If your brand is irreverent, your brochure should be too. Conscious design should be applied to more than just your color schemes and typography. Every billboard you put up and business card you hand out should reflect the essence of your brand.

One of the secrets to attaining true cohesion between all of your messages and mediums is a solid copy strategy. Your copy strategy helps your web content, brochures, letterhead, business cards, signage, speeches by company spokespersons, advertisements, and email signatures to all convey the same brand. Not its third cousin, not its twin, not its look alike- the exact same brand- from its look and feel, to its verbiage and its values.

Your copy strategy outlines whether or not you’ll use oxford commas, put periods at the end of bulleted sentences, use conjugations (like it’s in place of it is), use dots or dashes between breaks in phone numbers… It lays out which terms and phrases you’ll use and which ones you’ll avoid. It’s a clear and simple, explicit guide that outlines how your brand looks and sounds on paper.

A good copy strategy depends on a rock solid brand identity. Your brand identity is who you are, what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and how you want to be experienced. Your Brand Identity is how you conceive of your brand. Without a clearly defined Brand Identity, communications from different departments or for different mediums can seem disjointed and blur the brand narrative.