Julie Andrews Was Right About Branding
“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with ABC, when you sing you begin with Do, Re, Mi.”
— Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp, in The Sound Of Music
Even branding has its ABCs.
If Maria Von Trapp ran a branding agency she would insist on starting with the ABCs — tone, purpose, and style. Before we can communicate a brand’s offerings cogently, or, further still, make branding poetry, we must know our ABCs.
The challenge with a new brand language is that, unlike with the ABC’s of music or language, we have no preexisting rules developed over the centuries. And that is the best part! We get to riff and create these rules from scratch. The end result is a set of guidelines for the brand.
Working from this predefined set of communication guidelines (or brand bible, if you will) is the essence of brand communication. But not everyone invests enough time and discipline into this initial groundwork. Seeing a brand communicating without a solid foundation is like watching musicians of different genres competing on stage. You end up with a confusing cacophony. It rarely happens, and it never should!
Let’s not reinvent the alphabet with every piece of brand communication.
A brand bible, when developed well, can help set a consistent tone in brand language across platforms, and create a unified visual personality. As a result, content and design teams can use the brand bible as a starting point for ideas, a common ground between different mediums, and a foundation to build each brand communication on.
Eventually, a consistent and unique brand language can achieve high recall value and recognition.
We love our brand bibles.
Here’s a little bit about how brand communication guidelines help us work efficiently and effectively at Write Leela Write.
Need to make a new website? Copy and design teams can quickly come up with a coherent solution to communicate the brand’s purpose and offerings, because the brand bible puts us all on the same page.
Need to extend your brand to packaging? We won’t get bogged down by the minutiae of which font or colour to use, because we already know. Designers and content writers can work instead on clutter-breaking visuals and on-the-shelf recognition.
Need a last minute event booth design? Designers can ready print files before the deadline because the brand bible lays down basic visual units that can be used, replicated, and adapted, for the specific purpose at hand.
Need your brand to quickly add its voice to a trending topic on social media? This can be done quickly and accurately, because we’ll know what your brand sounds like if it were a person. With the help of the brand bible, we can extrapolate the tone, language, and vocabulary your brand should be using for each market and platform.
We’ll also know who your brand would be if it were a magical animal, a super hero, or even a character in the Sound of Music.
Now, wouldn’t you like to know too?
