the group, when it was founded, and its main market activities. After sharing some impactful numbers, the brand brief clearly highlights Virgin’s brand values. It showcases how the brand should be perceived and portrayed, using actual examples of creative deliverables.
Example #2: BMW’s brand brief
In BMW’s brand brief, the company succinctly highlights the core elements of the brand. This includes BMW’s goals, market research, target audience, and core messaging. Like Virgin, BMW includes sample creative work to illustrate how the brand should look and feel.
Example #3: Hulu’s brand brief
Hulu’s Big Green Guide is a comprehensive example of a brand brief. It includes everything from Hulu’s brand design toolkit to the brand’s tone of voice. There are many examples of how to use (and how not to use) the Hulu brand so anyone who references this brief knows exactly how to represent Hulu.
Example #4: Honda’s brand brief
Honda demonstrates how to infuse the essence of a brand by showing versus telling. This first section of Honda’s brand brief does a great job of showcasing Honda’s bold brand personality while telling the company’s story. The latter half of the brand brief includes colors, illustrations, graphics, and quotes that embody the brand.
Final thoughts: Discover how Ziflow boosts brand management efforts
Writing a brand brief can feel overwhelming. It’s a document that impacts your company’s brand perception — publicly and internally.
When you take the time to outline your brand story and create guidelines for expressing it, you take control of your brand image. The brand brief gives your creative team a foundation for producing work that aligns with your brand values.
