Building a Successful Brand with Brand Guidelines

Brand consistency is tricky. You need third-party agencies, partners, marketing staff, and customers to all stay consistent.

Externally, you want people talking about your brand. Internally, you want to produce lots of marketing materials. The more there is, however, the more inconsistency there will be. Your audience gets confused, and your brand suffers.

Brand guidelines ensure all your materials stay consistent by providing clear, exact rules. These guidelines maximize interest in your brand and ensure you’re differentiating successfully.

 

Why Brand Guidelines Are Crucial

Your brand is the culmination of all your messaging. Brand guidelines control this image. Here’s what a great brand helps you do:

• Connect with your audience. A study found that Millennials feel connected with their brands as much as their ethnicity or religion!
• Differentiate your business. Grey Goose has been able to build their brand as a luxury vodka, even though they perform similarly to house vodkas in blind taste tests!
• Improve the user experience. Former CEO Andy England attributes Coors Light’s extended period of growth to their packaging and branding innovations. This greatly improved the user experience.

Branding allows you tons of other benefits. Word-of-mouth, web traffic, referrals, and customer loyalty are all increased. This means a better bottom-line. Brand guidelines are the only way to control your brand.

 

How You Can Use Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines walk a thin line. They have to be tight enough to maintain consistency, but loose enough to stifle creativity or third-party use.

Here’s what your brand guidelines need to focus on:

• Logo. This is your most important asset. You need to make sure it’s never altered, and that size and placing is consistent.
• Colors. Color greatly affects your brand’s perception. Take the time to research how colors affect different people, and consider doing some A/B testing to see which combinations work the best.
• Fonts. Fonts need to be consistent throughout everything you produce. You’ll want to choose three or four maximum, keeping it to one or two fonts per piece of material.
• Graphics. Your graphics need to stay consistent in style and shape. This will also include any borders or background that appear on your marketing material. If you want to use visuals, decide on photographs or illustrations.

Skype’s guidelines are a fantastic example. Use them as an outline for your own branding strategy.
Building a great brand takes time. If you need help with your branding, turn to your branding Denver experts, Tag Team Design. We provide turn-key branding services, including graphic design, web design, and much more. Contact us by clicking here!