The Value Of Brand Guidelines

The Value Of Brand Guidelines
A company’s brand is vital. It explains what your company stands for and defines who you are, what you do and how you do it. A brand establishes ownership, creates unity and provides a set of values to rally around. But, behind every good brand is a comprehensive set of brand guidelines.
Here, fuse8’s award-winning senior designer, Matt McMillan, outlines how specific yet flexible brand guidelines can help create and maintain an effective brand identity that expresses your culture and your character and, in turn, helps play a leading role in establishing your reputation in the minds of your customers.
What’s the point?
Brand guidelines can often seem a little pedantic – pages of detailed company rules about logo specification, colour palettes, typography and tone of voice can, to some, appear trivial. But, there are plenty of reasons for having them and for sticking to them. They create consistency of image in your audience’s mind, build stronger brand value over time, deliver an accurate perception of your identity, improve customer confidence in your business, increase your profile and help enhance your competitive advantage.
So, quite significant really.
Keep it consistent
To grow and maintain a great brand, consistency is by far the most important factor. This ensures that your image is immediately recognisable wherever it is and on whichever medium it’s found.
A logo creates a visual credibility and a perceived quality to your organisation. A logo alone, however, is only part of the story. A logo’s implementation is equally as important, as an effective logo badly applied amounts to a wasted opportunity.
Take some of the most globally recognisable brands, such as Google, Nike, or Coca Cola. The topic of what makes a good brand is a discussion for another day, but what has helped to establish these logos as undeniably iconic symbols is the fact that they have remained consistent on print, clothing, packaging, TV and on the Internet.
Therefore, comprehensive brand guidelines are vital to allow your brand to achieve optimum performance.
Rules not restrictions
From a designer’s point of view, we like following rules. We can’t get enough of them. Grids, colour palettes, point sizes, ‘x’ heights, margins – we love them. What we hate is being restricted. It is important to give designers enough room for interpretation, that’s why brand guidelines should be just that – a guide, not a creative straight jacket.
Guidelines need to be specific enough to uphold the brand values, yet flexible enough not to stifle creative opportunity.
Guidelines mean efficiency
Brand guidelines also play an important role in a designer’s efficiency. In the current climate, where everyone has their eye on time and money, a well-managed visual identity can equal greater creative output. All the hard work has already been done, so it’s just a case of implementation. Therefore, you spend less time worrying about the how it looks and can focus your efforts on generating outstanding ideas.
fuse8 has recently created a brand identity for a client, which has been a great success and has received very strong initial feedback. The original brief for the job was to create a logo and several items of printed material, however, it was essential that we also created some brand guidelines that are integral to the client’s overall brand personality. This ensures that, when the client’s planned online activity begins, it all integrates with the offline presence we have lovingly created for them.
The bottom line
In terms of the bottom line, your brand makes money for your business. A great brand is an assurance of quality on the supply side as well as a revenue source on the demand side, so your brand needs to be fully understood if you are to maximize its value to your business.
On a basic level, comprehensive yet flexible guidelines provide a framework of instruction on how to apply your brand across any material or media. But, they will also help create and maintain a clearly defined brand identity and will contribute to an understanding of your business, motivating both customers and employees to share in your company’s vision and ethos.