Creating a Successful and Enduring Brand Book: A Comprehensive Guide

Some time ago Spinach Branding created The Life Negroni. We didn’t envisage this as a typical cocktail book – a brief historical introduction followed by a collection of recipes. Instead, we aimed to craft a narrative with the Negroni as the protagonist, weaving in ingredients, people, places, histories both factual and fictional, politics, arts, design and life itself as supporting characters.​

This approach proved successful. The book surpassed our sales expectations, garnered wonderful reviews and led to collaborations with other brands. While we hadn’t set out to win business through the book, it naturally opened new opportunities. The Life Negroni demonstrated the power of genuine and original storytelling.

Now, this is when the creative process gets exciting.

A brand book isn’t something that follows a set of strict rules. Quite the opposite. It should be a personal expression of that particular brand – or at least its intent. It may not even end up being a book as such. A professional branding agency should allow team workshops and the creative process to determine the narrative and design. One style does not fit all. Too often, we see agencies mimicking others and failing to utilise the brand book’s real value – communicating the brand, rather than creating a vanity project.

A great example is Campari. The Italian drinks giant contacted Spinach a few years ago to help define the brand in the UK market, where it was largely known. Following extensive internal and external workshops, we identified a connection between the bitterness of Campari and a developing palate among young urbanites who were eschewing the sweeter cocktails on the market in favour of more complex, bitter flavours. Our national ad campaign, ‘Ready for Bitter?’, tapped into this mindset and helped define Campari for new drinkers across the UK.

But to reach this conclusion, we first needed to define what sets Campari apart from other bitter drinks. While researching The Life Negroni, we came to see Campari in a new light. This is a drink embedded in the cultural fabric of Milan. It’s associated with the avant-garde – with artists, designers and filmmakers who have collectively shaped the city into a hub of creativity. It’s also a drink that symbolises aperitivo – that sacred few hours when work ends and the evening begins.

Our brand book and website for Campari, La Vita Campari, capture the essence of the brand beyond its liquid nature. During the Covid-induced lockdown, we created a spin-off cocktail book – The Little Red Book of Campari Serves & Negroni Twists – available to download for free from the lavitacampari.com website. Stuck at home with limited entertainment prospects, the book was a phenomenal hit and helped raise Campari’s profile further.

A similar exercise helped redefine Cowshed, Soho House’s wellness brand, which had begun to lose its way. For Cowshed, we created a more traditional brand book that outlined the brand values, purpose and positioning for the company’s staff and stakeholders. It helped us and Soho House’s internal design team identify a refreshed visual and verbal identity for the Cowshed products.

More recently, we worked with a US client to create Maze Row – a new brand in the fine wine scene. Through extensive workshops and national surveys, we saw that wine, at this level, is about so much more than a drink. It’s about craft, discovery, innovation, heritage, culture, land, nature, philosophy, people. It’s about building a community with a passion for wine and wine culture. And so, In wine, we find life became Maze Row’s brand essence.

A brand book followed to communicate this statement of intent – to the team, and also to partner winemakers in Italy and beyond. Then came Voices, a quarterly publication and digital platform to explore and expand on these values. After all, In wine, we find life is not a static concept – it needs nourishment. Voices has become a place where a likeminded community with a passion for wine and wine culture can share their lens.

‘Although Campari and Cowshed are established and Maze Row is a new brand, they share a vision for creating powerful, timeless branding and design rooted in narratives that are unique to each of them,’ says Spinach Branding director Leigh Banks.

He adds: ‘The brand narrative must remain consistent across multiple channels. This includes language, photography and design. As ever, the risk is that the messaging becomes diluted as it is shared across agencies. This is where it’s vital for the lead branding consultancy to act as guardian of the brand proposition and narrative. Ultimately, this gives the wider team a clearer understanding of how to communicate it.’