Why Your Company Needs A Brand Guidelines?
Now that you know what a brand identity guideline contains, you might be wondering why you need them.
A brand guideline is a form of tool to keep your brand consistent. Whether your company is a startup or an enterprise, brand guidelines are critical to communicating your company’s design standards to your whole group effectively. Without these guidelines, your message can change at any point just because a logo was misused or because someone didn’t know to use a graphic element instead of a wordmark.
Referencing a brand guideline or style guide ensures that content distinguishes a brand from its competitors, and is cohesive. This cohesion is necessary because it helps establish a reliable brand voice that resonates with the target audience, which is essential for building brand awareness. Over time, that awareness and consistency build trust.
A brand guideline is a form of tool to keep your brand consistent.
Below are a few reasons why your company needs a guideline:
Brand Consistency
For your brand to be effective, it needs to be consistent. If you change your logo’s colours to fit a particular marketing material better, then it may not be recognizable to your target audience or customers anymore.
Having a brand guideline ensures consistency on all levels. From your logo mark to your messaging to your colour palette, a brand guideline serve as a reference for everyone in your company to consult before developing collateral or speaking on behalf of the business. A brand guideline works to maintain the integrity of your brand for increased recognition.
Guidelines are not put in place to limit creativity, but to keep your brand identity consistent and recognizable. With brand guidelines in place, you can ensure your company’s brand’s elements are used effectively and look professional anytime they are used.
And, when the elements in your brand are used correctly consistently, you can build a powerful and recognizable brand.
Sets Standards and Rules
Terra Energy Services brand’s guidelines will include more than just a colour palette and versions of your Terra logo. It will contain specific rules and standards in which those elements are to be used.
Not only will the guideline contain things like different logo variations, but it will include examples of how not to use your logos. Rules like clear-spacing around logos are just as important as knowing when to use the wordmark versus logo icon.
The guidelines help anyone creating a message from the brand understand which elements to use and how to use them. It’s about consistency, but it’s also about knowing what’s right and wrong when it comes to applying those brand elements.
Provides Tools
Terra Energy Services brand guidelines aren’t just about setting rules, though. They’re about providing you and anyone else sending out a message from your brand with the tools to keep your branding consistent.
Avoids Confusion
Because not that many individuals use the elements and tools listed in your brand guideline doesn’t mean that will always be the case. If you’re looking to scale up your company or add one new employee, then more and more people will be involved and part of your brand. It would help if you had something to keep your brand consistent and cohesive.
There is no doubt that you know your brand like the back of your hand because you created it. But a new employee will not know the rules of your brand identity, at least not right away. Having brand guidelines in place will help avoid confusion for those using the brand elements and keep your brand consistent.
Send Out A Cohesive Message
Your brand consists of many brand elements that may need to send out a cohesive message. And for this, the graphic designer, the web designer, the content writer should be on the same page, which is possible if they know the brand identity guidelines very clearly.
To have website and graphics content that are aligned collaboratively to send out the same message, you need a brand style guide. With elements like voice, tone and imagery – all team members of your team must be well versed with the brand guidelines to send a cohesive message through all your communication.
Save Time And Efforts
Having a set of rules that every employee of your company has to follow, either for a new design or new marketing campaign helps you as a business owner saves both time and both your efforts and that of the employee and the organization on the whole. By handing over the brand guideline, which they need to follow.
Avoid Confusion
It is definite that at some point, you will be looking to scale your company or add more employees, then more and more people will be involved and part of your brand. And to make all these employees understand what your brand stands for, can be quite a tedious task. It would help if you had something to keep your brand consistent and cohesive.
You know your brand like the back of your hand because you created it. A new employee will not understand the rules of your brand identity, at least not immediately. Having brand guidelines in place will help avoid confusion for those using the brand elements and keep your brand consistent.
To avoid a chaotic situation, your company will need to provide every employee with your brand identity guideline. So that they understand what your brand is like or should look like, what to avoid at all costs, what colours can you use and what the logo should look like, etc., which eventually saves your time and efforts in explaining every single detail to the new employees.
Do you want to start a brand identity, a rebranding project, or create a brand guideline for your brand? Get in touch.
