Three major advantages of the brand-guidelines

Abstract

This is an overview of brand guidelines and the pros and cons for people who are not brand strategists.

What are brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines usually refer to a document detailing every regulation for a brand’s output.

The brand guidelines should be referred to by any stakeholders, both colleagues and people outside the company. Having your brand guidelines available online is ideal so everyone has access to the most current version.

Using the brand guidelines from the brand launch is common sense. Nevertheless, brand guidelines are not well- known to the public. If you are struggling with issues such as how to best express your brand or inconsistent marketing output brand guidelines are a crucial part of finding a solution.

• Note: brand guidelines are not the same thing as a design system or design guidelines.

The three major advantages of having guidelines for your brand

1. Reduce the amount of time spent on inquires from both colleagues and people outside your company
2. Raise the quality of each piece of a brand’s output, thereby maintaining the integrity of the brand
3. Make brand management more efficient

1. Reduce the amount of time spent on inquires from both colleagues and people outside your company

The following inquiries are quite common:

• How can I use the logo?
• Can you send me the logo as a jpeg?
• Which types of fonts should we choose?
• Do you have any guidelines for submissions to design agencies?
• Can you give me photographs for the public relations office?

Brand guidelines allow you to use your time more efficiently by cutting back on unnecessary tasks and questions that already have answers, so you can focus on more important tasks such as…

• …responding to or finding new clients
• …brainstorming marketing campaigns
• …expanding your operations
• …onboarding new members

2. Raise the quality of each piece of a brand’s output, thereby maintaining the integrity of the brand

Clearly defining restrictions or “don’ts” provides the following advantages:

• The business team will be able to reduce the amount of unnecessary interaction with the creative team and the overall number of steps needed to complete their part in a project.
• The creative team will be able to better focus and utilize their skills based on your brand’s purpose, philosophy, vision and mission.

More specifically, the following problems will be easier to avoid:

• Creative output not reaching the intended or desired quality
• Different materials from the same campaign of project lacking consistent tone, thereby diluting the overall impact of the project
• Vague or illogical feedback based purely on personal opinion or general design rules, rather than your brand’s guidelines

3. Make brand management more efficient

You can reflect more efficiently about the system of brand management and your team’s condition when you have the brand criteria (brand guidelines,) and the system of enhancing your team and your brands’ brand guideline.

• For example, as your business grows over time, if your brand guidelines are always updated when needed, you’ll likely need less manpower to handle this aspect of the business, despite the higher amount of inquiries.

Disadvantages

The following two blocks describe a couple possible cons of brand guidelines:

1, Cost

• Generally, brand guidelines will always need some sort of alteration or update as time goes on, so this will require more time, effort and money, until the brand disappears.

2, Required specialized knowledge (Required specialization)

• Brand and visual architectures require either a brand strategist and creative director, or the equivalent knowledge of such specialists.
• In order to streamline the output, whether or not you produce the work yourself, you should work side-by-side with the aforementioned experts during the initial development phase to further reduce inquiry costs and strengthen the interplay between business strategy and brand strategy.

Conclusion

I hope this document will make the operation of your brand a little bit simpler! I hope to upload a few more articles about branding in the future, so please feel free to contact me here if you have any requests or questions regarding the production of brand guidelines☕️