Brand sheet

A brand sheet is a one-page document holding a business's canonical facts in their exact agreed wording, handed to every third party that will describe it.

The term is the book's own, running from Chapter 2 through to the measurement chapter.

Publicists have long used press packs and boilerplate for the same purpose. The book's addition is that the wording must be identical everywhere rather than merely accurate.

A press pack sells a story. A brand sheet supplies exact strings, and its success is measured by how often they are reproduced verbatim.

A style guide governs your own copy. A brand sheet governs other people's copy about you, which is the half you do not control and the half the machines read.

The book's reasoning is that third parties will describe you however is easiest unless you hand them the words, so the brand sheet goes out with every outreach, every press pack and every directory submission to make accuracy the path of least resistance. Chapter 13 adds a further instruction to include: state each fact as a single complete sentence using the full entity name, so it survives being extracted on its own.

Read about the book's argument.