Offer Playbooks
Category: offers
Sources: brand-wiki/offer-playbooks/ folder (README.md, per-service brand-playbook JSON, market-intelligence, and prompt-pack files, 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-01)
Confidence: high
Last Updated: 2026-08-01
These are not marketing campaigns. They are the working reference material behind Trace's six core services — Route Finder, Certification Project, Range Review, Issue Support, Technical Partner, and Team Training — which together form the Trace PPE Pathway. Anyone writing, designing, or making decisions about a Trace service should treat the matching offer-playbook folder as required reading alongside Services and Offer Architecture, not as optional or separate creative-department material. The services-overview prompt pack states this explicitly: "These are Trace's services, not marketing campaigns. Don't refer to them as 'campaigns' in any output... Each one is a standing part of what Trace does."
Location and Structure
brand-wiki/offer-playbooks/ sits inside brand-wiki/, alongside wiki/, raw/, scripts/, and output/. Each service folder holds three file types sharing the folder's slug as a filename prefix:
<offer>-brand-playbook-<date>.json— structured brand/positioning data for the offer<offer>-prompt-pack-<date>.md— AI prompt pack for generating on-brand content for the offer<offer>-market-intelligence-<date>.md— market research and competitive context for the offer
| Folder | Service Name | Pathway Stage |
|---|---|---|
route-finder/ |
Route Finder | Know the route |
certification-project/ |
Certification Project | Move the product |
range-review/ |
Range Review | Regain control |
| (no folder yet — brand-playbook JSON only) | Issue Support | Regain control |
technical-partner/ |
Technical Partner | Regain control |
team-training/ |
Team Training | Build capability |
services-overview/ |
Cross-service overview & Trace PPE Pathway messaging | — |
Folder and filenames now match current canonical service names throughout (renamed 2026-08-01 from testing-certification/ and retainer-support/). See Offer Architecture for full current pricing and scope per service, and Services for the deep-dive rationale.
What Each Playbook Contributes
- Market intelligence files carry ICP pain points, transformation journeys, content hooks, and congregation points specific to that service's buyer. Their old per-service "Competitive Landscape" sections (synthesized, service-by-service, and inconsistent with real market data) have been replaced with a pointer to the maintained Competitive Landscape wiki article, which is the single source of truth for competitor intelligence. Several competitors originally surfaced in these files that weren't yet in Competitive Landscape were folded in there: Satra Technology, SGS (testing bodies), Centric Software and Bamboo Rose (adjacent PLM software).
- Brand-playbook JSON files carry structured positioning, persona, and offer-core data per service — the source material behind Primary Icp and Offer Architecture entries. Each file's
programNameOptions(brainstormed sub-brand/product name ideas) have been simplified to the actual service name — Trace doesn't run sub-brands under invented names. - Prompt-pack files carry the AI prompt sequence (style extraction → brand adaptation → logo → design system → website hero) used to generate visual brand assets per service. All six now consistently use "Service:" labelling (not "Campaign:") and current canonical service names.
Cleanup Completed (2026-08-01)
A full terminology and accuracy pass was run across all 16 files in the five service folders (route-finder, range-review, certification-project, technical-partner, team-training):
- Folders and files renamed to canonical names:
testing-certification/→certification-project/,retainer-support/→technical-partner/(files renamed to match). - "Campaign:" labels and "Campaign Voice" headers replaced with "Service:" / "Service Voice" across all five prompt packs — these are services, not campaigns.
- Stale service names fixed throughout brand-playbooks and market-intelligence files: "Testing and Certification" → Certification Project, "Trace Retained Support"/"Retainers" → Technical Partner, "PPE Compliance Pathway" (as a service label) → Team Training. The brand-level Trace PPE Pathway slogan was left untouched — it's a different thing (the umbrella customer-journey message, not a service name).
- Team Training pricing corrected — the brand-playbook JSON and market-intelligence file both carried a stale 4-tier structure ("PPE Compliance Foundations £750 / PPE Product Compliance in Practice £1,500 / PPE Technical Documentation Workshop £2,500 / Connected Team Training pathway £5,000") that no longer matched the live offer. Replaced with the current structure: PPE Foundation £750, PPE Document Workshop £1,750, Motorcycle Advanced £1,500, complete three-session pathway £3,500.
- Banned-word persona nicknames fixed: "The Lab Liaison" → "The Test House Liaison", "The Gear Architect" → "The Apparel Architect" (route-finder brand-playbook), consistent with Voice Guide's word swaps.
- American spelling fixed in isolated instances (realized→realised, Paralyzed→Paralysed, Decentralizer→Decentraliser, Harmonization→Harmonisation) across affected files.
- Broken internal links fixed in
services-overview-ai-prompts.md— its per-service prompt-pack links pointed to old capitalised/spaced folder names that never matched the actual folder structure; now point to the real files.
Known remaining item, deliberately not auto-fixed: each brand-playbook JSON still has a competitiveLandscape structured-data object (distinct from the removed .md prose sections) with the same synthesized per-service competitor data. Left as-is since it's internal research data rather than rendered/public content — flag for a follow-up pass if it should also be stripped or pointed at Competitive Landscape.