Develop your Anti-Brand to help focus your creative.

As a brand developer or a brand manager, you tend to be concentrated on who you are and what you do. You create logos, guidelines, essence boards, brand promises and creative platforms but how much time have you spent on who you are not. Have you created your anti-brand?


Whether you use your in-house creative department or you have an agency or design firm it is vital that you give as much information pertaining to a project in order to develop on target, strategic and successful creative for you brand. And in this time of budget cuts and lost personnel it is vital that we have an established efficient processes that allows your creative team to find the most effective and creative solutions in the most timely fashion.

Basically, quit wasting time developing concepts that can never and will never be approved. Concepts that are not strategic or on brand. But generate more on target creative and do it in a timely manner. This is where establishing your anti-brand is vital.


When you make a creative or deign brief, it is like giving your creative team a map. A map to the creative solution based on your brand. Based on who you are. When you pair that with your anti-brand, it is like giving your team a GPS system. You are giving them the quickest route to find a creative solution.

What is your anti-brand? Specifically it is what you are not. It is the other side of your brand story.

1. EXAMINE: Revisit your Brand documents to make sure they are still accurate.

2. BUT NOT: Take words that describe your brand and define them further using "But not". Ex: Our brand is Modern looking but not technology oriented.

3. Gather images to create an anti-essence board of those things that do not, and can not ever define who you are. Visually describe those "But not" phrases.

4. Define your brand mentors and those who are not your mentors. (Go Daddy.com usually enters in the conversation here)

You anti-brand will cut the number of concepts you have to generate and the number of revisions on a project. It will give you better and more successful work.


Written by:
Matthew Blazer
VP Creative Director, Breehl, Traynor & Zehe