Brand Guidelines: What they are and how they can help growing organizations
As organizations expand, they will always experience growing pains, and one we see all too often is the misuse or abandonment of branding elements. It’s easy to understand why. Companies in transition will likely face greater challenges than forgetting to use the correct font or misusing the logo. However, the misuse of brand elements can lead to ramifications down the road, like weak brand awareness, that will eventually have to be corrected.
The great news is that you can easily prevent this problem altogether through the creation and use of a brand guidelines document.
Brand guidelines are like a rulebook for how the brand should be used. It’s a living, organizational document that should be updated as needed and easily accessible by anyone who creates external-facing content for the organization — although it never hurts to encourage its use for internal-facing material as well. Since every brand is different, the content and size of brand guidelines vary greatly, but a robust document encompasses both visual and messaging direction. The table below outlines useful elements to include in your brand guidelines.
Brand Guidelines Content Recommendation
Messaging
Mission and Values
Value Propositions
Slogans or taglines
Tone of Voice
Writing Style (AP, Chicago, etc)
Words or phrases not to use
Visual Identity
Logo and Logo Usage
Typography
Color Palette
Icons
Photography Style
Illustration Style
There are so many reasons why the creation and adherence to a brand guidelines document is in your organization’s best interest, but here are the three that we find the most compelling:
Ensures Brand Consistency
Providing a consistent brand experience for your end-user means that all external-facing content, like a website, social media post, or sales deck looks, feels, and sounds like the brand. This is important because like human relationships, the relationship between a brand and its audience takes time to develop. If you change how you present your brand every time, it will be hard for your audience to recognize and trust you.
One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to cross-check your content against your brand guidelines during QA (marketing speak for quality assurance, aka making sure everything is functional and grammatically correct before sending it out into the world). It should help you identify if any changes need to be made or if it looks consistent.
Educates and Enables Everyone
As an organization grows, more hands will create content than ever before. Having a brand guidelines document that everyone in the organization can access, empowers employees to develop content that is on-brand by themselves. It also allows them to share the content with vendors and contractors who need to quickly get up to speed in order to complete the job they’ve been hired for. It’s also common practice to provide a public-facing media kit, which is a version of the brand guidelines document created specifically for media professionals, on your website so your brand is properly represented in the media.
Helps Filter New Ideas
With growth comes new ideas for every aspect of an organization - product development, marketing tactics, company structure, etc. While change is exciting and necessary, it’s easy to lose sight of what the organization stands for in the midst of rapid growth and change. A thorough brand guidelines document includes the organization’s core beliefs, mission, and/or values which act as a convenient filter to run new ideas through as an organization grows.
Prioritizing the creation of a brand guidelines document for your organization is a great first step, but ultimately it won’t help if no one uses it. After the document has been created, it needs to be quickly endorsed by key stakeholders and made accessible to everyone in the organization. It should also be reviewed annually to see if anything needs to be updated or refreshed. Interested in developing a brand guidelines document for your organization but don’t know where to start? Click here to learn about our branding services.