We’ve written about branding over the years, everything from strategy and concepts to tactics and execution.
This time I’d like to focus on what happens when your strategy is said and done.
You can now create great content, right? Well, not exactly.
You need a brand style guide that communicates your strategy in a guidebook.
Without this guide, you can end up with off-brand content. Think: wrong colors on a web page, incorrect logo placement, and wrong messaging in a social media post.
Even the most established brands often have creative guidelines that don’t work for their business and are not being properly utilized by their team members, vendors, and agencies.
Here’s a look at how to create a brand style guide that helps your company maintain quality and consistency in branded content.
A brand style guide is the last step in a branding process and documents your brand identity in a way that allows content creators to present a cohesive brand. Typically style guides are often considered design-only guidelines. But you’ll want a document that provides rules for how your brand looks and speaks.
A brand style guide tells everyone in your organization (and agency) exactly what your brand looks, sounds, and feels like. It helps your marketing team, doctors, and C-level executives to present a consistent brand to your consumers and the wider market.
This is especially important if you’re producing a large content volume, working with many content creators, or collaborating with an agency.
A brand style guide provides
Before we go into what’s inside a style guide, we need to delineate the difference between brand identity and brand style.
To do this, I chatted with friend and colleague, Brett Maurer. Brett is a classically trained creative director with vast experience building identity, brand guidelines, and advertising systems for several top-tier consumer brands.
Today, Brett leads design for our clients at Healthcare Success. He studied design at the Rhode Island School of Design and has over 20 years of experience in agency and in-house settings. He has created, supported, and guided brands such as Align Technologies, Time Warner, Merck, Aston Martin, Dodge, Schering-Plough, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Align Technologies, and Cornerstone OnDemand.
“I think there is a lot of confusion between what makes an identity and what makes a brand," says Brett, “more often than not, the two are conflated or used interchangeably, but they are really quite different.”
You see your identity. You feel your brand.
Brand identity encompasses all the building blocks, or DNA, required to realize your brand. It includes the basic visual elements that identify and distinguish the brand for consumers, including
“This is just a starting point for brands, but many stop here,” explains Brett, “utilizing these elements together in a cohesive, consistent, and meaning-building way elevates your corporate identity to a living brand.”
Once you've done the hard work of establishing that brand identity, you can then develop your brand style—a living thing that flexes to accommodate and communicate across any platform, medium, or discipline.
A brand style allows businesses to anticipate the unknown and adapt appropriately to new applications and environments.
“A brand style guide can—and should—evolve to accommodate new needs and changing messaging. If your brand style is too limiting or strict, it can't accommodate the needs and limitations across multiple platforms or locations—especially as your business scales and grows into its full potential.”
Brand style guides should provide a consistent, unified look, feel, and messaging—no matter where your audience interacts with your brand.
The goal is to establish a proprietary space for users—one that is recognized immediately as relative to your company. It should answer questions, like
When building brand guidelines, you want a document articulating your brand’s heart and verbal and visual identity.
This helps people in your organization fully understand how your brand looks, speaks, and feels. Here’s a rundown of everything to include
Every successful brand has established its strategy. If you haven’t developed your brand strategy, you’re likely already familiar with the challenges this type of shortcut can bring.
Take the time and develop the following:
A brand style guide needs to be accessible and easy to navigate. Team members, including graphic designers and content writers, will regularly refer to it for content creation dos and don'ts.
Here are three format options to consider:
Going back to the idea that a brand style guide should be easy to navigate, a table of contents is necessary for this type of book. Your team members should be able to quickly scan what’s inside and visit the section that’s relevant to them.
The table of contents should include all the areas you’ve established for your brand identity and style. You can reference the What’s Inside section above for some examples.
It’s time to combine all your hard work into a beautifully designed brand style guide.
Here are a few dos and don’ts:
Do’s
Don'ts
Add to it as needed to keep your brand relevant across new spaces, channels, and environments.
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