Your brand guidelines are not enough
Why you need a Brand Playbook instead
Most companies have a ‘brand’ in that they have a name, a logo, and a positioning statement. But only a few companies manage to translate their brand into outsized company value via distinctive communications.
Companies like Apple, Nike, Liquid Death and Glossier.
Distinctive brands don’t happen by accident; they are built by teams who have a clear sense of who the brand is, what customers like about it, and how it goes to market differently than everyone else.
Often, brands codify their behaviors into brand guidelines to help agencies and partners make the decisions that bring their brand to life. But most brands don’t end up leading in mindshare and distinctiveness.
Why not?
Most brand guidelines aren’t very good.
(But they are fixable.)
Typically, brand guidelines comprise a document that includes direction on design (i.e. colors and logos) and strategy (i.e. positioning statement, values, and tone of voice). It pains me to say, because I write many positioning statements, but: a positioning statement doesn’t make a brand. A positioning statement is a description of a brand.
A brand is nothing until it comes to life creatively.
Consider water brand Liquid Death, which has grown to a $1.4Bn valuation largely on the strength of its brand.
Liquid Death’s positioning would be described as irreverent and edgy. But many brands describe themselves as irreverent and edgy.
Brand guidelines featuring Liquid Death’s logo and a description of their positioning would not inspire edgy communications.
Examples of edgy communications inspire edgy communications.
Liquid Death is Liquid Death because they take action:
Liquid Death’s heavy metal aesthetic is complemented by ads that are designed to shock and entertain, playing into the brands intense tagline (Murder your thirst) and poking fun at typical marketing tropes:
Instead of spending $6M on a Super Bowl ad, Liquid Death demonstrated its irreverence by auctioning off ad space on their own packaging:
Unlike typical brand partnerships with products designs to sell, Liquid Death partnered with cosmetics brand E.L.F. to promote ‘Corpse Paint:’
When Liquid Death launched tea, product names continued the death theme, with titles like Grim Leafer and Armless Palmer
It’s these videos and taglines and partnerships and packaging that build Liquid Death’s audience and make it easy for future agencies and partners to say, “You know what you should do next….?”
These are the items that belong in brand guidelines.
What could Liquid Death do next?
How about ‘The Earth Strikes Back,’ a Star-Wars inspired short film where an evil-branded Earth fights back against plastic. Or a new Grim Reaper inspired mascot (The Grim Sipper) out to send plastic to the underworld. Or, could Liquid Death create the ‘Extreme Hydration League,’ an NFL-like league to sponsor extreme sports athletes that are ‘too violent’ for TV (and typical energy drinks), such as parkour?
It’s easy to come up with future ads and partnerships for Liquid Death because they have done the hard part of building and publishing a distinctive brand world already.
Actions are key for brands in the midst of a repositioning as well.
Take Abercrombie and Fitch. The brand executed an impressive turnaround after shifting their positioning from ‘exclusive’ in the 2000s (think tight clothing, dark stores, and a focus on a certain type of model) to inclusive.
To convey this ‘inclusive’ re-positioning, Abercrombie defined ‘inclusive’ via its actions:
Product: A&F shifted styles from ultra-tight to relaxed silhouettes, with expanded size ranges and new products such as Curve Love jeans.
Campaigns: A&F shifted from exclusionary to inclusive via its 2020 ‘Face your fierce’ campaign which promoted inclusivity and challenged traditional beauty standards.
Social content: Abercrombie partnered with a range of inclusive influencers like ‘Style not size,’ a pair of women who show what outfits look like on different body types.
Celebrity partners: “Face your fierce” featured a diverse castoff non ‘typical’ models including female soccer star Megan Rapinoe, transgender model Leyna Bloom, paralympic athlete Scout Bassett and LGBTQ activist and NFL player Ryan Russell.
Store design: Abercrombie got rid of dim lighting, loud music, and heavy scents, replacing them with brighter and more welcoming stores.
Abercrombie doesn’t need brand guidelines to describe their positioning. Their brand positioning is clear by their actions.
But what if your brand is not distinctive (yet)?
You may have an idea of where you want your brand to go, or that you want to build a strong brand, but you haven’t yet executed it.
From Brand Guidelines to Brand Playbook
If you want to inspire distinctive brand communications, focus less on perfecting the words of your brand positioning, and more on coming up with actions that convey your positioning, which go into a new document: your Brand Playbook. If you can’t come up with any good actions, you may need to sharpen your positioning.
Think of a Brand Playbook as a sizzle reel for your brand. This is us at our best. These are the campaigns we run, the types of people we work with, the copy we approve. These are the innovative ways we have offered loans to the unbanked, the programs we invest in to clean up the ocean, the models we choose to demonstrate that we care about shifting standards of beauty. This is the world we operate in, and this is how we show up completely differently to everyone else.
This document will…
Ensure consistency across channels
Inspire teams to come up with fresh, new ideas
Force teams to think about how your brand can act, rather than speak. In other words, it will make your brand bolder, sharper, and more distinctive.
How to build a Brand Playbook:
1. Map out your key channels.
What are all the ways in which you will be conveying your brand? As in, what are all the touch points through which you engage with customers? Make a list, and then challenge yourself to double that list. Brand comes to life in every decision you make as a company, so the list should be more than just typical marketing channels.
Some channel ideas:
The kinds of emails you send (Are they promotional? Inspiring? Funny? Do you address your customer by name?).
The design of your packaging (Sustainable? Avant-garde? Easy to pack and fold up? Easy to reuse?)
The types of models/influencers you work with.
Which types brands you collaborate with.
The stores you distribute in.
The design of your shopping bag.
How you train employees (Do they greet everyone who enters your cafe? Do they offer personalized service?)
How you design products (Is the goal High quality? Fit? Price? Sustainability?)
Dr. Dennis Gross skincare conveys a medical positioning through their packaging that resembles the colors of a pillbox.
2. Determine your brand strategy: What’s your positioning?
Your positioning might already exist, or it may need sharpening. But you and team need to align on your brand’s positioning before you develop content for your Brand Playbook, as ideally, all your content will align to that positioning.
For example, Budget airline RyanAir owns a cheap, no-frills positioning. They convey this in product (low prices, no luxuries) and communications (RyanAir’s TikTok makes fun of customers expecting anything but a cheap flight).
3. Fill your Brand Playbook with examples of how each channel (Step 1) is executed through the lens of your positioning (Step 2)
The main difference between brand guidelines and a Brand Playbook is that the Playbook includes examples of how your brand takes action.
What if you don’t have good examples yet?
Include unexecuted ideas.
The point of the Brand Playbook is to inspire better ideas and show the potential of your brand. If you don’t have good examples yet, consider hiring a creative from my partners at Fiverr to mock up some ideas. You can hire people for packaging, ads, copy, even concepting.
Test out your positioning with a few freelancers, and put the best of the best into your Brand Playbook.
4. Socialize the Brand Playbook
Your employees are the ones executing your brand, and they should have a clear idea of how your brand makes decisions. When your Brand Playbook is ready, hold a workshop to present the ideas to various team(s). Even better, make it interactive, and come up with new ideas in the session, and add the best to the Playbook.
5. Keep the Playbook Fresh
As your you execute new ideas, your Brand Playbook should update as well with the latest campaigns, products, and activations. Over time, your Brand Playbook will get stronger. And every new team member will have a better idea of how to make it more distinctive.
Van Leeuwen and the art of not advertising.
“We don’t advertise” is a common refrain I see in founder stories. It’s usually a way to communicate product quality. Our product is so good we didn’t have to advertise.
as a previous brand designer, this is so true. no one in any other department knows how to use the brand book, what we need to be making are playbooks!
This piece hits hard—finally, someone saying what we’ve all been thinking. A brand isn’t its positioning statement; it’s what it does. You can’t just slap some buzzwords in a doc and expect to become the next Nike or Liquid Death.
The whole “Brand Playbook > Brand Guidelines” argument makes so much sense. No one gets excited over a logo usage guide, but a Playbook full of fire campaigns, collabs, and actual moves? That’s what makes a brand feel real. The Liquid Death and Abercrombie examples prove the point—these brands didn’t just tweak their vibe; they lived it through every product, partnership, and post.
The best part? The push to include unexecuted ideas. Brands need to stop waiting until something is perfect to document it. If the vision is strong, the ideas should always be flowing. This piece gets it: The brands that win don’t just talk the talk—they act the brand every single day.