How to Build and Protect Brand Equity through Effective Brand Governance
In this Guide:
What Is a Brand Identity Guidelines?
A Logo’s Cautionary Tale
Who Uses Brand Identity Guidelines?
Where Will Brand Guidelines Be Applied?
What Should Be Included? Brand Identity Guidelines Checklist
5 Best Brand Identity Guidelines Examples
Get a Free Branding Guidelines Checklist
“Image and Perception Help Drive Value; Without an Image there is no perception ”
Imagine opening a magazine and seeing an ad for your favorite company XYZ in which the company’s blue and white circle logo had morphed into a red and white square logo, losing all connection with the original brand identity.
If you were indeed a customer of this company, you would actually be generally confused. In fact, you might think the XYZ red logo was an ad from a totally different company and decide not to purchase the product because it was made by your favorite brand’s competitor. If you did finally figure out it was an ad for your favorite brand, you might wonder why the logo had suddenly become red rather than blue without warning, and why, if the company was repositioning its brand, it had not announced the changes to the brand or communicated the change to customers like you. As I show in my post on how to design a logo, when a logo is redesigned, a careful methodology needs to be adhered to to ensure the logo meets brand standards and communicates brand value. For these reasons, if a company’s logo just randomly changed over night, you might actually wonder if something was wrong with the company’s management. For what well-managed company would make such a drastic change to its image without any warning? And if they didn’t intentionally change the brand identity, how did no one in the company catch a mistake like this? And in the end, you might wonder about the general health of the company and whether you should still buy their products.
In short, mistakes like this could not only cost a brand repeat business, but the trust and respect of its customers. Sound far fetched? Not really. This scenario is exactly what could happen if your business doesn’t have brand guidelines in place. And ironically it’s what happens all the time to companies who don’t take their brand identity seriously by putting brand identity guidelines into place.
Adhering to brand guidelines ensures your company's identity remains not only consistent but also intact.
Yet, many companies haven't heard the term or even given a thought as to what brand guidelines might mean for their business.
What Is a Brand Identity Guidelines?
First, what exactly are brand identity guidelines and how would you know one if you saw it?
Brand identity guidelines are resources designed to ensure proper implementation of identity elements in order to protect a brand’s identity across all touchpoints, both internal and external. Brand guidelines bring your company vision and values, identity system, messaging architecture, and brand persona(s) together into a single document so that every individual who touches the brand will be able to understand how to properly use it.
There is no single way to create a brand identity guidelines, but it is common for copywriters and graphic designers to work closely with brand managers and brand engineers to craft brand identity guidelines and distill essentially all the intangible but important aspects of a company into visual “bible” that provides both prescriptive and proscriptive rules and standards for brand usage. These guidelines are usually carefully prepared, designed, and packaged into a print presentation or a standalone PDF, but with new technologies and increased bandwidth, companies are now designing guidelines on web pages, easily accessible for all to see and many are now developing interactive guidelines. See section “10 Best Brand Identity Guideline Examples” below.
Don’t have time to create your own brand identity guidelines? VERGE is a full-service branding agency that can help you develop world-class brand style guidelines.
Why Create Brand Identity Guidelines?
Publishers have used style guides for over a 100 years to make sure their content has uniformity. Professionalism in most industries means getting the details right the first time and consistently getting the details right every time. When it comes to brand identity, consistent communication of the details or elements that make up a company’s identity immediately tells the world that a brand is a professional and organized business. In fact, when you think of the brands and organizations that you trust the most, you’re probably thinking of companies that have the strongest and most consistent brand identities. Similarly, a logo, tagline, company colors, mission statement, the tone of copy and how your company presents itself showcase the best possible image of your business. A brand identity conveys a sense of who you are as an organization and reinforces a company’s values, mission statement, and authority through a consistent, repeated expression of those elements. More than anything else, a strong brand identity showcases the fundamental unity every organization needs to be successful—it communicates that your company is a strong, unified, and capable organization.
We can break down the primary purposes of brand identity guidelines into the following six functions:
6 Key Areas of Brand Identity Guidelines
Brand Function: Brand exists to do something in the marketplace: communicate. Every brand developed communicates something of value about a company precisely because of the deliberateness of its design. But a “brand” cannot effectively communicate if the brand isn’t functional, i.e., providing a clear and precise concept for Sales, Marketing and Promotion to do their work, e.g., if a company has no real logo, how can a company actually advertise its products or services? If a company has no brand palette, how can a company determine what color their sales presentation should be? Brand identity guidelines thus make a brand functional by laying out the reason and purpose of design and providing immediate, tangible and discrete concepts and elements for employees to use and deploy.
Brand Consistency: If nothing else, marketing is an exercise in repetition. For brands to do to the work they do in a consumer’s mind, they must be repetitive. For a consumer to be transformed from a stranger to a brand advocate they must see and hear the brand relentlessly. But repetition is meaningless if the brand identity is not consistent in look, tone or voice. If a consumer sees a brand 10 times but it looks and feels different every time they see it, it means they are actually seeing the brand for the first time each and every time they encounter it. See the example I opened up this post with for clarity on how this works. In this way, brand guidelines ensure the brand is always consistent so that brands can be recognized and trusted. Make sure you have consistency in tone and voice.
Brand Focus: As a company grows, especially when it develops multiple products, it becomes more and more difficult for a company to stay focused with regard to brand. For example, a company with even 2 products often has 3 discrete brands it is managing under the larger parent brand portfolio: the company brand and competing product sub-brands. In some cases, product sub-brands can contrast dramatically with the brand identity of the parent brand. Brand identity guidelines thus compel everyone to narrow down from vague ideas to specific details and maintain focus when new ideas and opportunities arise, which include child or sub-brands. Such guidelines more importantly enable the brand to maintain a fundamental “unity” in spite of “variation” emanating from discrete sub-brands.
Brand Recognition: As I mentioned in my post on how to develop a brand persona or personality, “a brand helps a company know what makes it different and, consequently, to know what makes it better than its competitors. A brand helps your company stand out in a crowded marketplace. In short, it helps an organization to clearly communicate their difference so consumers can distinguish their brand from competitors and convince them to choose one brand over another.” Like this, brand guidelines foster unity and uniformity in the brand’s identity, so it’s easily recognized by all those who touch it, especially its audience. As I showed with the example at the beginning of this post, without the uniformity that guidelines provide, a brand can easily become unrecognizable in the marketplace to the consumers it's targeting.
Brand Governance: It goes without saying that rules and brand identity guidelines are probably the biggest reason brand “managers” in companies are called “Nazis” by employees behind their back. But those “Nazis” have one of the most important functions in a business, especially when that business’s brand begins to develop brand equity (see below): to protect one of the most valuable assets a company has. Rather than seeing brand managers as Nazis trying to make everyone’s life difficult in a company, we should see them as protecting the very essence of the company itself. By providing guidance and governance--the standards and rules that determine how a brand is treated--brand guidelines ensure that every person who “touches” the brand, both internally and externally, knows exactly how to use brand elements correctly and effectively to maintain everything in this list above: brand recognition, focus, consistency, and functionality. Moreover, guidelines provide grounds for effective oversight of the brand. How can you monitor a brand’s identity overtime if you have no rules in place to adhere to? If the company never introduced a brand palette into guidelines, how can a company correct instances where the logo is expressed in the “wrong” color? Without rules governing color in the guidelines, the company would be powerless to prevent or correct employees from changing the logo to any color in the rainbow. Thus, governance is one of the most important reasons to develop effective brand guidelines.
Brand Value or Equity: And finally, we come to the most important reason why you want to develop brand identity guidelines. Guidelines not only help you protect brand equity once you achieve it, but actually help you build it. Think about it. How can a brand become a recognizable household name without guidelines in place to ensure it is functional, consistent, focused, and recognizable? As I discuss in my post on brand equity, brands are quite literally the most valuable asset a company has. Brands enable businesses to charge a premium for products and services, increasing their profit margins despite making no increase in the cost of production. Indeed, brand equity means you can pay far less to produce a product while charging more than your competitors. Why, for example, is Apple able to charge $1000 for the same phone another brand is only able to charge $300 for the same features and functionality? Why is Starbucks able to charge $3.37 cents more than McDonalds for the same cup of coffee? You guessed it: brand equity.
Brand equity is, in other words, how companies come to dominate market share and increase market capitalization. Feel free to grab our free Brand Equity Survey template or our Brand Equity Measurement Bundle to get more free tools to help you measure your brand’s value.
Ultimately, Brand guidelines play an important role in managing perceptions of your company. Every time you communicate with customers, suppliers, employees, investors, journalists and the community, it is essential to build and reinforce a consistent perception of your company. Brand guidelines help you to achieve that goal.
A Logo’s Cautionary Tale
These guidelines put in writing—indeed codify--what your brand represents and how it should be portrayed--building and protecting your company’s most important asset: its brand equity.
In my post about brand equity, I share an anecdote about a company that hated its own logo. Every employee disliked the company logo colors, but no one could remember how or why those colors were chosen for the logo. That’s right. They'd been using the logo for 12 years and despising it every day for those 12 long years, but no one--not even the CEO--thought to ask the most fundamental questions about their own brand identity: Why? And for what purpose?
If that company had developed brand identity guidelines, this situation would never have occurred. Their guidelines would have ensured that every element that comprises the brand identity system, from logo colors to business card design, were not only strategically adopted and consistent, but also understood by all employees.
The challenge with branding is that it's not a science. It's art, and art can vary drastically. Without guidelines, the identity of a brand can quickly veer off track as the opinions and decisions made by different people affect the final marketing presentation. In contrast, if the basics about the company brand identity are established and agreed upon, the results will reflect that. For example, if your marketing team has multiple people developing your content marketing programs, guidelines keep everyone on track.
Who Uses Brand Guidelines?
The brand identity style guidelines are used internally to unify the presentation of the brand within the company. Having a well-defined brand identity helps your employees become brand advocates, which is reflected in their actions both inside and outside the company.
Since every employee represents the company to the public, it’s beneficial for them to understand the brand’s history and goals. When they know the background of the company and embrace the values, they are able to incorporate those qualities in the way they deal with customers. Moreover, corporate brand standards and guidelines are established to document and ensure consistency regarding those brand elements. To be useful, standards must be well understood by all members of the organization at every level and understood by other stakeholders, such as partner organizations. Developing and implementing brand standards and guidelines will not only ensure brand integrity, but also save us time, money, and frustration.
In this way, guidelines explain the brand’s importance and describe how to maintain the look and integrity of the branding, making it essential information for any designers, marketing companies, or network of partners with whom your organization works. If you are lucky enough to have influencers on your team, guidelines will help them maintain the integrity of your brand.
Where Will Brand Guidelines Be Applied?
12 key areas in marketing to apply brand identity guidelines
As mentioned above, brand guidelines are for employees as well as external partners, consultants, contractors, vendors, affiliates and the press to ensure branding consistency.
Some of the places where the guidelines would apply include marketing collateral materials such as:
Company identity system: Business cards, letterhead etc. Your company identity system is often the first impression your audience will have with your company. It’s essential that every element in the identity system be aligned with brand identity.
Printed marketing collateral: Printed brochures and sell-sheets. While not used nearly as much as they used to, they are still commonly used for in-person events and sales meetings.
Company backgrounders or fact sheets. A company fact sheet has the date the company was founded, the location of the main office and any related offices, contact information and the names and short bios of management. Images can be included.
Product or service data sheets, tear sheets or one-pagers: These describe the purpose of the product or service, what makes it unique, how it compares to similar products or services, a blurb about the characteristics and costs. You should have a fact sheet for your most popular offerings, if not for everyone.
Print, digital & video advertisements: These include advertisements in all their different media and channels. Advertising has probably the biggest impact on your audience and is the single best way to communicate your brand. Ensure that all advertisements closely adhere to branding guidelines.
Newsletters and annual reports: These are the longer documents you send to customers and stakeholders. Yes, businesses still publish newsletters and annual reports and many are still printed and are mailed out to shareholders or partners and other stakeholders. However, most newsletters and reports are now digital and also interactive. Perhaps no other documents convey your brand identity more than these two documents, so it's critical that brand guidelines be consulted closely while creating these.
Leadership biographies: The biography you provide on the founders, upper management or board of directors. You should include photos as well as their position in the company, their accomplishments with the company, past experience, any awards or honors received and educational history.
Company mission, vision and values statements: A mission statement for your company, which explains your purpose, direction, and focus. Brand guidelines can be and are often the starting point for a company to develop vision and value statements. If a company does not know its mission, vision or values, it will never be able to develop a successful brand.
Company profile, history or founding stories: Similar in many ways to the fact sheet, this is an opportunity to share the story of the company. Written in prose form, this profile includes the history and the reasons behind the company's success and growth. It can include images to enhance the narrative.
Social media Profiles and third-party sites: Social media includes all “shared media” including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube but can also include other third party review and resume sites such as G2Crowd or Glass Ceiling. Social media enables your audience not only to see your brand but to actually interact with it. Ensure that all social media profiles are aligned with brand identity guidelines.
Press/Media kit: A press kit is simply a packet of promotional material compiled for the media, your potential customers, investors and vendors. It makes it easy for anyone who wants to write an article, book an interview or work with your company to learn about it since everything is in one place. When you have a significant event or launch a new product or service, you'll want to send a press kit. It should include your company’s logo, a one-sheet summarizing your product or service, a press release, fact sheet for company and product, any relevant articles that have been written and your business card or contact information.
Signage and booths: These include signs for brick and mortar stores or for events and conferences. Designing these well can help your brand stand out in a sea of competitors and are essential for conveying brand.
Plan to review each component of the press kit at least once a year, using your guidelines. If you have a busy season, new product or trade show, that's the perfect time to review it to make sure it reflects your current branding styles. Keep in mind that the best way to control your brand identity with the public is to make sure your press kit is easy to use and presents your company in accordance with your brand guidelines.
What Should Be Included: Brand Identity Guidelines Checklist
Much depends on the size of your company. The larger your company is, the more detailed the guidelines should be, since many people will be using them for a wide variety of applications.
To see the complete list of items to include in your brand identity guidelines download our brand identity guidelines checklist here:
COVER: A great brand identity guidelines will include a descriptive but powerful cover showcasing all of the brand elements in action--form serving as content itself. Indeed, the cover of brand guidelines not only serves as a gateway to company brand governance, but is also its ambassador--an example of how brand elements can be utilized to showcase the company’s values and promise. It should be compelling, visually appealing, and dynamically engaging.
BRAND VALUES & PROMISE: A comprehensive guide also begins with the company history, philosophy and values. A company’s brand is a symbolic representation of all its values, beliefs and promise. In order to be able to use and engage the company brand correctly, internal and external stakeholders need to know how the brand was created and what’s behind it. What does it stand for and why is it important for the whole company to understand these underlying values?
BRAND PERSONALITY/PERSONA: The personality of the brand might be light-hearted, serious, educational, technical, casual, formal or fun and the guide will specify that, along with the overall tone and corporate culture. It explains the house style in the form of text and graphics, as well as the tagline and advertising preferences. Please review our comprehensive post How to Develop a Brand Persona & Personality and also download our FREE brand persona worksheet if you need to develop or refine your brand personality.
GOVERNANCE/POLICY: It addresses how the elements of the brand should be used, whether product names are capitalized or not, how much clear space is needed around the logo, and other details. The guidelines are for internal and external usage, so they should also describe the policy regarding social media usage and also specific guidelines for partners, press and affiliates where needed, as these agents can significantly impact on the brand's reputation and image. In this section, other essential topics are prescriptions and proscriptions--showing how “not” to use a brand element coupled with how to use it properly. That's why every company should have brand guidelines that establish the way the brand will be represented and promoted. This post is a great resource for developing proper brand governance and you can download our free Brand Identity Guidelines Checklist to help you get started.
COLOR: The guidelines on branding in either PDF, website, or interactive web presentation should address colors--including primary, secondary, and tertiary palettes, web-friendly font, button style and logo consistency.
LOGO & USAGE: The logo is central to branding identity and will be the most prominent element of your brand identity system, so your company will want to spell out exactly how it's to be used. It helps to have different logo variations for different situations–square, rectangle, circle, banner and, depending on how much control you want, you might want to specify minimum sizes so the logo text is always legible. Show how it should look in color, reversed and in black and white and in multiple file formats, including PNG, JPEG and TIFF. You’ll also want to look into interactive logos for company videos, presentations and signage. If you haven’t yet designed your logo and are thinking about redesign, feel free to checkout our 10-Step Process to Designing a Logo or contact VERGE to get a Free consultation to help you design your logo.
TYPOGRAPHY: Typefaces should be specified, both the primary and secondary choices. More than any other element, typography is the primary way we convey “brand voice.” Is the font traditional or modern (sans serif or serif or script)? Or is it slim or thick (quiet or bold) etc? You can define the size and the style. Since not all print typefaces work well for the internet, identify the type style that should be used for online publication.
GLOSSARY: Finally, you’ll want to close out your brand identity guidelines with a comprehensive glossary. What’s a brand archetype? Or a brand asset? What’s a logo “clear space” and why does a brand style guide need it? All of these branding terms mean something specific and if your audience isn’t familiar with the terminology used in brand governance documents, they will be unable to fully understand how to implement brand elements correctly. So, including a glossary of terms can go a long way to ensure proper governance.
If your company works with a wide variety of designers, you might want to include a design template that shows the placing of the logo and address information.
5 Best Brand Identity Guidelines Examples
Mozilla/Firefox
A great example of an effective brand identity guidelines is the one developed by Mozilla (Firefox). Mozilla (Firefox) has their style guide freely available online where anyone can refer to it. Their guide is extremely detailed, even down to the use of the logo in relation to other elements on a page or website. It also prohibits using their corporate identity on sites that are obscene, deceptive or harmful or those that promote illegal or hateful activities.
Firefox clearly lays out its Brand Identity Guidelines topics with bold colors and fonts
Slack does a great job here highlighting the newly designed “octothrope” for their logo redesign.
Firefox/Mozilla brand guidelines educates users on the differences between logotype, the logo mark and how the two combined make up the parent brand logo.
Slack
Slack went through a massive logo redesign last year. There were so many people who had come to love and trust the brand and their affinity for Slack was strongly tied to their logo and brand identity color palette. Here you can find their new logo redesigned along with brand new identity guidelines to help users understand the meaning behind the rebranding, why it was necessary, and how they went about the process. Play special attention to the section on the individual components that make up the new logo “octothorpe”.
Here we see a great example by Slack of a standard section in a brand guidelines on “Logo Misuse”
Google’s brand identity guidelines are fascinating from the perspective that they are a global brand and have complex brand architectures, so they not only need to provide guidelines for their parent brand but also special guidelines for their product sub-brands including search, maps, YouTube, partner marketing hub, and cloud advantage. In their guidelines, you can find simple, if elegant, brand identity guidelines that convey usage. What’s important is the first paragraph that explains that Google is “one of the world’s most valuable brands,” in which Google demonstrates how their careful management of their brand has helped build significant equity for the brand. Their brand is valuable and they suggest that their guidelines are essential for protecting that value.
One of the first thing’s Google brand guidelines discusses is the importance of their “brand.”
These usage guidelines by Google of their logo show what colors backgrounds are to be used with their logo, clear space and as well the “minimum size” their logo should be displayed.
Amazon
Amazon has provided a brand identity and usage guidelines specifically for advertisers. While the guidelines contain many common features, one notable exception is how they include “brand phrases” and protectable brand elements, such as “1-click” “Subscribe & Save” or “Deal of the Day.” According to their guidelines, anyone using these phrases needs explicit permission from Amazon to use them if they are not tied directly to Amazon functionality.
The best branding guidelines in their usage sections not only show you what is approved and not approved usage, but also explain why. Amazon’s guidelines showcase best practices in brand identity guidelines.
The way in which Amazon illustrates “clear space” around the logo and size is similar to Google.
Mailchimp
We don’t typically think of Mailchimp and think “Wow, that’s a world-class brand.” right? However, Mailchimp recently went through a brand redesign and their process shows just how powerful developing a comprehensive brand guidelines can be. Their new identity guidelines not only re-positions the brand, but elevates it in profound ways, illustrating that they take branding seriously and are well on their way to developing a great brand. I recommend this guide as a classic example of how to do a brand redesign correctly, especially when you’re trying to raise your company’s brand equity and prestige.
Here is the wonderfully irreverent “cover” sheet of the new Mailchimp branding guidelines. It does an excellent job of illustrating their new brand identity in action.
As I opened this post, I explained how a great branding guidelines help to showcase a brand’s function. This is a good example of the new branding giving specific instructions to celebrate creative expression.
I’ve saved the best for last. All great identity guidelines devote a section to color. This guide does a great job not only of showcasing their primary brand palette but also their secondary palette, along with a description of how and when to use the secondary palette.
If you’re currently working on your guidelines, we’ve prepared a great resource to ensure you’ve included everything you need to. Why not download our brand identity checklist here:
Endnotes
Don't risk losing your brand identity and thereby your brand equity because someone in your company didn't understand the brand specifications. Take the time and effort to put together your brand guidelines, and you'll rest easy knowing you've got a clear roadmap for employees, designers and contractors to follow and that you’re well on your way to developing a successful brand. More importantly, have fun with this project. Looking at the Mailchimp and the Firefox examples: you can truly feel that their branding team enjoyed developing their company brand and it shows. While branding guidelines take a lot of time and effort, they are well worth the effort when they are done right. Brand governance is how great brands make “branding” look and feel easy :)