How familiar are you with brand guidelines? They’re often considered to be at the very heart of a company’s identity or the glue that sticks a company’s identity together. Brand guidelines are a collection of rules that must be followed to help the brand remain consistent across all fronts. They usually include the company’s key values and message, its tone, colour palette, fonts and type styles, photography style and layout design for all marketing and company materials, including emails.
Often, when you’re dealing with numerous employees across a variety of teams both inhouse and remote-based, it’s easy for brand guidelines to become blurred and worryingly – neglected. This can lead to all kinds of issues, including confusion within your department, embarrassment when you reach out to third parties or other agencies, and perhaps most frustratingly, throughout the customer journey.
In short, the more people who are involved within a company or a department, the harder it becomes to maintain control of brand guidelines. Thankfully, with brand identity guidelines from Bynder.com, you can always ensure that the story of your brand is consistent throughout your department and beyond. With this essential branding tool, you can easily embed branded elements throughout your department, ensuring everything from fonts, letterheads, logos and the company voice is consistent and accessible to everyone who needs it.
Read on to discover some interesting reasons to never neglect your brand guidelines.
Consistency
When you promote and enforce your brand guidelines, you should get consistency throughout. By keeping these rules and guidelines intact – with a little help from brand guidelines software – you’re actively implementing the company name, mission and logo. Which means whether a customer opens a newsletter in their inbox, or they click onto your website or social media platforms, they’re actively consuming your brand’s identity, which in turn makes the brand more recognisable and trustworthy. Neglecting brand guidelines creates worrying gaps in a company’s brand, which is something which could raise red flags for potential clients.
The value they bring
When brand guidelines are closely followed, companies look the part. When implemented correctly, brand guidelines give a company’s image a boost, advocating their professionalism and integrity across all platforms. When brand guidelines are neglected and woolly, the quality of the brand comes into question and the lack of attention to detail is staggering. It’s not easy to win over customers if a business can’t match their logos or the tone of their company from one interaction to the next.
Bringing in new products and services is easier
When brand guidelines are consistent and upheld, it makes bringing in new products and services much easier. When you use brand guidelines software, keeping the brand consistent is simpler, making the process easier for your team members and exciting for your customers. When you’re struggling to maintain the company image, the idea of bringing in more products and services means stretching an already strained department even further.
Final thoughts…
It’s clear that brand guidelines are essential for creating a strong company identity, and when done well, using brand guideline software, you can easily target your chosen demographic.
