Building a Creative Brief
Before we begin any naming project, we send clients our Brand Assessment Workbook for them to fill out and return to us. This document essentially becomes a creative brief for the project. And even when a client already has a detailed creative brief, there is still a lot of value and insight to be gained from completing our Workbook.
Here is an outline of what the Workbook entails:
1. General Brand Information
- Basic questions about the brand, its industry, its competitors, and some of the category language used.
- The brand’s position in the marketplace
- competitor info
- industry perception
- industry language
2. Brand Foundations
- Mission, Vision, Brand Values, etc.
3. Brand Personality
- Questions that tease-out various aspects of the brand personality, coming at it from different angles
4. Brand Archetypes
- Identifying the Brand Archetypes that most align with this company or product brand under development.
5 & 6. Name Mood Boards
- Discussing existing brand names that could work conceptually for the new brand, and why.
7. Free Association
- This is where our clients can go free-form and discuss anything else about their company or product(s) that are relevant to our naming process.
The Brand Assessment Workbook in practice
The Brand Assessment Workbook is the centerpiece of our project Kickoff Call discussion. Together with our client we go through their Workbook responses and use this as both a general outline of our thinking for the process as a whole and specifically as a lead-in to our work crafting the Brand Positioning foundation in Week 1.