Don't Fck Up Your Baby: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Your Newborn Brand

After years of industry experience and academic positions lecturing to students about creativity and branding, Joris van Dooren and Coen Luijten both began to notice some strange behaviour. Both their student and the starting entrepreneurs they were working for in their Building Better Brands course, had started to act irrationally when it came to their brands, putting in all their financial resources, discussing them non-stop, and staying up late into the night to work on them.

It almost looked a little like parenthood.

Newborn brands are just like babies to us. With the right guidance, we can raise them into something spectacular. That said, when things go wrong, we can just as easily f*ck them up.

Within these pages, we trace the development of your brand from its baby stages right up to adulthood. Just like how it takes 18 years to raise a child, we've broken down the process into 18 steps. With interactive examples and tasks to help bring your brand to life, you'll be able to watch your brand grow as you move from step to step.

It takes a village to raise a child and you'll need to juggle different tasks when starting up. But, when it comes to branding and creativity, we'll be your support system. After helping launch over 75 startups, we've refined the process to perfection. Let's start creating your brand, it will be big fun!

By the end of these 18 steps, your brand will have a personality, a style, a story - it'll be a fully formed brand. But, before we arrive there, we have to take care of our baby brand.

Are you ready for parenthood? It's one hell of a ride. Let's try not to f*ck it up.

Coen Luijten always knew that his heart belonged to commercial advertising and brand building. In his mid-thirties in 2010, armed with his passion for innovation, he took up a position teaching creativity, advertising, and branding at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences. After that, he obtained his Master of Business Innovation in Imagineering, which he now uses   to help people unlock their creativity and foster their newborn brands' image.

After finishing his master's degree in international business communication, Joris van Dooren started a successful career in advertising. His projects thrived on creative concepts, and he quickly distinguished himself as an innovator in the field. In 2009, he took a position lecturing creativity, advertising, and branding at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences. In his free time, you'll find him brainstorming or building brand ideas.