Why Does Brand Style Matter, and How to Create One?
Why Does Brand Style Matter, and How to Create One?
Increasing brand awareness is the key to success for any business, small or large, but how do you achieve it? The answer lies in brand consistency, which can only be achieved by creating and using a brand style guide.
Unfortunately, small businesses often miss out on the benefits of a brand style guide because they either don't realize its importance, think it takes too long to create, or don't know where to start. However, without a brand style guide, you risk diluting your brand message, business values, and how you want consumers to think of you.
We've written this detailed, step-by-step guide to help you learn what a brand style guide is and how you can quickly and easily create one for your business. You'll know what elements a brand style guide should include, how to define your brand's primary color palette and typography, and more.
Definition
What is a brand identity guide?
A corporate identity guide is a detailed document that focuses on your company's vision, values, and strategy. It talks less about visual elements like a logo or color scheme and more about how you communicate, interact, and look, both internally and about your customers.
A style guide, on the other hand, is a document that shows and explains how your brand should be presented visually. Think of it as a set of guidelines for everything that plays a role in the look and feel of your brand, including your logo, color scheme, typography, and more.
To summarize, a brand guide is how you present your brand through communication and action, and a style guide is how you showcase your brand visually.
Why is brand leadership important?
We've touched on the importance of a brand style guide before, but this document provides business owners with incredible benefits.
Here are the main benefits of creating a style guide:
Creates consistency: It's essential to communicate a consistent brand identity because it plays a massive role in making your brand recognizable and therefore trustworthy. Every time someone interacts with your brand, whether through your social media, blog, or marketing materials, they perceive what your business represents. When this perception is clear and consistent, it works wonders with recognition and loyalty to your brand.
It sets standards to follow: As a business owner or self-employed person, you undoubtedly know your brand like the back of your hand. But a new employee doesn't.
So they must have a document they can refer to teach them everything they need to know about what to do or not do when representing your brand. Similarly, a brand style guide is handy when working with freelancers such as writers, designers, or developers.
Builds credibility: Think of some of the most trusted and successful brands in the world. If Google, for example, comes to mind, their logo, color scheme, or even some of their popular products you use daily. Having a crystal clear idea of how your brand presents itself to the world and showing consistency over some time can also go a long way in asserting your professionalism, integrity, and, in turn, credibility.
Aligning your interests with your target audience:There's nothing like developing a brand identity guide that allows you to sit down and think about your business interests and how they align with the needs of your audience on a whole new level. When you define things like your company values, your brand voice, or how you want the color scheme to evoke certain feelings in your audience, you're getting back to the heart and soul of your business.
Keeps you organized: It's important to emphasize that brand style guides are not just for graphic designers. As a business owner, you undoubtedly have a million concerns, so having a document that keeps track of all your brand elements and concepts can save you an incredible amount of time and stress trying to find this information in several different places.
What are the six components of brand identity?
To create a convenient style guide that covers all aspects of your brand, you must first identify the key pillars that define your brand identity.
Below, we'll cover each of them and their benefits.
Brand Story
Your brand story tells the story of the events that prompted you to start your business and how they still define who you are and what you do today. Don't let it just be a highlight reel: A compelling brand story should also include all the challenges you've faced along the way. As a result, your audience will empathize with you, and your brand will be more memorable.
Brand Mission
Simply put, your brand mission statement is your «why.» It's a short statement that proclaims the real purpose of your business. A well-written brand mission will provide a consistent direction for your company's strategy and inspire your customers to get involved. Take Twitter's mission statement, for example, «To give everyone the ability to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.»
Brand vision
While the brand mission focuses on what you do in the present, the brand vision should explain your aspirations for the future.
It's a statement that clearly and concisely explains what you want your business to end up being, whether in 5, 10, or 20 years.
Brand Voice
Your brand voice can be described as your communication style. For example, how do you talk to your customers? It should align with your brand values and persona and be aimed at how your target audience speaks, thinks, or acts to get more attention. MailChimp, for example, strives for a brand voice that is clear, sincere, and with a dose of dry humor. Their content style guide even describes using off-the-cuff humor and conversational voice to write branded content.
Brand Values
What beliefs does your company stand for, and how do they align with your vision and mission? Your brand values are important because they help you maintain your authenticity, and consumers and employees are more likely to support a brand whose core values align with their own.
It can often be challenging to articulate exactly what you want to say about your business, but this is where a business writer can help. They are trained and experienced in writing compelling content that can engage your target audience, especially when it comes to the following:
Mission and vision statements
- Company values, such as your company culture
- Tagline or slogan, such as a short phrase to impact and reinforce your product or service audience.
Target audience
Understanding your target market will help you make more informed decisions about your brand. For example, you can take elements of your target audience's personality, such as the fact that they prefer to use only natural products, and then extend those elements to your branding by choosing a predominantly green color palette to evoke a sense of nature.
Finally, you can use symbols such as a leaf or tree in your logo to draw your target audience's attention to natural products. Not only will this symbol help your target audience visually identify your brand as a natural product, but it will also allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition in terms of branding.
These important brand decisions would not be a simple coincidence. They would have been driven by the fact that you understood your target audience and, in turn, how they should inform your brand decisions.
How to create a brand style guide
Now that we've looked at the benefits of having and implementing a style guide, it's time to consider how you can start creating your own.
The following five steps will get you on the right track:
1. Find inspiration to create a brand style guide.
Start by gathering any visuals, such as photos, illustrations, etc., that you think to represent your brand in some way. For example, they may embody the desired color scheme or convey your business's core values or themes.
You can also suggest that other employees do the same so that by the end of the exercise, you have a lot of inspiration to work with.
It's also helpful to find out how others perceive your brand. Do you have examples of past marketing materials, whether they be ads, social media posts, or product images that have done well? Collect these as well, as they will show you which elements of your brand resonated most with your audience.
2.Identify the critical elements of your brand style guide
When creating your style guide, you should include the following 5 key features:
- Logo guidelines include a set of rules and guidelines on how your logo can and cannot be used. The logo guidelines will discuss issues such as:
- The spacing around the logo.
- Colors that are allowed or not allowed to be used with the logo
- Typography and fonts that can and cannot be used in conjunction with a logo
- The minimum size for the logo to be used on the Internet or in print
- Logo designs and their use
Logo guidelines are essential for your brand because your logo serves as your company's most commonly used visual representation. In addition, a logo creates the first impression of your company, differentiates you from your competitors, and is a point of recognition for your customers.
Thus, creating logo guidelines for branding has a lot of advantages. The benefits include:
- The ability to control the appearance of the logo
- Promoting the integrity of your branding
- Preventing abuse of the logo by other designers
- Showing the right and wrong ways to use your most valuable visual brand asset.
A great example of a company that sets clear rules about its logo is Spotify. Their brand identity guidelines state: «The green Spotify logo is our primary color scheme, and it should only be used with black, white, and non-bicolor photos.» They have also established a clear «exclusion zone» with a spacing between logos that is half the icon's height.
Basic color palette. Your color palette means your color scheme
These are the colors that your brand has chosen to use to represent itself, for example, in a logo, on a website, or in marketing materials.
Your color palette is an essential part of your corporate identity because it uses the psychology of color to communicate the essence of your brand to your audience. In addition, you can use your color palette to differentiate yourself from your competitors, make your brand memorable, and increase its visibility.
Netflix is an example of a company that has successfully used color palettes in its branding. When you think of this brand, you immediately imagine its bold, red, and slightly curved logo, and the colors red, black, and white directly come to mind. These colors, as well as the dramatic logo, evoke a sense of action, immediacy, and excitement, which fits perfectly with Netflix's mission to «create a sense of first-rate filmmaking» and «set the industry standard for original content.»
Typography
Typography is the style, layout, and appearance of text associated with your brand—for example, the fonts you choose to use, their size, spacing, and more.
Typography is another crucial element of your brand because it guides and informs your audience, sets the brand's overall tone, optimizes readability and accessibility, and provides a great user experience.
Voice.
This is how the company speaks to customers. The brand voice is targeted to the target audience and is designed to give the company's communication personality and emotionality.
Imagery.
Brand imagery is how you visually represent your brand to convey messages to consumers, such as the images you post on social media, the look of your product, the packaging, and the images you use in your marketing campaigns. It all comes down to aesthetic appearance.
Identify other needs specific to your brand that your guide should cover.
Some things to include in your brand style guide include:
- How you place images and text on your website, especially if your brand is predominantly digital.
- Packaging guidelines if you sell physical products
- Social media marketing recommendations if you often use social media to communicate with your audience.
- Store signage design if you have a brick-and-mortar store.
- Your stationery should look like business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc.
Outline your style guide
Now that you know which sections you should include in your brand style guide, it's time to put the document in the form of an outline that will help you stay on track. That way, you won't miss any critical elements that need to be covered.
For each section, you should detail your final decision on that element, why you chose it, and any additional rules associated with that element, such as what you should and shouldn't do.
At this point, you can write this information down as bullet points. Then, when you're ready to finalize your brand guide, you can go back to this information and present it more refinedly.
Plan for evolution
The fact is that a brand style guide is never finished. Over time, your business will grow and evolve, and your branding will become with it.
That's the beauty of such a document because you'll refer back to it periodically and always be able to supplement or adjust it.
Keep a folder on your computer with any new ideas you come up with over time, and then you'll have them handy when it's time to review your brand style guide to see what's working well and what may need to be changed.
Conclusion
Without a brand style guide, you risk diluting your brand message, your business values, and how you want consumers to think of you. After all, creating a solid brand identity is key to business success, and the only way to achieve this is brand consistency, which can only be achieved by creating and following a brand style guide.
It all starts with gathering inspiration for your brand and determining what message you want to convey to the world. Then, armed with a brand style guide, you can move forward with your business journey knowing that you've taken all the necessary steps to present your brand with the integrity it deserves.