The Importance of Creating Brand Guidelines

Building a brand is the need of the hour in this era of mass brands and an ever-shrinking world. And a brand guide can speed up the process for you.

Brand guidelines force you to make decisions on the little details so that there are no questions about bigger choices. By defining your business's look, perception, and voice, you build trust with your customers and convey stability even if 'change' seems constant in your industry.

Here is everything you need to know about the importance of creating super practical brand guidelines that help direct everyone on your team.

What are brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines are a defined structure that your company creates to communicate and educate others on your visual identity, voice, and content standards to name a few.

They are the rules that implement and govern your selected brand colors, fonts, logos, taglines, and overall graphic design style. They are an internal document that goes hand in hand with your company's principles and benchmark for branding.

Brand guidelines are the basis of how your business presents itself through its branding efforts, whether those be web, mobile, social, or print. Defining them can ensure all your marketing efforts remain uniform and using them consistently throughout your business can help you develop a recognizable brand identity.

What is in a brand guide?

A brand guide is more than just a style guide, it is an essential resource for everyone who works with your organization. They can be created in any type of content that tells the internal team how they can best represent your business - all while keeping your branding on point and within the parameters of your brand's values.

Your brand guidelines may include guiding elements, such as brand language and voice, brand character, logo, colors, typography, philosophy, vision, values, and tone.

Why businesses need concrete brand guidelines

Creating rules for your brand can increase revenue and set it up for success. Conversely, by not having any, a company runs the risk of diluting its brand - and with it, its message. Here are a few more reasons why you need to create brand guidelines.

To maintain consistency and uniformity

A brand guideline can fuel your business and make it faster. It can speed up the branding process because you don't have to stop and determine your branding standards every time you create your marketing collateral.

A solid brand guidelines document reduces internal and external gaps, ensures consistency and uniformity in a company's messaging, and elevates the overall brand - even if the employees involved are different people.

Since consistency makes it easier to build, maintain and run a business, lacking brand guidelines limits your potential for growth and success.

To eliminate confusion

If you have ever been in a situation where an employee is unsure how to answer a question, you already understand why brand guidelines are crucial for every business.

Without them, employees are often left trying to interpret company rules and requirements based on their own judgment, which can lead to confusion among customers.

Brand guidelines can also let your customers know what to expect from your business. With a defined and documented brand strategy, your company can reinforce its brand identity with internal teams and customers while saving significant time and resources spent each year on marketing collateral, staff training, and more.

To stay focused

It is not unusual for companies to lose focus and introduce products that don't align with their brand's image.

Remember when Cheetos launched a Cheetos flavored lip balm? Or when Prada started selling paper clips that cost $140 only to prove that their audience would buy anything labelled Prada?

But such launches and directionless brand activities can lead to confusion among customers. They can find it difficult to associate with your brand, ultimately causing you to lose sales. Fortunately, brand guidelines can keep you from making costly mistakes and stay on track every single time.

To set yourself apart from everyone else

Brands are easy to spot but harder to create. Brand guidelines help you fully develop your business identity and give you a framework to work from in different aspects of your business. And businesses that don't have them end up adapting someone else's brand identity, image, and value.

Every brand needs to have a personality, made up of visual and verbal interaction with its customers. Having a unique combination of brand colors, voice, tone, and personality will allow customers to spot you from a crowd of similar brands.

Having concrete brand guidelines also ensures that all your communication adheres to your brand image, even if they aren't being supervised.

To align your business with your values

Imagine what would happen if business founders made decisions on behalf of the company without communicating those decisions to their team.

Everyone else in the company would essentially be left applying their own interpretation of the brand guidelines as opposed to executing them as intended.

Brand guidelines are a crucial part of effective brand management because they help you put out cohesive and consistent stances for your company. They make it easier for your team to communicate with each other, partners, and clients about the specifics of your brand's values.

In addition, brand guidelines can give you a starting point when it comes to creating case studies, handling customer service inquiries, sharing content on social media, and creating marketing collateral, among more.

Conclusion

Whether you are a startup or an established business, creating and following brand guidelines is critical to making sure your market presence is unified and effective.

Identify Digital can help you highlight the unique selling proposition and develop your company's information architecture to create a comprehensive and effective brand guide, which will allow you to establish a well-rounded identity in the market.

Our branding experts will build a streamlined brand guide that will ensure your company's branding activities are futureproofed even if the founding team changes.