Guiding Your Brand
Guiding Your Brand
When it comes to building a memorable brand, it’s all about consistency.
Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand guidelines. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, sales managers, and even product packaging departments all stay on the same page and present a unified vision of your brand to your customers.
Brand guidelines, also known as a brand style guide, are essentially an instruction manual on how to communicate your brand. They lay out all the visual details, as well as important notes about your company’s voice, tone, and messaging.
Your brand guidelines do more than just outline and specify brand standards; they are expectations, to be used both internally and externally, that exemplify your brand – who you are, what you stand for, etc. – and help build consistent brand messaging to create lasting connections with your customers.
A key goal of brand guidelines is to ensure that all parties use the brand elements consistently.
Key elements of your brand guidelines should include:
1. Your brand’s core purpose or reason for being:
- Purpose – why you exist?
- Vision – what do you want to help create?
- Mission – what are you here to do?
- Values – what principles guide your behaviour?
2. Messaging:
How to best speak about your company, products or services to best engage and connect with your target audience – what is the value you provide them?
3. Visual guidelines:
Design plays a vital role in your success and recognition. Comprehensive visual identity helps to guide consistent content creation and should include:
- Colours Logo
- Fonts and typography
- Stationery – letterhead, business card, email signature
- Photography
- Videography
- Signage
- Web design
- Social media
- Uniforms
4. Make your guidelines accessible:
To drive consistent presentation of your brand your brand guidelines should be easily available to everyone who uses your brand. When changes or updates area made they should be circulated to all users.
In sum, detailed brand guideline will allow you to influence the impression your customer has of you, everything from your logo to your customer service to your product quality. It’s important that you control all of those touchpoints. Everything you’re doing sends a message, and your brand guidelines will help you to guide and direct what message or impression is being sent to your customers, consistently!
Contact our specialist team today on (07) 5458 5600 to discuss how we can help get your brand guidelines right: let’s get down to business!
