Branding is one of the crucial aspects of any business. It works as the company’s identity and credibility that allows the customers to trust your brand. In simple words, your audience recognizes you more and better perceives you, if you have a great brand value.
To create this branding for your business, you need to have clear and cohesive brand guidelines within your business system. It will help you set up a consistent brand image of your brand in the market. However, creating brand guidelines consists of various complex aspects that you still have to figure out.
In this article, we have mentioned all the essential aspects of brand Guidelines. You can implement all these in your own brand to achieve greater heights of success.
Without any delay, let’s begin the guide!
What are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines denote the specific rules and regulations of a brand that maintain how your brand should be represented to the world. It helps the brand to maintain a consistent image in the market and shows what your company is all about. You can understand the brand guide as a “rule book” that controls the entire look and feel of your brand.
Therefore, brand guidelines allow everyone to properly promote and showcase your business based upon the set brand values, vision, mission, and personality in your business guidelines. In these guidelines, you have to consider all the essential elements that your stakeholders should use in order to represent your brand.
Why are Brand Guidelines Important?
Branding directly denotes the way the world recognizes your company. You need to have an appealing branding to create your trustworthy personality. To keep your branding clean and consistent, you need to work over your brand guidelines. These guidelines are actually the main controller of your company’s branding.
You need to have an amazing experience with your brand so that your customers recognize you and get back to your brand. Therefore, these brand guidelines will simply help you to better operate your business as per your choice without your need to make any decision.
5 Visual Styles You Should Include In Your Brand Guidelines
Here we have mentioned all the essential brand guidelines for social media, website, and other platforms for your business.
1. Logo
The logo is one of the main visual styles of a brand. You can use the brand logo on every important page of your brand to leave your company’s presence over it. People generally remember the visual style more than the company’s name. However, some of the companies keep their company’s name as their logo, and it is not possible to stick the company’s name on every important page. Such companies generally have a differently designed compact logo that they can use in other aspects.
2. Written Style
Written style means the way you use your brand to communicate with your customers. It consists of factors such as voice, tone, and audience considerations. Thus, it is known as brand guidelines typography. You have to decide all these factors based on your customer persona and preferences. When you maintain a consistent written style over your brand pages, then it will craft a unique style for your brand.
3. Color Scheme
Most of the brands are known for their unique colour theme. It gives the brand a unique identity in the market that allows the users to remember their brand easily. Some brands prefer dark themes to make their brand seem classic and multi-colour themes to make their brand seem more creative. Therefore, your brand colours can help you create your brand identity. You should also use a similar color scheme on your promotional campaigns to give the touch of your brand.
4. Mission Statement
The mission statement of a brand defines the personal brand statement of a company. This statement is created based upon three main important factors: Targeted Audience, Product/Service Offered, and Unique Selling Point. Hence, your brand mission statement should be concise and consider everything so that anyone can understand your business in one line.
5. Photography
Every brand has to post some of the photos on their web pages, social handles, and promotional campaigns. Photos might be candid, posed, casual or professional. You should decide the type of photography consistently used in your brand, as it will also define a lot about your brand.
How to Create Brand Guidelines?
Step 1: Define the Main Characteristics of Your Brand
First, you need to define the mission, value, and purpose of your brand. It will help you craft the identity of your brand in a way that your customer prefers. To mould your brand based on your customers, you need to add relevant brand elements like- visuals, written styles, colour schemes, and more. All these factors will help you create a unique brand.
Step 2: Set Up Basic Rules For Your Brand Elements
You have to decide on certain basic rules for all the elements of your brand, such as mentioned below:
- Logo: The company’s logo should be used on the pre-decided pages only, as it represents the company’s branding.
- Written Style: You should set clear guidelines for only using the relevant fonts.
- Illustration: You need to add a clear guideline for using certain types of illustration. Plus, you should also see where it can be used for better results.
- Icons: Adding the color, size, and type of icons is essential to ensure that your managers and creators are using the right icons in your promotional campaigns.
- Color Palette: Confirm the colors relevant to your brand and add them to your guide. You should choose the color based on the emotion and sentiment you want to convey.
- Grids and White Space: You also need to add a specific way how your brand elements should be placed.
Step 3: Inform The Employees About Your Guidelines
When finally creating the basic guidelines of your brand, then you need to convey it to your employees and creative team. You can also organize an official launch to make your guidelines known to each employee of your company. Furthermore, you can also provide training programs to make people aware of your guidelines. Make sure to keep your guidelines simple and easy to understand.
Step 4: Plan Your Brand’s Evolution
A brand is a living entity that needs to be upgraded every day. You have to plan every step in order to upgrade them strategically. Bring new ideas and implement them to your business to evolve your brand as per the changing times and environment. Also make sure to implement the social media brand guidelines that will drastically increase your brand value.
3 Major Examples of Brand Guidelines
Example #1: Uber
Uber has the most straightforward guidelines, consisting of their brand mission as a foundation. They have created their unique brand style and also have clear guidelines for how their brand language should look. In the Uber guidelines, you will also find the specific colors, fonts, etc to be used in the promotional campaigns.
Example #2: Starbucks
Starbucks is one of the great examples of brand guidelines. They have a standard set of rules and regulations to use their brand elements in a certain way to maintain their brand’s premiums. Starbucks has a clear set of instructions for the use of its Siren logo, color theme, voice tone, typography, illustration, and more. They maintain their brand consistency by providing simple and easy-to-follow guidelines.
Example #3: Netflix
Netflix has a very famous dark theme, which has a lot of popularity. Their logo “N” also has a separate popularity. Therefore, this company is widely focused on guidelines related to these elements – Logo and Symbol. You need to focus on certain aspects of your brand that can potentially provide the results.
Wrap Up
Brand guidelines are an essential aspect of a business. Because it keeps complete control of all the different brand elements as per your demand, the steps we’ve mentioned in this blog can help you create great and comprehensive guidelines for your business. We hope this article helps you find all the relevant ways to form brand guidelines social media, web pages, and other necessary aspects.