AW 05 – Building a Brand

Module assignment

Part 1 – Brief and beyond

Now it’s time to get typing. This is the start of your strategic planning and research, and you’ll use all this information in your report. To start this activity, you need to have knowledge about the course assignment (found at the bottom of the Module Overview page) and answer the questions with the specific brief in mind.

1. Who and what are Brodie’s Books? Describe the client and the business in your own words. Include things like their location and the unique concept they have for their retail space.
2. What are Brodie’s Books’ unique selling point? What makes them stand out from their competitors?
3. Who is Brodie’s Books’ target market? Create at least two buyer personas to define your target market clearly.
4. Who are Brodie’s Books’ competitors? Name at least two and describe their brands in a couple of sentences.

Now that you have the answers to the questions above you need to:

• Write down a goal (what does the client want to achieve?);
• and how you are going to achieve that goal.

1. Brodie´s Books is an online bookshop that owners by Meet Isla Stewart and Njabulo Dlova. The bookshop have been running for the past 15 years in Edinburgh, Scotland. The unique concept they have for their retail space is specifically focus on rare, collectable second-hand books. Their business is done on eBay and they have a physical booth at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival each year to promote their books.
2. Brodie´s Books´ unique selling point is the sale of rare, collectable second hand books. The thing that make them stand out from other competitors is that they have made their own custom coffee to sell as a side product.
3. Brodie`s Books target market is basically all book lovers and people who like to collect valuable books. They can be younger adults or pensioners. The value of the books can range from as little as 1 pound to many thousand, so everybody will find something.

4. Brodie´s Books´competitors are Armchair Books and Main Point Books in Edinburgh. Armchair Books: It is second hand book shop where the buy and sell large amounts of books. They only buy second hand books that they think can resell. Main Point Books: It is second hand book shop in Edinburgh´s old town. They sell a large variety of book both cheaper book for as little as 1 pound and collectables. They also help writers to get the book or novel published.

• The client would like to make their bookshop unique and stand out from other competitors by selling their custom made coffee in the book shop and to distribute the coffee to restaurants.
• I would like to achieve the goal by creating unique, eye-catching branding and stand out from other competitors. The brand will also need a new logo. The logo has to be something that is easy to remember.

Part 2 – Building a brand

1. Create a brand positioning statement for Brodie’s Books using the template below.
2. Create a personality for Brodie’s Books. It is up to you how you want to figure this out: you can use brand archetypes or simply attribute things to your brand to form some kind of personality. Describe this personality in your report.
3. Create a mood board for Brodie’s Books by specifically looking at the visual elements below. This mood board is going to guide you in a stylistic direction before you even start with the logo design. Include this mood board as one of the pages in your report.

Find visual inspiration for all the following elements of the brand:

• Typography (what kind of typography will go with the brand personality?)
• Colour Palette (find inspiration for a colour palette – use Adobe Color if needed).
• Pattern and texture (do you want a supporting pattern to use within your brand identity?)
• Supporting visuals (photography/animation/illustration).

1. To book lovers, Brodie´s Books is a perfect place for book shopping by having a large assortment of books.
2. A personality for Brodie´s Books, I have chosen to go with the sage. The sage is a seeker of knowledge and wisdom. Also a very good place to find this is in a book shop with all kind of books.
3. Mood board

Part 3 – Brand design process

You need to start with the logo design process. You’ll only focus on ideas and rough sketches for this part – all of which should be included in your report. The next part of the module assignment will be a continuation of this process. For this, you need to:

1. Generate ideas for the Brodie’s Books logo – like mind mapping, for example. Include this ideation process in your report.
2. Use your ideas generated above to sketch visual ideas for the logo. Include these sketches in your report.

1. Mind mapping

1. Sketch visual ideas

Part 4 – Brand touchpoints

Hopefully, you have lots of rough sketches for the Brodie’s Books logo by this stage. Now you need to go through the elimination process (yes, you must “kill your darlings”) and decide which of your ideas are worthy of vectorising.

This is also an excellent time to share your roughs on the forum on Moodle and get feedback from fellow students or tutors. All of this must happen before you spend a lot of time polishing your chosen design.

For the logo, I get ideas from my different sketches and some extra from my research. Take a look at the result below.