In today's competitive business world with infinite choices, companies have to look for ways to connect emotionally with customers and create lifelong relationships. We can't say it enough: people fall in love with brands.
It doesn’t matter what stage your company is at or how amazing the marketing strategy is, there are still misconceptions about what brand guidelines are and why they are important.
Why are brand guidelines important?
Regardless of what you call them, brand guidelines are a set of tools designed to give your brand consistency and flexibility. By default, they are most often used by designers to make certain they’re using the right fonts, colour palette, and versions of your logo. But effective guidelines should be much more than that; try to see them as a defined resource that everyone in the company can use to represent the brand and communicate with your customers.
Here are 5 reasons why brand guidelines are important:
1. It brings value
It is essential that everyone understands the value of the brand and how to use it. By implementing brand guidelines, you make it easier to maintain the quality and integrity of your brand’s image.
Great brands are like friends - you encounter a huge number of them everyday, but you only remember the ones you love. (Luc Speisser, MD Landor)
2. A clear understanding of your brand
Brand guidelines explain how employees can reflect brand values in the way they deal with customers; for example, customer focus, innovation, leadership, and in the way they deal with customers. Think of it in this way - everyone should have more a clear understanding of what makes your organization unique.
How strongly people believe in an organization and its basic precepts weighs heavily on success. (Thomas Watson, JR., CEO IBM, 1952-1971)
3. Consistency in your visual communication
With brand guidelines in place, you can ensure your brand’s elements are used effectively and look professional everytime they are used. Guidelines give your company control over the way other people use your brand so that its visual appearance is always consistent.
The best brands marry intelligence and insight with imagination and craft. (Connie Birdsall, Creative Director, Lippincott)
4. Relationships
You can use brand guidelines to demonstrate the relationship between your company and stakeholders associated with it. If you have referrals or affiliates, provide them with guidelines to help them represent your brand better.
Design differentiates and embodies the intangibles - emotion, context, and essence - that matters the most to consumers. (Moira Cullen, VP Global Beverage Design, PepsiCo)
5. Perception
Every time you communicate with customers, suppliers, employees, investors, journalists, and the community, it is essential to set, build, and keep a consistent perception of your company.
If you think that good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design. (Ralf Speth, CEO Jaguar Land Rover)
The 5 essentials to include in your brand guidelines
Brand guidelines can take many different forms, assets, and formats. To help you out in creating your own or re-branding the existing, we want to share our own StoryChief brand guidelines together with some other examples you can use as inspiration.
Element 1: Mission
A mission statement tells people what you strive for as an organisation. You want to make sure your brand identity is distinctive, relevant, and consistent.
WeWork is a community of collaborative workspaces around the globe. With focus on three words, WE WORK HERE, their brand mission became easy to explain and easy to understand.🕴🏻Find out more here.
Element 2: Core Values
Your core values should express the principles your organisation are built on.
Raka chocolate is making unroasted dark chocolate from scratch, progressively sourcing single origin cacao beans and crafting recipes that celebrate each cacao’s distinct flavour profile. Their re-branding is truly a great example of a symbiotic relationship between great design and core values. 👏
