Why You Need Brand Guidelines

What makes your brand unique? And how does that translate into words and visuals?

Brand guidelines are essentially there to answer these questions. They usually cover two key areas:

• Language-related elements, such as style, tone of voice and values.
• Design elements, including your logo, colour palette and fonts.

Defining your brand identity is particularly important if you’re starting a new company or thinking about rebranding – but every organisation can benefit from brand guidelines. Here are three reasons why.

1. Consistency

From product descriptions to packaging labels, each piece of content you produce should be clearly recognisable as belonging to your brand. This helps to strengthen your image and drive customer loyalty. Having clear 'rules' or instructions will keep copywriters, designers and creative agencies on the same page, and quickly bring new employees up to speed.

2. Capturing attention

Your brand has a unique story, and sharing it is the key to standing out. Documenting your brand’s heritage and values enables you to tell this story in a consistent way, amplify your message and show customers what makes you different.

3. Credibility

A cohesive brand identity can help to boost your credibility and build trust. It shows that you care about quality and details, and that you are professional and reliable.

Where to start

Here are just a few questions to think about when you're creating brand guidelines:

• What is our company story?
• Which values guide our business?
• Which words do we want to use / not want to use?
• How would we describe our brand personality?
• Which tone of voice do we want to convey?
• What makes us unique?
• How do we want our customers to feel when they interact with this brand?

How we can help

Ready to create or refresh your brand guidelines? We’ll work closely with you to get to know your company, put your brand’s ‘personality’ into words, and make sure that all your communications speak the same language.

Stay tuned: we'll be sharing our five top tips for developing brand guidelines in our next blog post!