Branding Checklist

The answer changes the rest of the workflow. A rebrand triggers asset migration, redirect mapping, and customer communications that a net-new brand skips. Capture the answer here so downstream steps branch correctly.

Use the standard format: for [target customer], who [need], [brand] is the [category] that [benefit] because [reason to believe]. Tie ICP to firmographics (company size, industry, role) and behavioral signals — vague personas like "busy professionals" don't survive a creative brief.

Pull 5-8 direct competitors and 2-3 adjacent category leaders. Capture logo, palette, typography, tone, hero messaging, and what category words they own. Goal is to find the white space, not to copy the leader.

Aim for 6-10 customer interviews and 4-6 internal stakeholders (founders, sales lead, CS lead, top reps). Look for the words customers actually use to describe the problem — those become the source material for messaging.

Search USPTO TESS, EUIPO, and target-country registries for any candidate name. Check .com plus the relevant regional TLDs and major social handles (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok). Loop legal in before any creative work commits to a name — naming a brand you can't register is the most expensive avoidable mistake.

Brief includes positioning, audience, mandatories (legal-required marks, partner logos), tone descriptors, references the team likes and hates, and the deliverable list. Sign-off from the brand owner before designers start; mid-design pivots are where budgets break.

Show each direction in context: favicon, app icon, business card, hero on a landing page, a billboard mock. A logo that wins in a Figma frame at 800px often fails at 16px or in single-color print. Capture which direction is approved for refinement.

Deliver primary lockup, secondary horizontal/vertical, monogram, app icon, and single-color reversed-out variants. Export AI, SVG, PNG at 1x/2x/3x, and a favicon set. Test logo at 16×16 and on dark, light, and photographic backgrounds.

Specify HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone for primary, secondary, and accent colors. Run every text-on-background pairing through a WCAG 2.1 AA contrast checker (4.5:1 for body, 3:1 for large text). Document which pairings fail so designers don't reach for them.

Pick a display, body, and optional mono. Confirm the license covers web (self-host or Adobe/Google Fonts CDN), desktop, and embedded app use; web-only licenses break native app builds. Store license PDFs alongside the brand files.

One sentence above the fold, one paragraph for the about page, one 30-second spoken pitch for sales. Test the value prop against three competitors' homepages — if you can swap their logo onto your page and it still reads, you haven't differentiated.

Use the "this not that" pattern: confident not cocky, plainspoken not casual, expert not academic. Include 4-6 before/after rewrites of real copy so writers see the rules applied. Cover edge cases: error messages, legal disclaimers, support replies.

One overarching narrative, three to four pillars, supporting proof points under each. Pillars should map to ICP pain points and to the positioning statement — if a pillar doesn't trace back to either, it's filler.

Any superlative (#1, leading, fastest), comparative claim, or quantitative claim needs a substantiation file under FTC and Lanham Act exposure. Build the substantiation doc now, not after a competitor complaint. Regulated industries (health, finance) loop in compliance review here.

Cover logo usage and clear-space rules, color, typography, photography style, illustration style, iconography, voice, and do/don't examples. Publish as a Figma file or Frontify/Brandfolder site, not a PDF that drifts from reality within a quarter.

Slide deck (Google Slides + PowerPoint), social graphics (1080×1080, 1200×630, 1080×1920), email header, one-pager, case-study layout, and Zoom/Teams backgrounds. Templates are how guidelines actually get followed.

Upload to Bynder, Brandfolder, Frontify, or whichever DAM the team uses. Lock in a file-naming convention (brand_asset-type_variant_size.ext) and tag every asset with usage rights. Untagged assets get reused past their license window.

Audit every customer touchpoint carrying the old brand: site, email templates, app icons, in-product UI, invoice templates, support macros, ad accounts, social profiles. Map old URLs to new with 301 redirects to preserve SEO equity.

Plan covers internal reveal date, external announcement date, channel sequencing (site → email → social → press), customer comms for any rebrand, and the kill criteria for delaying launch. Identify the single owner who can call a go/no-go.

All-hands walkthrough of the new identity, voice, and messaging — at least 3 days before external launch. Sales gets new pitch decks and email signatures; CS gets refreshed support macros; recruiting gets updated employer-brand assets. Internal leaks are mostly avoidable with a clear embargo.

QA: 301 redirects verified, GA4 + GTM firing, Search Console property added, sitemap.xml resubmitted, schema markup validated in Google Rich Results test, Core Web Vitals passing, OG tags rendering in the LinkedIn Post Inspector and the Meta Sharing Debugger.

Press release on the wire, founder LinkedIn post, customer email (segmented for active vs. dormant), social posts with UTM-tagged links to the announcement page, paid social boost on the hero post. Influencer or partner posts carry FTC #ad disclosure where there's a material connection.

Pull branded-search lift, direct traffic, announcement-page conversions, email engagement, share of voice, and sentiment from social listening (Sprout, Sprinklr, Brandwatch). Compare against the pre-launch baseline captured in the strategy phase.

Identify which metric missed and why — message-market fit, channel mix, creative fatigue, or tracking gap. Decide between a creative refresh, a paid-media rebalance, or a messaging revision before the next quarter.