Dear Tig,
What all should one include in a brand book? What are the main frameworks one should cover?
Thanks, Officer Brand
Dear Officer Brand,
For those who haven't been subjected to “brand books,” the term warrants an explanation.
These guides--often put together by the company's primary ad agency--set out a very precise set of limitations as to how different brand elements can be used.
Generally, they set out not only the limited set of logos, taglines and other elements, but also list very specific guidelines as to sizes, color, context and circumstances under which each should be employed.
Things a brand book should contain include:
- A statement of the brand essence of the company, and how that should be treated at the product or service level.
- All variations of the logos, including how they need to appear in different contexts (black and white, online, etc.).
- Color guidelines, with specific Pantone numbers.
- Taglines, as well as their hierarchy, usage and guidelines.
- Policy on the usage of product and service names and descriptions.
- Level of discretion (and to whom one should appeal) for taking liberties with brand elements for clever creative concepts in, for instance, advertising.
- Current status of trademarks, servicemarks, copyrights, etc., and the required demarcations (as well as future expected changes in these statuses).
- The process by which a sub-brand must evolve in the context of the rest of the company's brand elements.
The better versions of brand books also delineate a proposed evolution of how a brand may develop over time.
A great example is how McDonald's evolved brand in the 80s and 90s, starting out with a new concept such as “McDonald's Chicken McNuggets” and--over a decade--increasing the prominence of “McNuggets” so that it eventually evolved into its own discrete brand. This was not by happenstance. This was “by the book.” Today, it continues to drive insane the Burger King drive-through tellers who have to listen to people drive up and order “McNuggets.”
An important consideration is also what types of discretion should be used. Companies should consider creating a formal process by which changes can be made to the brand book--sort of like a brand legislature. To pretend that all instances will be covered in a brand book is naïve.
There are always new cases, though, that will provide gray areas.
I remember back in the mid-90s working with Sun Microsystems on creating a Java version of their Solaris logo. The logo was a very complicated set of shapes, and the Java version was supposed to rotate around.
The problem was, those shapes were defined only in two dimensions. In order to make a 3-D version of it, we had to extrapolate what those shapes appeared to be on the backside. The brand book was silent.
Our tinkering got us arrested by the brand cops. Only after much haggling with intellectual property lawyers were we released out of brand jail, winding up creating a rotating cube on which the 2-D version of the logo could be seen on each side.
If I remember correctly, this was one of the projects that made me consider going to dental school.
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Hi Tigmund,
Do you happen to have any recent statistics on the average cost per lead these days?
Thanks! L. in Parsippany
Dear Parsippanian,
In traditional direct response, we used to speak about a standard cost per lead because there were limited ways in which we reached people. Different product categories had different CPLs because the various brands tended to have similar rates of response.
This is less so today, because we've added two dimensions to the equation. We now have very different means of acquiring leads, and different companies now employ different metrics as to just what a “lead” is.
The online world shows us this jumble most starkly. To a media site, trying to drive more traffic so that it can sell advertising, a click onto the site is the ultimate goal.
To a dating service, the lead might be someone who seeks pictures of “matches” but hasn't yet subscribed as a paying member. To a business-to-business service, a lead might be little more than basic contact information entered into a database.
On top of that, consider that the leads come from advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, online and event marketing and other places. Very quickly, the “average” CPL becomes muddled.
All caveats aside, people generally see CPLs approaching $5-$10 in direct mail and telemarketing. These are 2 to 4 times higher in business-to-business categories.
Online, CPLs tend to range from $3 to $5, with a little less of a boost in the business categories. One can always get the 20-cent lead from promotions companies. But some leads are better than others, and leads coming from communications that are very upfront about the product and value proposition tend to be much more convertible to real business.
Once a company sets into motion a sophisticated lead generation marketing strategy, however, these CPL's invariably rise.
And this is a good thing. They rise because the company knows that it makes sense to spend more and more money against the lead campaign up until the point that the CPL exceeds the average revenue gained from the average lead.
In other words, despite diseconomies of scale in spending more and more on a particular lead-generating mechanism, a company will do this so long as they think they're going to make more money in the end.
