Most of the new businesses don’t think much about branding and that’s a terrible mistake. Especially in the age of digital marketing and having so many social media platforms, where people see a lot of brands, advertisements, content, having a clear and distinct brand is very crucial. To do so you need to have branding in place from the very beginning of your business. And a brand style guide helps you define your brand and keep it consistent throughout the digital, print, and other customer touchpoints.
First of all, let’s understand what a brand style guide is. In simple terms, a brand style guide is a crucial document that dictates how a business presents itself to the world. It acts as a reference tool for everyone associated with the brand starting from the employees, partners, designers, vendors, advertisers, etc.
The brand style guide promotes consistency in an organisation’s social media, offline and online presence by demonstrating what the brand should look and sound like in all the places. It gives structure to your organisation’s brand voice and presentation. It helps people identify your brand and distinguish it from other brands and companies.
As you know, a brand should be presented cohesively, consistently and clearly in every place. It is important so that people don’t confuse it with any other brand.
Now that you understand how important a brand style guide is, you must be wondering what are the components of the brand style guide and how can you make one for your own brand. Let’s discuss the components of a brand style guide.
Components of a Brand Style Guide
In simple words, a Brand Style Guide is the foundation of a consistent brand. It comprises a set of rules that helps marketers, designers and social media marketers to stay on the same page and represent the unified vision of the brand to the public. Below are some of the components that a Brand Style Guide has:
Mission Statement
The mission statement defines what the brand seeks to accomplish and the reason for the brand’s existence. Hence, it is very important that every piece of content created works towards the right end goal defined by the mission statement.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona helps you define who your ideal customers are and then your marketing is focused to target only those customers. So having the buyer persona in your Brand Style Guide ensures that you’re speaking the right language with the right tone with your audience.
Colour Palette
Every brand uses some colours for its logo, fonts, and other visual material. To keep the brand identity consistent you need to have a colour palette. Your colour palette dictates what colours you can use and when to use them. So, everything from your marketing material, logo, website, mobile applications, icons, images, etc., follow this colour palette.
It keeps the visual identity of your brand consistent. Now the colour palette ideally should have all the HTML codes, RGB, and CMYK numbers of the colours used so that the designers know exactly what colour to be used.
Logo
The logo is also very important like the colours. People identify your brand from your logo. Hence, the brand style guide should clearly mention and determine the use of the logo. For instance, a logo that is in black colour can’t be used on a black background. So, the brand style guide should mention all the scenarios of the use of the logo so that the brand identity remains consistent everywhere.
Editorial Guide
An editorial guide is very important to determine the tone of voice a business should be using to communicate to its consumers in promotional strategies, website, informational content, and any other content they use.
Typography
There are millions of fonts you can use. But keep in mind that many brands use a specific set of fonts in their marketing and branding campaigns. The kind of font you use affects the way your brand is perceived and even has an emotional impact on your audience. With fonts, you can tell your audience what kind of brand personality you are.
Image & Video Style
There is a style of presenting the videos and images by brands. It makes that brand look different from the crowd. State clearly in your brand style guide what kind of videos you should be showing to your audience. For instance, some brands only use cartoons in their videos while others don’t use them rather they use human characters.
Caricatures and icons
An icon is a unique and memorable visual representation of a product or service. They are simple, modern, friendly, and sometimes quirky. The icons are highly simplified, exaggerated, and caricatured in nature so that they are appropriate for use in small sizes. Sometimes the icons are literal, but they can also be metaphorical, symbolically representing the features of a product or service.
Similarly, caricatures are rendered images showing the features of its subject in a simplified or exaggerated way through sketching, pencil strokes, or through other artistic drawings. If these icons and caricatures and their uses are defined in the brand style guide it is easy for the designers to work around the guidelines and represent the brand correctly.
Other points in this guide might include rules for employee advocacy, social media posting guidelines, schedules for content creation and anything else that impacts your brand identity and positioning online.
Benefits of a Brand Style Guide
The important thing to keep in mind is that a brand style guide takes time to create and it often evolves with the brand. Brands keep evolving and so do the brand style. For instance, you would have seen a lot of brands changing their logo, imagery, approach, communication techniques, etc.
As you learn more about your target audience and the goals of your company develop, your brand style guide will begin to change. As a rule book for your organisation, your style guide has a lot of benefits to offer, including:
Consistency
Consistency is the most crucial aspect in brand building and for building familiarity with your target audience. The more you approach your target audience with a cohesive brand identity and voice, the more credible your brand becomes.
Reputation management
Your brand style guide helps ensure that everyone is presenting the same view of your brand. This way you will be able to build good reputation management of your brand and people won’t be making bad comments on your brand pages on social media.
Brand recognition and awareness
Maintaining consistency with your brand makes it easier for your audience to immediately recognize you online or offline. For instance, Apple’s brand guidelines have helped them to become one of the most well-known brands in the world. And you would have seen that almost every brand you know has consistent branding. That’s how you recognise and differentiate them from others.
Focus
Your brand guidelines will stop you and your employees from going “off track” when building a social media presence. It helps in building applications, advertising online and offline, packaging, building a consistent offline and online identity.
Now you understand how important it is to create a consistent brand identity. And to do that you need a brand style guide. If you need our help in creating your brand style guide and building your brand get in touch.
