10 best Automotive Brand Books / Style Guides [+ Free Templates]

Raul Tiru
marketing-and-branding
5 min readJan 29, 2021
https://insights.lytho.com/top-automotive-brand-books

Inspiration and ideas to create your own Automotive Brand Book / Style Guide

Do you want to create a strong and structured identity for your brand?

Creating a Brand Book and Style Guide is essential for your brand to develop and gain notoriety. They allow you to group together the different guidelines and values of your company while presenting the visual identity of your brand. It is a powerful internal marketing tool that will insure the credibility and originality of your business.

A brand book must be built in accordance with the company’s purpose and provide tangible elements that characterize the brand identity. It will help you to maintain your brand consistency, and to make your brand more recognizable for your audience.

Automotive companies are a perfect example of brands with strong identities. They are often innovative companies that communicate strong values to their target audiences. Giants of the automotive industry such as Tesla or Mercedes Benz have created original and innovative brand books that are available online!

You are looking for inspiration for your own business? Below are some awesome Brand Style Guide examples.

If you’re looking to create your own brand book / style guide, we got you covered with some free resources you can download here.

https://insights.lytho.com/top-automotive-brand-books

1. Tesla

The Tesla brand guide is mainly focused on the visual identity of the brand. It is aimed at both the brand’s employees and potential customers. It also includes the brand’s strong commitments and its desire to offer premium products. The Tesla brand book keeps it simple and presents the main graphic and visual guidelines of the company.

2. Volkswagen

The Volkswagen brand book is also focused on the visual identity and keeps the storyline efficient. It is mainly directed for internal communication, and there’s a lot of content about how to be structured when doing presentations to the different distributors of the brand. It is a corporate guide with a standardization approach.

3. BMW

BMW brand book offers a large quantity of data on how to adjust the visual identity of the brand according to the different countries they are present in. It is a simple and effective brand book that fits with the image that the brand wants to give. The instructions are clear and advocate a uniformity of their visual universe.

4. Toyota

Toyota brand book is very throrough and complete. It contains everything the brand needs to be irreproachable to the customers. The amount of information contained in this brand book is massive and shows that Toyota puts a lot of effort into. their brand consistency.

5. Mercedes

The Mercedes brand book is also extremely complete and gives all the necessary indications about external communication. The values and philosophy of the brand are clearly stated. It also contains information about the brand strategy and the main goals they want to achieve.

6. Ford

Ford is so much more than just a logo; they have been using other brand elements that constitute the identity of the brand. Ford’s brand book permits to clearly understand how to use all the visual identity element properly.

7. Opel

The Opel brand book is quite centered on the history of the brand and the evolution of its visual identity over time. The guidelines are clear and allow us to easily understand how to use the graphic assets.

8. Porsche

Porsche keeps it simple with a very design-oriented brand book which contains advice on how to use their famous logo properly. You can imagine that without clear guidelines, people could use the visual assets of the brand in many different ways.

9. Alfa Romeo

Alfa Romeo’s brand book is mainly focused on the core missions of the company and how to make the brand more attractive to consumers. This very design-oriented modern and innovative brand book is one of the best examples you can find. It is our personal favorite!

If you want to improve innovation and creativity within your organization, make sure to check our blog post about it!

10. Mini

The Mini brand book is very visual and eye-catching. It is basically a list of the must do’s and don’ts concerning the different visual assets of the company. It is a perfect illustration of a minimalist brand book which contain everything the employees need to know.

Here are a few tips to create your own Brand Book or Brand Style guide:

  • Be clear on who is the target audience for your new brand book
  • Keep it simple: Brand books are about giving visual guidelines, to make your business structured!
  • Be creative: Your brand should be original and represent the identity of your brand.
  • It is above all an internal communication tool! Keep in mind that it will mainly be used by the members of your organization.
  • The brand book must have a real added value, it is not only a communication tool and must be filled with useful information.
  • In order to remain relevant, it must be updated on a regular basis.
  • Make your Brand Book public, it is crucial for your brand awareness!

If you’d like help in documenting your own brand guidelines, go ahead and download our free template here!

https://insights.lytho.com/top-automotive-brand-books

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Originally published at https://insights.lytho.com.

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Raul Tiru
marketing-and-branding

Co-founder https://StoryLab.ai, Founder https://GlobalOwls.com. Let’s create memorable content. #ContentCreation, #ContentMarketing, #Nonprofit