3 ways to document and guide your brand’s evolution

Keeping your brand’s evolution within your control is easier than you think, but most marketing and creative departments let busyness get in the way of documenting it.

Every customer touchpoint and every asset present an opportunity to make small changes that compound over time. If you manage those changes intentionally, you keep the brand narrative aligned with your core messaging. 

Brands that fail to document their own evolution will lose control of it. Documentation feels like the last thing you need to do when you’re busy getting campaigns out the door. But when we intentionally slow down to examine our choices, we can make better decisions in the future. Brands don’t document their evolution because:

• They assume that everyone understands how and why the brand has evolved.
• They’re too busy to document.
• They don’t know it needs to be done.
• They’re afraid of looking at past “mistakes.”

As Bob Ross says, there are no mistakes, only happy accidents. By chronicling and analyzing past decisions, we better understand what works for the brand and how to replicate it.

The tactics and systems that follow shift teams from reacting to each campaign’s needs to thinking critically about how each campaign represents the brand’s message and story. This helps team members uphold brand guidelines independently and consider them while creating the work rather than after it.

3 ways to document your brand evolution

These tactics can be used independently or incorporated into the team’s regular processes. Managing brand evolution is a long-term investment, so find the tactics that work best for the team and build the processes that reinforce critical thinking.

1. Hold a retro meeting 

When you begin documenting your brand’s evolution, take stock of months or years’ worth of touchpoints. This introduces your team to the idea of brand documentation and gathering information to define the brand as it currently stands.

One way to run this meeting is to gather brand artifacts, lay them out on a table (or in a single shared folder), and have all team members comment on how each asset adheres to or deviates from the established branding guide.

Identify trends and group tendencies that inform the brand’s current state. Fill in the blanks about how the brand evolved, both on purpose and by accident.

2. Write historical branding documentation

Once the team understands the brand’s evolution, either through the retro meeting or another method, add notes to your branding guide that explain the choices made in previous touchpoints, why those choices were made, and how they affect the brand as a whole. 

This record becomes the training documentation for future team members. They won’t need to perform a full retrospective of the brand evolution. They can review the documentation to see where audiences, tone, color schemes, design frameworks, and other details changed in the past, and why.

Historical branding documentation should include large and small changes, including:

• Rebrands.
• Mergers and acquisitions.
• Seasonal campaigns.
• Audience targeting changes in campaigns.
• Co-branding or sponsorship deals.
• Website design changes.
• Newsletter tone and targeting.

The point is to have a reference document that explains why the team chose rounded corners on website boxes in 2014 and why the newsletter font changed in 2023. Explanations can range from wanting to modernize the look or make better use of negative space to documenting how the release of a new product line opened up an entirely new target market.

3. Build rubrics to document and reinforce ideal brand requirements

Use your ideal brand requirements to build rubrics for assessing how well each asset or campaign represents the brand. The rubric should be divided into several sections, each reinforcing a major pillar of your brand. Content and design should create individualized rubrics that reflect the group’s priorities.

Use the rubric to document feedback before discussing it. Write down specific examples of tone, audience, and formatting that are well-executed and those that could be improved. Use these examples in your feedback discussions to take the focus off the person and onto the text itself.

A rubric isn’t a tool to grade individual contributors on their work. Everything can be updated, so if a campaign or asset misses the mark, go back and improve it. Then keep a copy of the rubric to document the discussion and any decisions made.

Documentation cycles build continuity

After documenting your brand’s evolution, reinforce those habits. As a department or in smaller role-aligned teams, set up feedback rhythms to regularly review campaign assets and assess them against your rubrics. Update branding documents quarterly and annually to reflect business changes.

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