Building your first Brand Bible

ATIYO product documentation · Getting Started · 6 min read

Your Brand Bible is the strategic foundation of everything you make in ATIYO. It's the shared library of who you're marketing to and how you talk to them, and your briefs pull directly from it. Build it well once, and every future brief gets faster and more consistent.

This guide covers what goes into a Brand Bible, how to add entries by hand, how to bulk import a big starter set, and how to keep it tidy over time. Open your Brand Bible to follow along.

What lives in the Brand Bible

The Brand Bible is organized around a few connected building blocks. Together they describe your audience and your angles of attack.

  • Customer avatars: the distinct types of people who buy from you.
  • Sub-avatars: narrower segments within an avatar for sharper targeting.
  • Core desires: the deep motivations that drive each avatar to buy.
  • Marketing angles: the ways you frame your product's value.
  • Ad types: the creative formats you produce, like UGC, static, or founder story.

Add your customer avatars

Start with avatars, since everything else hangs off them. Aim for a handful of clearly different people rather than one vague "everyone."

  1. Open Brand Bible.
  2. Create a new avatar and give it a memorable name (for example, "Busy new parent").
  3. Add sub-avatars if a segment splits into meaningfully different groups.
  4. Attach one or more core desires to each avatar.
Name avatars like real people or vivid personas. "Weekend endurance athlete" is far more useful in a brief than "Segment B."

Add core desires and angles

Core desires keep your creative anchored to genuine motivation, and angles give editors different ways to sell against that motivation. A strong Brand Bible has several angles per avatar so you can test variety.

  • Write core desires as the underlying want (for example, "feel in control of mornings again").
  • Write marketing angles as distinct framings (for example, time saved, social proof, founder story, or problem-agitate-solve).

Define your ad types

List the creative formats your team actually produces. These show up when you write a brief, so keeping them accurate makes briefing quick and consistent across the team.

Common ad types for DTC brands include UGC testimonials, unboxings, founder-story videos, problem-solution demos, static images, and comparison ads. Only list the ones you genuinely run; a shorter, accurate list is easier to brief against than a long aspirational one.

How much detail is enough?

A frequent question for new teams is how deep to go. The answer is: enough to make briefing fast, not so much that maintenance becomes a chore. A strong starting point looks like this:

  1. Three to five clearly distinct avatars.
  2. One or two core desires per avatar.
  3. Two to four marketing angles per avatar so you have variety to test.
  4. The ad types you actively produce.

You can always add sub-avatars and new angles as you learn. Treat the Brand Bible as a living document that grows with your testing, not a one-time deliverable.

Bulk import with the template

If you already have a lot of audience research, you don't have to add entries one by one. ATIYO supports bulk import from an Excel/CSV template so you can seed the whole library at once.

  1. Download the Excel/CSV template from the Brand Bible import option.
  2. Fill in your avatars, desires, angles, and ad types following the template's columns.
  3. Upload the completed file to bulk import every entry at once.
  4. Review the imported entries and tidy up any names.
Match the template's column headers exactly before uploading. Clean columns in equals clean library out.

Keep it tidy with archiving

Your Brand Bible will evolve as you learn what resonates. When an avatar or angle stops earning its place, archive the entry rather than deleting it. Archiving removes clutter from active briefing while preserving the history of what you've tried.

How the Brand Bible powers your briefs

Every field you build here becomes a pick-list option when you write a brief. A well-stocked Brand Bible means briefing is a series of quick, informed choices instead of a blank-page exercise, and it keeps your whole team aligned on strategy.

Next steps

With your Brand Bible in place, put it to work by creating your first creative brief. New to ATIYO overall? Read what is ATIYO for the big-picture view of how the pieces connect.

Related articles

Creating your first creative brief in ATIYOA walkthrough of creating your first creative brief in ATIYO, field by field, plus custom builders and uploading an existing brief. What is ATIYO? A creative operating system for DTC brandsA plain-language overview of what ATIYO does, who it's for, and how its core tools fit together for DTC creative teams. Getting started with ATIYO: your first 15 minutesA guided 15-minute quickstart that takes you from a fresh account to a real brief on your Creative Roadmap.
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