Do I need Brand Guidelines?
Your brand’s integrity is a fragile thing, so it needs to be treated as such. Every touch point between your brand and your audience should be used to reinforce your unique perception, and that’s where brand guidelines can help.
Brand guidelines will help protect your integrity by maintaining a consistent look, feel and voice. They set a foundation for your brand by creating a framework to operate within, and allow you to communicate in a consistent way no matter what medium you choose.
As well as setting strict rules to follow, they should aim for a clever degree of flexibility to allow the brand to grow and develop.
Guidelines can also demonstrate the essence of your brand’s DNA - your energy, your spirit, your culture. It should be a fun document which can be communicated internally to excite employees, after all, if your people understand and believe in the business, that then becomes visible to your customers.
All of these elements make guideline documents highly unique to each company and brand. They can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, sometimes hundreds of pages long and incredibly detailed and sometimes short and visually expressive. Whatever youd need, or choose to communicate, a brand guidelines document should at least include:
- Logo usage
- Font and typography
- Image use
- Brand tone of voice and personality
Ok, so what are the benefits?
Personality
By creating a set of guidelines you start to build up an idea of your brand personality. This enables you to develop further marketing materials and eventually promotes brand advocacy with customers. This also helps when the brand develops and enters new ventures as it means the brand will be recognisable.
Efficiency
Guidelines help to save time, which also allows creative budgets to be spent wisely.
Consistency
If your brands visual identity is clear and consistent across all channels this reinforces the way you resonate with your customers. A uniform integrated campaign allows your campaign to have maximum impact, as its repetition across channels will filter through more efficiently to your customers.
Clear messaging
Creating brand guidelines also helps to define clear objectives of the brand through its messaging, this in turn ensures that you do not loose sight of your brand aims.
Brand trust
Building a consistent brand helps to grow trust in your brand or product. It is a bit of a jump but we believe this brand trust leads to customer advocacy and people willing to pay more for your product.
In conclusion, guidelines are a positive marketing tool however the success of the brand is still dependent on the quality of the brand development that occurs before or whilst the guidelines are being developed. If you would like more information on creating brand guidelines for your business give us a call, or email us at hi@hive.agency.
