What is Brand Execution?

Bad as Brand Drift #

Somewhere you have this PDF with your brand guidelines. Maybe the PDF is even a Figma with assets. But you also have: 1 old logo on the invoice, wrong colors in the email signature, and a newsletter that develops a visual life of its own after every send. This all smells very much like the 2000s. A time when that “Think Before Printing” paragraph manifested itself in your email signature and printers weren’t lasers yet. Ok. I’m drifting away. What I meant to say: When nothing fits together again, we agencies call it Brand Drift.

By the time everything is sorted out again, it’s already time to log hours and we wonder where all those booked hours came from. By that point, the damage to your audience has already been done. Rebrandings are million-dollar projects precisely because every corner of the company – every touchpoint – needs to be addressed.

Better: Brand Execution #

So you need something that executes before you present your invoice with outdated terms and conditions and rack your brain again over the Word template header with the old company data. The solution is called Brand Execution. The principle behind it is the physical concept of coherence – like a laser pointer: Regular light radiates in all directions (according to Wikipedia). With different wavelengths and phases. A laser, however: all waves are aligned and synchronized. Like this:

It’s the same with brands: Without central control, every touchpoint creates its own waves. For a meaningful message, it’s not enough to have many voices – you need many voices that rise as one. With Brand Execution, exactly that is possible.

Technically, the system works by having your company define a so-called Single-Source-of-Truth. This is a text file where all your branding components – logo, font, colors – are defined. It looks like this:

data:
  company:
    name: "Buero Lightwaves"
    claim: "We make websites"
design:
  font:
    font_name: Montserrat
  color:
    color_text_accented: "#a2e4b8"

What does Brand Execution save? #

Officially nothing – because nobody admits that constantly keeping touchpoints up-to-date is work. Unofficially: a lot. A large part of the rebranding costs mentioned above doesn’t come from the new logo design, but from rolling it out across hundreds of touchpoints. Emails, documents, websites, apps, signs, contracts. With Brand Execution, you reduce this effort to a single commit.

On top of that: Touchpoints that aren’t synchronized carry the risk that your investor backs out because you obviously can’t manage to update your logo on your newsletter.

Live Demo #

Change the company name and watch how all touchpoints update simultaneously.

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The 3 Concepts #