Importance of Brand Guidelines

What are Brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines are rules and directives that describe the components of a brand and how it should look. Brands ensure that their narrative is clear and consistent by sticking to these rules in all of their promotional material, on social media, blogs, packing, and other connections. Creating impactful branding is established on the pillars of brand guidelines. Brand guidelines for a company include specifics regarding the logo, font, color combination, graphics, tone of voice, and communication. They outline the best procedures and guidelines for maintaining your brand consistency as well as where and how to apply these components. Brand guidelines provide a roadmap for branding identity, personality, communication techniques along with brand aesthetics. Thus, ensuring the brand’s messaging is consistent and resonates with its intended audience. Ultimately, brand guidelines work as a framework to guide how a brand should be represented in the public, resulting in the development of a strong and distinctive brand identity that shines out beyond rivals.

Components of Brand Guidelines:

Brand guidelines are a collection of a brand’s representation components that build over time. When starting out th kiese are the basics to start empowering your brand:

1. Mission statement – Regardless of the size of the company, the mission statement is important to lay down. It highlights the purpose and values that drive the organization’s goals.
2. Buyer Persona – This helps in getting into the psyche of the customer and understanding their needs, wants, and expectations.
3. Color Palette – It determines what feeling the brand wants to evoke and what impression to solidify on its target market. The color schemes employed in the visual representation of the brand, when and where to be employed.
4. Style guide – It is the tone of voice used in copywriting, blogs, and ads of the brand. It basically provides a guide to staying consistent with the tone of the brand. This saves the brand the hassle of explaining the brand’s tone again and again to an agency/freelancer/new employee hired to write communication content for the brand.
5. Typography – It includes the font of the content, microcopy, UX design, font size, and blog design for your brand. Brand guidelines are your vision for the brand. Start from the basics and work your way to keep improving, perfecting it to deliver a memorable and impactful brand. This highlights that brand guidelines have paramount importance. Here, we have listed the importance of brand guidelines:

Consistency

Human brain recognizes, and remembers when exposed to the consistent representation of experience and trusts it. That is why brands with good consistent tones, imagery, and color schemes evoke the same user experience time after time. Thereby building trust in the brand. However cool, beautiful, and smart the brand maybe if it fails to stay consistent, clients won’t remember it. Thus, no consistency, no trust no loyalty from customers. Consistency begins with visual representation and goes on to the brand tone and experience. Today, when people experience information overload, it is crucial to create consistency more than ever. Example: When a design studio is hired for managing the social media of the brand, they are aware and skilled to create consistent representation. But they need guidance as to what parameters to work by.

Personalization

Ever since the pandemic 70% of people switched brands because of personalization. Personalization is an obvious need of the hour of the clients. With the surge of Covid-19, the world went into lockdown and people were heavily dependent on online services, e-commerce, entertainment, information and so much more. The more people had experience with online services their expectations have grown to brands, and they demand personalized services, and products. Personalization is the default expectation of clients from every brand. A personalized experience increases engagement, and repeat customers turn into loyal customers. Personalization is based on building long-term relationships that lead to better brand growth and a hike in revenue continuously. Ensuring less spending on paid efforts to generate revenue.

Creative Direction

Every successful brand works in a creative direction and that is why theta is memorable, unique, and impactful. Creative direction comes from foolproof brand guidelines. It gives a pathway to frame creative ideas in the form of graphics, ads, campaigns, pr material for the brand. Having brand awareness through the components set in brand guidelines helps in having a clear direction for execution. When brands have a creative direction their team feels unified and motivated to achieve a common goal bigger than themselves. It turns a creative vision into an impactful reality. Example: A logo design studio is hired to give the new look to the existing logo. The staff is given the brand guidelines to give them a creative direction to work with. Meaning what kind of feeling the logo should evoke. Focus Business keeps growing, venturing into new industries, and audiences. Among all, this consistency should remain, and brand guidelines help keep the focus on what the core should be of any venture in its branding. However a brand may evolve and grow, the visual identity may change but the feeling behind that is to be kept in focus.

Recognizable

Brand guidelines help a brand in having a unique identity making it recognizable. It is the quality of a brand being identified among other brands from its logo, design, and services. The ultimate win in brand recognition is when a brand is used to refer to a product. Example: In India Maggie is the synonym for instant noodles, and Godrej is a synonym for armoire. Now, this is a recognizable brand backed by strategic brand guidelines. Rules to work by Brand guidelines facilitate smooth functioning as it pens down the variation of logos, and color schemes to be used when and where. It includes does and don’ts for design. Making the job of the working design studio easy, by giving them what is needed and what is not to be done for the project. It’s about creating consistency and also aligning with the mission and vision of the brand.

Avoid Confusion

As the brand grows more and more employees get recruited, they are not aware of your brand’s elements, rules, and what goal to work towards. Brand guidelines educate them on the branding elements of the company thoroughly. example: When a logo design studio is hired to create the logo for a new range of products from the brand, the studio should be aware of all elements that guide to keep the logo consistent with the existing branding. This is where brand guidelines help in clearly mentioning the tone, color schemes, and design styles that represent the brand.