Global brand consistency is the aim of any proficient brand manager – a coherent, harmonious image and identity across all touchpoints that your target audience understands, recognises and resonates with.
Yet achieving this is easier said than done. With an abundance of marketing channels and multiple teams scattered across the globe, it’s easy for inconsistencies to creep into your communications. When this happens, your audiences lose trust in your brand’s identity, impacting their loyalty and willingness to engage with your organisation.
In this ongoing battle to ensure brand consistency, brand guidelines are one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal. Defining your vision, style, tone and much more, your guidelines are the key to educating the people responsible for creating and promoting your brand, and keeping your brand assets uniform on every channel and in every location.
However, the quality and effectiveness of brand guidelines vary from company to company. Some keep brand image locked down; others simply gather dust in a file cabinet.
In this ultimate guide, we harness our decades of experience in helping brands stay consistent to share our tips for truly unbreakable, actionable brand guidelines.
What are brand guidelines?
Your brand guidelines are the heart and soul of your company’s identity. It’s the manual that dictates your brand usage across all areas. It captures the essence of what your brand represents and its unique personality. It tells the brand story that forges emotional connections with your audiences, both internal and external.
Whether you’d rather refer to this as a brand style guide, brand manual or brand kit, the principle remains the same – your guidelines are the foundation for absolute brand consistency:
- They deliver greater quality control, ensuring all content is produced with your brand’s reputation and identity in mind
- They increase the understanding of your corporate branding across your marketers, graphic designers and wider staff
- They enable better brand recognition by guaranteeing a consistent, coherent visual identity across your collateral
Or at least they should. While over 85% of organisations say they have brand guidelines, only 30% are enforced properly. Problems such as a lack of awareness, poor communication and inaccessibility commonly prevent guidelines from having their desired impact, enabling inconsistencies in visual elements, tone of voice and other critical areas.
When brand design guidelines are ignored or misrepresented, your consistency – and consequently your overall company performance – suffers.
Is brand consistency that important?
Imagine a coworker who is always smartly dressed. Tailored suit, tucked-in shirt, polished shoes – everything neatly aligned. One day they come to work with messy hair, stains on their shirt and worn shoes. You would probably be confused and want to know if something was wrong.
The same logic applies to your brand and your customers. Your branding is the personification of your organisation, what people come to know and love. If that image frequently changes, it becomes impossible for your audiences to build trust as they don’t know where you stand.
This is why consistent, harmonious brands enjoy 33% revenue increases over inconsistent brands. Or why consistent brands are 3-4 times more likely to have excellent visibility in their market.
Consistency breeds confidence from your consumers, fosters loyalty, and builds lasting customer relationships. Your brand guidelines are the lynchpin of realising these benefits.
Cementing your identity before creating your brand guidelines
Before you can write up your brand guidelines, there’s some initial groundwork you and your team must take care of. Whether you’re undertaking a rebranding campaign or establishing guidelines in a long-established company, the first step is to cement your brand identity.
After all, if you aren’t clear about what your brand represents and how it should be portrayed, what exactly are your guidelines protecting? To get your guidelines off on the right foot, here are the formative steps you should know:
Conduct a thorough brand audit
Begin by examining your current brand elements, communications and collateral in a comprehensive brand audit. This should give you a sense of what personality your brand is projecting to your audience: is it coherent on all touchpoints? Is it aligned with what we want our brand to represent?
It’s vital your audit is approached objectively. You must be honest about whether your current messaging represents your brand in the manner you intend. Canvass your stakeholders, customers, employees and more to build this universal view of your brand’s perception.
Your analysis will establish the strengths and weaknesses of your current branding, and what your brand guidelines must include to present your brand correctly.
Understand your target audience
Your brand is designed to foster a connection with your customers, employees and the wider world. So, it’s important your brand guidelines are grounded in what your audience wants and expects from your organisation.
To build your buyer personas, consider the following:
- What are their demographics and characteristics?
- What are their habits?
- What are their concerns and pain points?
- What values do they care about most?
- What are their hobbies and interests?
- Where do they look for information?
Examine your competitors
Competitor analysis is vital when forming your brand identity to establish areas where you can set yourself apart from the crowd.
Examining their colour schemes, tone of voice, mission statements, social media platforms and beyond can inspire ideas for your own branding, while pinpointing unique characteristics, visuals and offerings that will help you stand out.
Determine your visual identity
As prominent graphic designer Paul Rand once said: design is the silent ambassador of your brand. When you have audited your brand and researched your audience/competitors, you should nail down the visual elements that will encapsulate your brand’s identity.
This takes your brand from conception to reality, forming the bulk of your brand guidelines. You may enlist the services of an external design agency to bring these initial assets to life, which you can later harness for wide-scale asset creation through branded templates.
What should be included in brand guidelines?
This is the fundamental question in your creation of brand identity guidelines. After cementing the essence of your branding and visual presentation, what must you include to ensure this is properly communicated across all your marketing?
Clarity and comprehensiveness are the order of the day here. While you want your guidelines to be digestible and accessible, the more detail you include here, the less room there is for your teams to misinterpret and misrepresent your brand in future.
Brand vision and mission statements
Your brand vision and mission are your brand’s purpose and how it aspires to achieve that goal. They’re the core values that tell your customers, employees and beyond who you are, what you represent and where you’re going.
Consider these as people’s introduction to your brand and the foundation for your relationship with them. That’s why your vision and mission statements should sit at the front of your brand guidelines, so those using the guide can understand this immediately.
Brand logo
The Nike swoosh. McDonald’s’ golden arches. The Starbucks Siren. Your brand logo is the visual face of your brand, and one of the most important tools in building recognition and brand equity among your audiences.
However, your brand guidelines should not simply display and explain the rationale of your logo. It must set parameters for how your logo should be used in all brand assets. How large should it be? Where should it be positioned? Does it look different on a letterhead than a social media post?
In your guidelines, include all approved versions of your logo and include the following:
- Different sizes and layouts of your main logo
- The white space required around your logo
- Approved colour variations beyond your main logo
- Reversed and mono versions of your logo
- Responsive logos for smaller screens (mobiles, tablets, etc.)
Iconography
Icons are important parts of your branding as they can be recognisable across different languages and cultures in a way that written text cannot.
Your brand guidelines should identify aspects like the size of your icons, what they indicate and situations where they are appropriate for use. If you use outlined icons or solid icons, this preference should also be pinpointed here as well.
Colour palette
Colour is arguably the most powerful means for people to recall your brand. In fact, colour is estimated to increase brand recognition by 80%. Therefore, your distinct, unique colour palette must be clearly outlined within your guidelines.
Most brands will typically choose three or four primary colours of different hues for different purposes:
- A lighter colour for backgrounds
- A darker shade for text
- A neutral hue
- A flashy colour that pops off screens
Dutch brewing company Heineken follows this pattern in their own guidelines:
When presenting your colour palette in your brand style guide, precisely indicate your primary and secondary colours, and any distinction between colours used on the web (RGB colours) and in print (CMYK colours). Also ensure you include the following details:
- Their colour match, using their Pantone name and number
- Their CMYK number
- Their RGB colour and HEX code
Typography
Typography is the variety of font styles your brand uses in its copy. This could be a single “family” of fonts, or include a mixture of styles you want to use across your digital and print channels.
Consistency is key here, so it’s not ideal to have numerous wildly different fonts. A good rule of thumb for brand managers is to use a different typography for your logo than your “main” font style. This creates a contrast that stands out more to audiences.
Within your brand guidelines, outline the typography used for different types of text – headings, paragraphs, bullet points, etc. – as well as the preferred alignment of text and spacing between words and paragraphs.
Tone of voice
Your tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with your audiences and influences how they think about you through your messaging.
This is often the segment of brand guidelines most open to misinterpretation. To ensure that doesn’t happen:
- Use a tone of voice scale, including examples of the tone used for greetings, sign-offs and other key CTAs
- Alternatively, a tone of voice table can illustrate your various voice characteristics and when they should be employed
- Provide best practice examples to guide your copywriters on what is acceptable and what isn’t
- Align your tone with your brand personality, connecting it to 3-5 adjectives that underlie your core values
Imagery
The imagery section of your brand guidelines should guide your whole team on what types of photos, illustrations, designs and more are appropriate for your brand.
You can make the distinction between good and bad imagery clear in your guidelines in several ways:
- Best practice – Show examples from your collection of photos, illustrations and other imagery that performed well for your brand, demonstrating to designers which ones fit your range of channels
- Aspiration – Don’t have an internal collection to lean on? The same effect can be achieved by using imagery that you’ve found from brands that inspire your organisation
- Mood board – Collect images and themes that convey the feelings you want to get across in your brand imagery
Signage
Whether the signage is physical posters, banners and billboards, or digital bulletins on retail websites and beyond, these will have specific dimensions and elements that you’ll want to ensure stay consistent across all locations.
Are your signs flat, plastic and vinyl? Are they built up and illuminated? Are they static or animated? All of these elements should be highlighted in your brand guidelines.
Guides for physical and digital marketing channels
Finally, you should dedicate part of your brand guidelines to clarifying your various physical and digital marketing channels. Denoting how your logos, colours, visual elements and more appear on specific channels ensures a coherent, harmonious flow of content on these platforms.
Perhaps dedicate a page or two of your master guidelines to each channel to illustrate nuances or restrictions that differ from your core guidelines. Alternatively, you may want to produce distinct brand management guidelines for each platform, which can be incredibly useful if you have professionals dedicated to different areas of your marketing ecosystem.
Making your brand guidelines accessible and actionable
While nailing the components and structure of your brand guidelines is no doubt essential, equally as crucial – and often overlooked – is the accessibility of your guidelines.
What’s the point of having a thorough, informative, end-to-end guide if no one knows where it lives or follows it? That’s why there is such a discrepancy in the number of organisations that have brand guidelines and the number that use brand guidelines.
In order to achieve the all-encompassing consistency your brand demands and your audiences expect, making your guidelines easy to access and understand is essential. Here’s how you achieve it:
Structure and design your guidelines for ease of use
First, take time to design and lay out your guidelines for maximum engagement and comprehension. There’s a lot of information to be communicated here, but a guide with wall-to-wall text will likely inspire eye rolls and shoulder shrugs.
Remember, this is a resource that a brand-new designer, marketer or agency will use to grasp your brand and produce assets to the standard you expect. If it’s confusing, bland or poorly structured, people won’t follow it closely.
For truly accessible brand guidelines, consider the following:
- Be concise yet informative in each segment, only providing as much information as necessary without going overboard with text
- Use imagery and interactive elements to engage readers more effectively
- Rely on simple, easy-to-digest language so anyone, regardless of their design knowledge, can follow along
- Create checklists alongside your guidelines to offer step-by-step instructions for how to apply and present your branding
Here are 3 great examples of organisations with engaging, digestible brand guidelines:
Ollo
Ollo’s creative, colourful brand guidelines include an interactive game demonstrating how users can manipulate their logo, making this segment more engaging and understandable.
Wolf Circus
Wolf Circus’s guidelines leave no confusion over the colours and imagery at the core of their brand identity. It comprehensively covers everything from the company’s mission statement and logo variants to specific campaign guidelines, while maintaining a minimalist and clear structure.
NJORD
NJORD’s minimalist approach gives readers everything they need in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. It doesn’t skimp out on relevant details, delivering everything someone would need to produce their array of digital and print assets.
Harness the power of video in your guidelines
92.3% of users watch videos every week. It’s the most powerful form of online content and people retain more information from it than something they simply read or hear.
Converting your written brand guidelines into a series of video explainers and tutorials can help users easily understand your brand identity and its usage. Think of it as a “show not tell” approach that can reduce the risk of misinterpretation.
Translate your guidelines in relevant languages
For global brands with worldwide locations, ensure there are versions of your brand guidelines written in every relevant language. This removes any jeopardy of people misunderstanding the instructions in your guidelines, and makes these much easier to follow for your teams across the globe.
Establish a digital “home” for your brand guidelines
Where you house your brand guidelines is crucial – it cannot simply be a single printed booklet in your office. While you can produce printed guidelines for all personnel, this is not exactly cost-effective or environmentally friendly. So, we recommend establishing an online brand portal to contain your digital brand guidelines.
Taking this approach ensures:
- Users worldwide can access, read and download guidelines with a couple of clicks
- You can incorporate interactive features and videos within your style guides
- Any adjustments and updates to your guidelines can be applied instantly without any administrative headaches
Create a single source of truth for brand assets
As your brand assets offer the clearest guide to how your branding should be portrayed across all marketing channels, having these contained in one intuitive location helps you lock down consistency.
Investing in a standalone Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, or as part of a more comprehensive brand management platform, can make it far simpler for your teams to locate exemplar assets to use as a template for future campaigns.
Turn your brand guidelines into brand templates
Speaking of templates, the best way to ensure your guidelines are steadfastly applied throughout your brand assets is by making these the framework for dedicated design templates.
Creating templates for each type of asset you require, constructed under your brand guidelines, makes it impossible for designers to steer beyond these boundaries. This can lock down the size and position of visual elements, typography and much more, meaning people don’t have to study your guidelines meticulously to apply them.
Furthermore, high-quality template software empowers anyone on your team – not just those with a design background – to create content, completely secure in the knowledge that everything produced is 100% brand-consistent.
Control your brand like never before with unbreakable brand guidelines
Now that you know the essence of great brand guidelines, we hope you can use this blog to take your own guidelines to the next level.
Making these as engaging, comprehensive and accessible as possible for your workforce is critical to always communicating the right messages to your audiences, leaving zero room for inconsistencies.
By applying the techniques and tips above, you set your teams up for a future of consistent, coherent marketing campaigns, and build a strong brand that is understood, trusted and beloved by customers, employees and others globally.
