Your brand identity sets the tone for how you want your audience to perceive and interact with you. Just as important is ensuring that identity is consistent across all consumer- and internal- facing channels. In fact, the average revenue increase for always presenting a brand consistently is a whopping 33%. That’s why creating a set of rules and guidelines, or brand standards, for your brand’s look and feel is crucial to maintaining that consistency. It also helps avoid confusion for your customers – and your organization.
Brand guidelines can differ from company to company. Some can encompass an entire brand identity, including mission statement, positioning and values as well as what’s typically included in a style guide: logo, color palette, typefaces, backgrounds, copy tone, tagline/mandatory language – and the appropriate use cases of them. Some may only include the style guide itself as a needed resource for their company and outside vendors. However, no matter where your brand falls on this spectrum, having some form of brand guidelines is key to ensuring your company is represented correctly out in the world. Here’s why.
Consistency
Having set brand standards will help provide consistency in multiple ways for your brand. First, it raises awareness of your brand. Seeing the same messaging and look across channels – for example, on your website, in email blasts and on social media – gives customers repeat exposure to your brand so that they learn to recognize, and are more likely to delve deeper into, your company and its offerings. Adhering to brand standards also protects your reputation and helps build value as customers learn to trust your brand the more they’re exposed to it in a consistent way.
Google is a good example of a widely recognized brand with extremely thorough and consistent brand guidelines. The multinational technology company must have brand rules that are very strict because of how ubiquitous Google is in our daily lives. For example, there is a lengthy section in their Brand Resource Center devoted to Entertainment, meaning how and in what way scripts and video can refer to Google in order to make their projects more realistic. The section covers everything from UI to how various Google features, like Google Earth and Google Maps, are being portrayed onscreen. These comprehensive guidelines might seem extreme, but they are crucial to maintaining brand standards and preventing Google’s image from being misused and tarnished — and it also protects them legally.
Brand Recognition
What stands out when you think of the Apple brand? The apple icon? The clean white background? All of it? The reason it’s so memorable is because Apple has employed best-in-class brand standards consistently for decades. In fact, their brand identity is so thorough they even publish it on their website for vendors and partners to download and follow to the letter. You would never mistake Apple with any other brand, which demonstrates just how powerful a strong set of brand guidelines can be.
The more your brand identity is consistently out in the world, the more recognizable it will become. Having brand standards to define exactly how and where it appears is essential to its memorability and helping build trust with potential customers. When there are no brand guidelines in place, a brand’s visual identity can quickly become compromised by missteps like mixing old and new logos, using incorrect typefaces or icons, or employing off-brand copy and images.
Establishing Value
If a buyer or client visits a brand’s website and sees inconsistencies in typography, tone, or overall look, what will they likely think? At the very least, they might feel confused as to what identity the brand is trying to sell. At the worst, they might perceive the brand as not buttoned-up or professional, assume its services are a poor value and decide to not engage. They’re looking for a brand they can trust, a brand that takes itself seriously, and having brand guidelines provides a major failsafe that identity misalignment will be much less likely to occur in consumer-facing channels.
Going back to the Apple example, their brand identity exudes class and high quality. Every consumer-facing iteration of the brand, from their website to billboards to digital ads, has a consistent look and feel that people have come to expect. Whether or not the consumer is actively looking to buy an Apple product, they have been conditioned to equate Apple with the best tech, easy-to-grasp UI and superior design. Apple’s unmatched brand standards set the bar for telegraphing their unique identity across every marketing channel in which they appear.
Convenience
A good brand style guide groups together every element that comprises your brand’s identity into one living document. It can be conveniently shared among employees, content creators and vendors with clear, easy-to-follow instructions on how to use those assets in any kind of context. Although one would think this would limit creativity, it actually does quite the opposite. Because it provides clear rules for designing and writing, creatives must get more creative to execute their vision within a set of existing rules, which leads to more compelling advertising.
A shareable brand style guide is also extremely handy when you bring on new employees or contractors who aren’t as familiar with your brand identity as you and your staff are. Because it’s a teachable document with detailed instructions for treatments and situational examples for messaging and design, it makes the learning curve easier and faster, and helps eliminate confusion about how your brand should look.
Establishing brand standards for your brand is critical for consistently telegraphing value and quality to distinguish yourself from competitors. Brand standards also facilitate use of your identity in design and copy across every medium for your designers, writers and content creators. The more detailed and thorough that identity is, the more recognition your company is bound to have, which can ultimately lead to bigger sales and larger engagement among your target audience.
If you’re looking for a partner to help set your brand on the right track, we do that. Connect with Barbara Wray at barbara@wickmarketing.com or (512) 479-9834.
