Who should participate in brandbook development: team roles

Who should coordinate the process and why everything falls apart without it

Most articles about brandbooks list a designer, copywriter, brand strategist, and art director — and stop there, as if the team organizes itself. It doesn’t. There must be a person who holds the entire project in mind: deadlines, budget, quality, communication with the client, and conflicts between specialists. This role is usually called a brand producer or project manager of a brand project.

Such a person must have real authority, not just a formal status of 'meeting coordinator'. He approves final versions of materials before showing them to the client, assigns tasks between the designer, copywriter, and strategist, and — what is most important — has the right to stop the work if it deviates from the brand strategy. Without this authority, the coordinator becomes a secretary who just collects files into one folder, and decisions are made chaotically, by whoever happens to be around.

In practice, one person often fulfills three roles at once: strategist, project manager, and partially creative director. This is normal for mid-sized agencies — economically inefficient to keep three separate specialists for each project, if the producer is capable of managing strategy and controlling creativity simultaneously.

Why end users cannot be involved only at the testing stage

This is the most common and most expensive mistake in team organization. A brandbook is made for those who will work with it: in-house designers, marketers, contractors, managers of advertising channels, partner agencies. If their opinion is only asked when the document is almost ready — 'take a look, is everything clear?' — feedback comes too late to make changes without redoing half the material.

The right approach is to involve future users of the brandbook in the process at the stage of structuring the document, not only in the final review. Ask the sales designer which questions arise most often when working with the current guideline. Find out from the copywriter whether the intended tone of voice is clear to them before it is finally approved. This saves weeks of rework after launch.

The final test before approval should be realistic: give a new designer a task to find the required brand palette shade without hints, ask the copywriter to write a post in the specified voice tone. If a person seeing the document for the first time cannot complete the task within a reasonable time — the brandbook is written for its creators, not for those who will use it.

How to distribute responsibility to avoid duplication and conflicts

Conflicts in brandbook development teams almost always arise not from the personal qualities of specialists, but from blurred areas of responsibility: two people think that the decision on the logo color is their prerogative, and both are formally right because nobody specified who finally approves visual decisions.

Such division works only if it is documented in writing before the project starts, not just verbally agreed upon at the first meeting. Verbal agreements are forgotten by the third week of work.

Small business and corporations — different teams, different logic

For a company with 2–10 people, hiring a full team of roles is excessive and expensive. A brandbook is usually made by one or two specialists with basic design and marketing skills, often an external freelancer or a small agency that combines the functions of strategist and designer into one person. Here coordination is simpler: fewer approvals, decisions are made personally by the business owner.

In enterprise structures it's different. There, a full team is needed: brand managers by region, strategists, analysts, designers, IP lawyers — and a clearly established hierarchy, who reports to whom in matters of approval. Without hierarchy, a large organization sinks in endless revisions because each regional manager feels the need to add their opinion to the final version.

Governance: a control system that cannot be added 'later'

This is the section that is most often omitted from ready-made brandbooks — and it is exactly this absence that makes the document useless within a year and a half. Governance must be built into the development process from the start, not added after the visual part is complete.

• Who approves new creative concepts that deviate from basic guidelines;
• Who has the right to adapt the guidelines for the local market or a new channel;
• How frequently the brandbook is reviewed and updated;
• Who personally is responsible for the document's relevance after project handover.

Without this system, the brand inevitably drifts for approximately 18 months: people who created the document leave or change roles, and new employees simply don't open the guidelines because they don't know they are mandatory. Governance is not bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy, but the only way to keep the document alive after the development team disperses to other projects.

Typical mistakes in team organization

A brandbook made only by designers usually turns out visually flawless but functionally useless: colors and fonts are perfectly thought out, but the section on brand messaging and tone of voice is missing or reduced to a couple of general phrases. Marketers don't use such a document because it doesn't answer their working questions.

The opposite situation — when a brandbook is written only by marketers and strategists without a designer — yields the opposite result: a strong strategy, but the visual part is so abstract that contractors interpret it as they wish. Both errors are solved in the same way: a mixed team with a clearly defined coordinator who ensures that no discipline takes the process over for itself.