What are Brand Standards Guides?
Brand standards are exactly what they sound like: rules for how to portray your brand to customers and potential customers.
Having such standards in place can help you create a quick-reference guide that provides direction for marketing efforts and protects the look, feel and integrity of your brand. Following these guidelines is critical to producing consistent content across all teams and platforms utilized by your company.
Brand standard guides may contain specific rules, although they are not meant to limit creativity. The rules assist anyone—inside or outside your team or organization—tasked with producing marketing materials and ensure branding elements appear as they should.
What is the Purpose of Brand Standards?
You want your brand to be recognizable and memorable. Logos and other visual aspects of branding are likely the first thing your customers, and potential customers, see—they’re the face of your company.
Persistent use of brand standards leads to consistency across advertising efforts and increased brand recognition. This is important because when customers recognize your brand—and think positively about it—they are more likely to interact with your brand and make a purchase.
The most effective brands are impeccably consistent when it comes to their branding. Constant change in branding, such as fonts, logos, colors and messaging, make your company less memorable and therefore less likely to grow brand loyalty.
You can’t create a consistent brand without effectively sharing branding expectations with your entire team. A thorough brand standards guide allows your team to be on the same page and create cohesive marketing materials across all platforms.
Additionally, brand guidelines give your team a starting point. When your company has a comprehensive brand standards guide, creatives don’t have to start from scratch every time they’re tasked with developing a new marketing campaign. In many cases, the imagery and messaging groundwork has already been determined by the brand standards.
What Do Brand Standard Guidelines Include?
What exactly your brand standards include will depend on the size of your company and extent of your marketing efforts.
At a minimum, brand standard guides include visual elements such as logos, fonts, color palette and imagery.
A more extensive set of guidelines may include more granular details such as:
- Icons
- Tagline(s)
- Layout templates
- Copy and messaging parameters
- Mission statement and values
- Frequency of communications
- Audience demographics and personas
No matter the complexity of your brand standards guidelines, be sure to be as specific as possible in order to ensure consistency across your brand.
Who are Brand Standards For?
The rules and tools laid out by your brand standards guide need to be readily available to anyone who touches your brand—employees, contractors, creatives, etc. This guarantees correct branding and consistency no matter who is working on your advertisements and marketing content.
You might think that brand guidelines are only for designers, but they can be useful for anyone who needs to understand your brand and how to best portray it to customers.
The Bottom Line: You Need a Brand Standards Guide
Protect your brand with a thorough brand standards guide. This tool aids your team in creating the best possible content while building your brand’s authority, credibility and customer loyalty.
The experienced team at ColinKurtis Advertising understands the importance of brand standards guides, how to develop them and how to put them to use in your marketing strategies. Reach out to Mitch Robinson at mitch@colinkurtis.com or call at 815-956-6657 EXT. 1 to learn more about our services.
Blog post from:
Debra Tucker
Vice President, Creative Director
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