This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Play Bigger" by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, et al.. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How do you write a branding proposal? What is the point of proposing your brand?
When building a company, one of the first things you need to do is create your company’s identity and brand. You might have to share your brand with investors, which means writing up a proposal.
Read below to learn how to write a branding proposal from the book Play Bigger.
Answer Questions to Determine Your Company’s Take
You need to ask yourself questions about your potential brand before learning how to write a branding proposal. These questions are: 1) How are your company and your product different from other markets and products? 2) How will you create the product? What’s your plan of action, and how will you achieve success? 3) How will you impact consumers and the world? What is your vision of the future? 4) What sort of identity do you want for your company? What’s your ideal culture? Who are your ideal employees?
(Shortform note: Answering the above questions requires you to have at least some components of your business already set up—for instance, you must have a company and product to be able to say how they differ from others. This is in accordance with the authors’ recommendation to build your company, market, and product at the same time and around each other: Your product informs your take, while in turn informs your market, and so on. This will also likely mean you’ll need to revise your take-over time as you adjust the three components of your business to each other. Thus, while flexibility is almost always an advantage in the workplace, it’s a necessity in the authors’ approach to building a company and market.)
Write Up and Share the Take
You’ll likely need to write multiple drafts of the take for internal review. Be brief and straightforward, and write in easily accessible language. Connect to an emotional need in the consumer—consider what future you can offer customers that they’ll want to be a part of. Think of your take as a movie trailer for your company: It must be short, informative, and generate excitement in the listener. Again, include the following elements in your take: your company identity, guiding principles, outlook, and story about how your company solves a problem differently than other companies. Once done, you should be able to present your take in 10 minutes or less in a brief document or across several slides.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Play Bigger summary:
- Why financial success doesn't depend on education or intelligence
- Why the key to financial success lies in understanding human behavior
- How to create a financial strategy you can follow for decades
