The Slow Creep
Ruining your brand doesn’t happen overnight, it incrementally happens over time, slowly and quietly. In small, innocent decisions made by people who are just trying to help.
A social post here, a new landing page there, a presentation someone threw together before a meeting. Six months later your business looks like five different companies stitched together, and nobody can quite explain how it got there.
How brands mutate
In the early days there are one or two founders who know the business inside out. They know how it should sound, how it should look, what feels right and what feels wrong. The brand lives in their heads. And it works, because they're doing everything themselves.
Then they hire someone. That person searches the drive for the logo and finds five folders all named "Final Logo." Each one has a different version. They pick the one that looks the nicest and get on with their day. This isn't incompetence. It's what happens when someone is trying to be helpful without a reference point.
Then another person joins. Same thing. Then an agency gets brought in. Same thing.
A year later you've got ten brand colours, three different fonts, stock photos that look like they came from four different companies, and a tone of voice that changes depending on who wrote the email. Nobody planned this. It just happened while everyone was busy doing actual work.
Can’t trust a mutant brand
People are always looking for an excuse not to trust you online. We've all landed on websites that feel slightly off and something's wrong but you can't quite put your finger on it. And 9 times out of 10, what you're picking up on is inconsistency. Mismatched colours, strange imagery, a tone that doesn't fit. You don't consciously analyse it, you just spot the eyeballs and tentacles, feel the dread, and leave. Nobody sticks around to find out if the mutant is friendly.
Good and consistent branding signals that someone is in control. I've written more about how your website either builds or destroys that trust in Your Website Is On Trial worth a read if this is landing close to home.
What is a brand? and why is it attacking?
What is brand? What is your brand? Ask that question and you'll get a riddle, some vapid ethereal waffle, or if you're lucky, someone pointing at a logo and a colour palette.
A better question is: what do people actually say about your business when you're not in the room? That's your brand. Not the logo. Not the font. What people say.
Mutant brands tend to get a long pause and an "I don't know..." in response to that question. Which tells you everything. If the people closest to your business can't answer it, your customers definitely can't. And you can't document what you can't define.
Quick story about brand, a chap in Christchurch opens his restaurant when he feels like it. No website, no social media, sun-bleached signage with red font. Must be doing badly, right? nope he has the longest queues in town. Why? That's the power of branding, baby! It's the rock and roll attitude that makes people talk about him, everything else exists to reinforce that customer experience.
So here comes the hard part 🤔 what makes you genuinely different? Build your visual brand to reinforce that and cull everything else. It might need some soul-searching. But you can't build a good brand on a shaky foundation.
Now build the thing
So soul-searching done and you know what makes you different. Time to build the document.
Remember what it's for: a guide that reinforces your brand so everyone working on the business, at any level, knows what to do without asking.
Where do I start? Start with the intangible, then move to the visual assets.
Values
Brand docs start with the company's values as a foundation. This doesn’t mean add fluffy ideas, but mean what you put in. Better to have one honest value than six nice-to-have corporate, fluffy, vapid placeholder values that you or anyone couldn’t care about. What’s a fluffy corporate value you ask? Something like "We believe in trust, integrity, and delivering excellence for our clients." 🤨 This is fluffy corporate talk (and people on the team probably don’t care about it), and it causes real problems down the line for your branding because when it comes time to pick a colour, you'll find that basically every blue, along with every other colour in the light spectrum, including ultraviolet, represents trust. I don’t have time to talk colour theory, but surface-level ideas get surface-level results. So, find a genuine value and use it as your foundation.
Visuals
Lock in your colour palette (the real one, not the seven variations that have accumulated), your fonts, your logo usage, and your imagery style. On that last one, think carefully. Images send signals faster than words.
I re-designed the homepage for Nextminute, a New Zealand SaaS built for tradies. What the team brought up to me as I was being briefed on their brand is that they have to avoid most construction stock photo, because it usually showed guys in suits and hard hats holding clipboards., no tradie in New Zealand or Australia looks like that. The people they're selling to look like your dad, actually on the tools, actually doing the job. Using the wrong imagery doesn't just look off, it destroys trust with the exact people you're trying to reach.
Tone of voice
How would your brand talk if it was a person? Casual or formal? Do they swear? How do they end an email?
- Simple rules for how to write go a long way.
- A list of words to avoid,
- a few examples of good copy
- guidance on sign-offs.
The goal is that when two different people write something for the business, it sounds like it came from the same place.
Templates
Give people something to start from. Presentation slides, social post formats, email layouts. Not so they can't be creative, but so they're not reinventing the wheel and drifting in a new direction every time.
Some other tips
If during this process you might find something in your brand that has mutated and is out of place, record it and look to change it or update it in the future. This, my friend, is a brand audit.
Don't get lost down the rabbit hole, more documentation does not mean better. You can go deep, but a simple doc that everyone actually uses beats a perfect one that lives in a folder nobody opens.
Your brand doc is also a briefing document for AI
Here's something most brand documentation guides won't tell you, because most of them were written before LLM really hit the scene.
Your team is using AI tools. ChatGPT, Claude, whatever. They're using them to write social posts, draft emails, build landing page copy. And when they do, they're either giving the AI a proper brief or they're winging it.
Without brand documentation, every AI prompt starts from scratch. The output is generic, off-tone, and sounds like it came from a corporate robot with no personality.
With a well-structured brand doc, the AI has a real brief. Your tone of voice, your vocabulary, your values, your audience, your examples of good copy. The AI becomes a new team member, and like any new team member, the better you onboard them, the better the work.
If you're using Claude, this is exactly what Projects and Skills are built for. You load your brand documentation in once as a skill, and from that point on every chat in that project starts with your brand already loaded. It doesn't forget. It doesn't drift. Every piece of copy it produces starts from the same foundation. Your brand voice, every time, without having to remind it.
That's not just a nice workflow trick. It's how you stop the mutation from creeping in through the AI tools your team uses every day.
The cure for the creeping mutations
Brand documentation exists to stop the people who do know your brand from getting tapped on the shoulder every day. “What font do we use?” “Which logo and where is it?” Each question only takes a minute. But over months, it becomes a constant background drain, and before long eyeballs on stalks start to sprout.Good documentation gives everyone one point of truth. New hire on day one? They've got a reference. Agency you just brought in? They've got a reference. AI tool your team is using? Same deal.
And when someone tries to do something off-brand, you've got a potato peeler to shave off any unwanted tentacles that pop up. That's a much easier conversation to have when there's a document backing you up.Without a shared reference, every new touchpoint is another opportunity for the mutation to continue. With one, you've got a backbone to build from. And a much less weird-looking brand.
