How to launch a brand: what to decide first, and in what order

When a launch date is set, the first reflex is to start producing. A holding page, a “temporary” logo, a few visuals to announce that something is coming. The reflex is reassuring, and it has a cost you only see later. Every asset made before the fundamental decisions are taken will have to be redone, or it never will be, and it will end up defining the brand by accident.

Difficult launches rarely lack time or talent. They simply make their decisions in the wrong order.

Where do you start when creating a brand?

With whatever is most expensive to undo. It is a more useful criterion than urgency or visibility, and it sorts almost every launch decision into three families.

Near-irreversible decisions. What the brand promises, and to whom. Its name. Its architecture, meaning how the company name relates to the names of its products. The languages it will speak. Once the brand is out, these choices are everywhere: domain names, trademark filings, contracts, packaging, and above all the memory of the first customers. Changing them means launching again.

Costly decisions. The idea that ties the identity together, the mark, the typography, the colours. They can evolve, and a good identity does, but every asset produced with them becomes an asset to rework.

Light decisions. A campaign, a series of posts, the look of a holding page. They can be redone without anyone remembering.

Yet most projects spend their energy in the opposite order. A shade of green gets debated at length, the name gets picked at the end of a meeting. The reason is simple: visible decisions are pleasant to make, while fundamental ones force you to give something up. Choosing an audience means leaving others aside. It is always easier to discuss a colour than to accept that you will not speak to everyone.

Which decisions should come before any design?

Four, and they fit on one page.

A promise a stranger could repeat. A plain sentence, more useful than a slogan, that says what the brand does, for whom, and what it replaces. That last part is often forgotten. The real alternative to a new product is rarely a direct competitor. It is a habit: a spreadsheet, a workaround, or doing nothing at all. Knowing which habit you are up against changes a great deal about how you present yourself.

A name checked before it is loved. People grow attached to a name within hours, and can lose it to a single search. Before showing it to the whole team, check the trademark registers, the availability of the domain and social handles, and how it sounds in every language of the market. For the filing itself, an intellectual property attorney is the right person to ask.

An architecture. If a second product is planned, will it carry the same name, a name of its own, or both? The answer changes how the logo is drawn, since it may have to sit next to other names.

Languages. In Belgium, this question comes up earlier than elsewhere. A name that sounds good in French can be unpronounceable in Dutch. A layout designed in one language breaks in another with longer words. A website in two languages is a different project from a website in one. Deciding on languages at the start costs a meeting; adding them later costs part of the project.

Once these decisions are made, design stops being a debate about taste, because there is finally something to check it against. Trace is a good example. The company designs sensors that measure athletic performance: speed, trajectories, game data. Once it was clear what the product does and for whom, the idea for the identity was almost already in the name. A trace is the path an athlete leaves behind. The design did not have to look for a style; it had to make that idea visible.

Where will people first see your brand?

This question defines the real scope of a launch, and it is sharper than “which assets do we need?”. The point is to list, in order, the places where the first people will actually encounter the brand, and to design for those first.

For Trace, the challenge was to make the technology legible and desirable, on the field as well as online. Two very different first contacts, then: an object worn by an athlete, and a screen. The mark had to work on both before it worked anywhere else.

For GUD, a platform promoting blockchain in the video game industry, the first contact was the interface itself, and the ads leading to it. Delivering an identity and then writing a website brief would have split a single first contact in two. So the studio designed the identity, the web interfaces, the icons and the ads in one movement.

Anything that is not on this list can wait. Launch plans often include assets that exist out of habit, like the brochure nobody asks for. Three first contacts done right beat ten approximate assets.

Why shouldn’t the launch campaign come before the identity?

Because people remember the first thing they see. When the identity is not ready, the launch campaign is often produced “in the meantime”, with a trendy style, a typeface chosen in a hurry, a colour borrowed from the investor deck. For the public, there is nothing temporary about that campaign. It is the brand. And when the real identity arrives a few weeks later, it looks like a rebrand, even though the brand has barely been born.

There are only two good options. Either the campaign is the first application of the identity, designed with it and by its rules. Or it waits. A delayed launch can be caught up; a first impression, much less so.

What goes into a creative brief?

Most briefs contain a mood board and a string of adjectives: modern, premium, bold, human. Every brand asks for those words, so they say nothing about yours. A useful brief contains other things:

• the promise and the priority audience, in that order, with secondary audiences clearly named as such;
• what is already fixed and no longer up for debate: the name, an inherited colour, a technical constraint, the languages;
• the list of first contacts, drawn up in the previous step;
• the category codes, shown with real examples, to decide which to keep and which to break. A brand that breaks every code of its category is not understood; a brand that keeps them all is not noticed;
• the name of the person who makes the final call, and on what criteria;
• a real question.

That last point often makes the difference. A list of adjectives gives a designer something to illustrate; a question gives them something to look for. The Salomon project started that way: what happens when typography behaves like a three-dimensional object? Everything that followed was an attempt to answer it. “How do you make the precision of a measurement visible?” leads further than “a modern, dynamic identity”.

And the website brief?

The website is often the first asset a brand needs, and the last one anyone briefs seriously. A good website brief does not need to be long, but it has to answer a few questions people tend to put off:

• which pages must exist on launch day, not in two years;
• what the site must let people do: buy, book, sign up, get in touch;
• who writes the copy, in which languages, and by when;
• which tools it must connect to: payments, newsletter, contact management;
• who will update it after it goes live, and with what skills.

The third question is the most underestimated. In our experience, a website is more often delayed by its copy than by its code. Mock-ups filled with placeholder text always look good; the problems arrive with the real content, longer, more hesitant, translated. Writing before designing, or at least at the same time, is one of the most profitable decisions in a web design project.

What does a brand launch timeline look like?

Every launch is different, but the sequence of phases varies little.

1. Decide. The promise, the audience, the checked name, the architecture, the languages. This is also the right moment to set the date, or to confirm it.
2. Design the core. The idea, the mark, the typography, the colours and enough rules to produce the first contacts. A solid core designed to grow, rather than the entire system. This is the heart of a brand identity project.
3. Write. The messages, the website copy, the sentence the whole team will be able to repeat.
4. Produce in the order of first contacts, with real content, testing the hard cases: the tiny format, the longest language, the bad photo sent by a partner.
5. Prepare for the day after. The formats that will come back every week after the launch, and the person who will look after them.

A word on the date. It is often set before anyone knows what is being launched, and only then do the lead times you don’t control appear: the printer, the packaging manufacturer, the trademark office, app store review, translations. Better to ask for them at the very start and plan backwards.

Which mistakes cost the most?

Keeping everything secret until launch day. For fear of spoiling the surprise, many brands show nothing to anyone before the launch, so their first real test is public. You don’t need to reveal the logo to check what matters: reading the promise to a few future customers, then asking them to put it in their own words, is enough to know whether it lands.

Approval by committee. Each person adds a criterion, and the result ends up bothering no one, which is the surest way to be remembered by no one. Several opinions are useful; one person has to decide.

Betting everything on launch day. A brand that reaches its launch with twenty flawless assets and nothing for week three starts improvising at the very moment the public starts paying attention. The launch is the beginning of production, not its end. This is often when ongoing art direction takes over.

An order, not a sprint

A good launch is not measured by how much was produced before the date, but by what it will not have to redo afterwards. It starts with the uncomfortable decisions, the ones that force a choice, and leaves for last the ones people are happy to make.

If a date is coming up and you don’t know where to start, list the decisions that would cost you the most to undo. Then let’s talk.