Consistency is critical when you want to build trust and establish loyalty. This is especially true when it comes to your brand. Your brand is arguably more than just a logo; it is a substantial business investment. ENTER Brand Guidelines.
After you’ve worked collaboratively with a branding company to come up with a name and decide your core values, voice, positioning, and brand design logo, there is still more work to be done. You need to ensure that your brand’s identity is communicated effectively and consistently across all marketing channels, in print and online.
How do you do that? By creating a style guide.
A style guide is part of your brand strategy and holds the utmost importance of brand guidelines. These documents offer directives and clarity on the visual presentation of your brand—tone, logo, color palette, typeface, and more. They also help create and maintain uniformity among key collaborators like copywriters and designers. Thus, having these set of rules in place will enable your brand to drive authority and encourage consumer allegiance, increasing your brand recognition.
For example, the style guide may offer specific rules regarding your brand’s voice. Do you want your message to be active or passive, formal or casual, modern or traditional? There may be words that you don’t want to be used in your written communication and certain abbreviations and spellings. Some companies opt to follow the grammar rules found in the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook instead of creating their editorial style guide, which is a route you may also seek to take in terms of content.
Style guides also help with your brand’s visual distinctiveness by ensuring a consistent color palette. CMYK and RGB values and an HTML Hex reference are included in the manual for designers to follow. The style guide will also underline variations of your logos (size and color), fonts, weights, and styling used to represent your brand identity.
Your brand’s tone is a reflection of your brand personality. Without a style guide, you may unintentionally jeopardize your brand’s value and reputation. Simply changing the position of your logo on a brochure or your color palette may cause your brand to be unrecognizable and confuse your consumers. To avoid errors like this, you must ensure that your entire team, internal and external, or on the same page. Having a style guide on hand is also helpful in making new employees aware of your expectations.
If you’re a startup and need help managing your branding, brand guidelines and marketing efforts, you can contact us to help you get started on creating a style guide.
What's for Lunch?
