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Brand Patterns

Build a brand people recognise and choose.

Methods for building a brand that people recognise, believe and choose. Written for founders, marketers, designers and anyone responsible for a name, it moves from why the brand exists and where it stands in the customer's mind to how it looks and sounds, how a family of brands fits together, how the promise is kept at every touchpoint, and how to tell whether it is working.

56 cards · 7 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

• Purpose8Is it clear why the brand exists?
• Position8Do customers know what makes you different?
• Identity8Would people recognise you without the name?
• Voice8Can people hear one voice in everything you write?
• Architecture8Is it clear how your brands and names fit together?
• Experience8Are you keeping the promise at every touchpoint?
• Measure8Have you checked whether the brand is working?

A few cards

Purpose

Purpose Statement

One sentence on why you exist, written for the customer rather than the board.

Position

Category Frame

Choose your category on purpose, because it decides who you are compared with.

Voice

This, Not That

Write three or four voice principles as pairs, such as "confident, not arrogant".

One card in full

Experience

Touchpoint Map

List every place a customer meets the brand, including the ones nobody in marketing owns.

Brand work tends to focus on adverts and websites, but customers meet you far more often in invoices, hold music, delivery boxes and password-reset emails. Each of those says something about you, whether or not anyone designed it. A touchpoint map finds them all so you can decide which deserve attention.

How to use it

1. Pick one customer type and walk their whole relationship: hearing of you, choosing, buying, using, getting help, leaving.
2. At each stage, list every touchpoint: people, screens, messages, documents, places and sounds.
3. Mark the owner of each one. Leave the gaps visible; unowned touchpoints are common and telling.
4. Collect a real sample of each, such as a screenshot, a recording or a photo, and put them on one wall.
5. Rate each sample against your promise and voice: on brand, off brand, or silent.

Example

A hypothetical hospital ward maps a patient's stay and finds the discharge letter, written by a template nobody owns, contradicts the warm tone of everything before it. Rewriting one document changes how patients describe their stay.

Watch out

• Mapping the journey you designed rather than the one customers actually take.
• Stopping at purchase. Cancellation, complaints and renewals shape memory too.

Pick the few that count with Moments That Matter, then measure the Promise Gap at each one.

Recipes

• Find The Voice: Define how the brand sounds, from a few paired voice principles to tone settings for each situation, a word list, prepared bad-news messages and an audit of what you actually publish.
• Inside Job: Build a position from the inside out: start with what loyal customers already value, own the weaknesses that come with it, give things up on purpose and end with a positioning statement and a promise you can keep.
• Keep The Promise: Make the brand promise true in daily experience: map every touchpoint, find the moments people remember, close the gaps, prepare staff and recovery, and add one gesture only you make.
• Refresh, Don't Erase: Update the brand's look without throwing away the recognition you have built: measure what people already link to you, change only what you have a reason to change and write the result down.
• Where Does It Live: Decide whether a new offer gets its own brand, sits under the parent or is endorsed by it, after mapping every name you already own.

Missions

• Check brand health: from "is the brand working?" to a scorecard of funnel, category entry points, share of search and sentiment, with the two gaps to fix first.
• Write a brand platform: from scattered opinions and old decks to a one-page platform with purpose, values as behaviours, positioning statement, promise and voice principles.

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