Developing Brand Guidelines

If your company's brand is not well defined, it could hurt sales and marketing. To avoid this, we recommend making a plan for creating and keeping a good brand identity. This will make sure that all designs used by the company match each other. It will also help new employees understand the company's branding principles.

Who should read this?

If you're a startup owner or part of the marketing team, and want to clearly define your brand's identity while cohesively creating content across all channels, then this is for you.

How to build brand guidelines

Step 1: Define your brand

Schedule a meeting with your team to discuss and agree upon the following:

• What’s your purpose? WHY do you do what you do?
• What’s your mission? WHAT do you do? Who do you serve? How do you serve them?
• What’s your vision? What do you want to become? What’s your ambition?
• What are the functional and emotional benefits* you deliver to your customers?
• What are your values? E.g., bold thinking, leadership, integrity, a will to win.
• What’s your tone? Fun, professional, more feminine than masculine? If your business were a celebrity or someone famous, who would you be and why?
• Who’s your audience? What types of companies and roles do you want to target? The CTO? CMO? Who are they? What drives them?
  

*Functional benefits are the tangible outcomes your business can provide (such as losing weight, saving money). On the other hand, emotional benefits focus on mental rewards (like instilling confidence and creating joy).

To evaluate your current business state, create a consensus on what you are trying to achieve and communicate it in 1-2 sentences. Additionally, consider the future of your company as well as areas where design and identity can be enhanced from this initial brainstorming session.

Step 2: Establish your design and identity

After you have decided what your brand will be and what it will be known for, it is time to look at the design of your products. It is important to establish firm design standards so that all of your marketing materials will look the same and be easily recognizable.

Establish brand rules and guidelines

Establish concrete guidelines for the following design assets:

1. Color: When it comes to the colors that best capture your brand identity, consider which hues evoke the desired emotions from your intended audience. Once you have chosen a colour palette, ensure you include relevant HEX, RGB and CMYK codes in order to create consistent guidelines.
2. Typography: What fonts do you have in your design? Are they different for the headlines and the body copy?
3. Imagery: The pictures you use should match the kind of brand you want to have. For example, if you want to be seen as a luxury brand, you would use different pictures than if you want to be seen as a family-friendly brand. You should also think about different formats for different uses, like blogs, print ads, and slideshows. Make sure to give clear instructions for where people can find and download these assets if they need them.
4. Logo usage: It is important to make clear rules about how your logo can be used. You would be surprised how many designers change or adjust corporate identities without permission. If you make clear rules about how the logo can be used, it will ensure that your brand is consistent in all marketing efforts.
   

Step 3: Package up your positioning and identity

Put together the regulations and policies you've created into a PowerPoint or PDF presentation to be shared amongst your business partners and suppliers.

Challenges when building brand guidelines

1. Clearly defining their purpose

Companies may experience difficulty in defining the "why" of their business, which goes beyond merely satisfying customer needs or gaining profits. To break this stalemate and discover your organization's purpose, consider how you can offer a greater contribution to society through your product/service.

2. Keeping it simple

It can be hard for companies to explain why they are good and different from other companies. Keep your answers short, clear, and to the point! This means that each answer should be summarized in one or two sentences. Simple yet effective is what you should aim for!

3. Imagery and design

Some companies have trouble finding the right pictures to go with their products or services. They forget to include people in their pictures, and they focus too much on the technology side of things. To avoid this problem, you can try using free stock image sites like unsplash.com and pexels.com. You can also buy packages of five or 10 images from Shutterstock. Be sure to include people in your pictures, and try to use pictures that show positive emotions. Empathy drives sales, which means that people are more likely to buy something if they feel empathy for the people in the picture.