Creating new Brand Guidelines: Challenges & Opportunities
One of the core elements of a business is its brand identity. Not only does it define the brand’s values and personality on a broader scale, it also shapes how you work, how you communicate and how you present yourself to your customers.
Defined and aligned guidelines are closely tied to a brand identity — both for copy and design teams. They help to shape and bring that brand identity to life in every channel and asset, and essentially set the rules for everything you hear and see of the brand: the logo usage, colour palettes, typography, font types and of course the tone of voice. Think of Apple as an example. Its brand identity is super minimalistic, straightforward and to the point. And so are their visuals and copy.
A huge benefit to point out is that guidelines help to maintain consistency — so no matter who is working on the new campaign, creating the new flyer or concepting the next TV spot, everyone in the company has the same direction and uses the same set of rules. And in the long run, this consistency and alignment leads to the brand recognition we all aim for.
Creating, developing and using best practices as part of the guidelines also reinforces overall brand quality. This can include the way you phrase your email subject line to what colour you use for your homepage hero background. The better you understand your customer and their needs, the better you can create and adjust your asset.
So, no doubt, brand guidelines are fundamentally important when it comes to shaping your brand identity. But what happens, when, as a business, you want to explore a new and slightly different direction? When you might have outgrown your status quo and want to develop your brand in a new way but feel limited by your current guidelines? Of course, brands aren’t alone in growing and developing. Markets, customers and social norms also change over time — and it’s a completely natural process. But what’s important is that as a business you need to be able to react to those developments. And for this reason, it is also essential to re-define new brand guidelines. In the following, I want to talk about my experience on the challenges and opportunities of creating new guidelines and what I have learned.
Challenges of creating new brand guidelines
It takes time: No change comes overnight. It’s quite the opposite actually. Depending on the size of a company and its status quo, changing existing brand guidelines is an extensive and long process. First off, you need to ask yourself ‘Where do I want to go as a brand and where am I currently at?’ Of course this is something I didn’t ask myself, but leadership did. As a business, Wayfair has existed for almost 20 years now and has changed massively over the years — one of the biggest businesses around for furniture and home goods. Brand awareness in the US is at over 80% and in the European market it has grown strongly. So with a bigger audience, different markets and higher brand awareness, goals and visions change. To understand what it takes to bring this new vision to life and how to translate it into design and copy guidelines takes time. A lot of time. You need to understand your customers’ needs and tailor your guidelines around them. This includes Customer Insight testing, analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative research. You need to consider everything from the bigger picture to the smallest asset. We have been working on our new guidelines for almost a year now and are still re-defining them as we go.
Communication is Key: Especially in a global company like Wayfair, creating new guidelines meant facing many different challenges. Not only are we very used to generating data-driven rules based on best practices, we also currently work in four different markets (soon to expand into more countries) with different languages, various levels of brand awareness but most importantly different cultures, customer behaviours and needs. It is easy to brainstorm a direction that works for one geo better than the other but as I just mentioned, global alignment means considering a lot of different key elements. This in turn meant a lot of communication between local teams. In our case, this included close collaboration between UK, German and US designers and copywriters, to make sure the new direction would work for each geo.
Make sure everyone is on board: To say you are going to change your brand guidelines is easy. But to actually put your words into actions it takes more than just a simple announcement. It takes communication, transparency, onboarding and most importantly education to get the buy-in of your stakeholders — especially in a data-driven company. No one likes to potentially go against their current best practices. They have been established for a reason, but in order to move forward and in a different direction, you need to make sure everyone understands the bigger picture and the long-term benefits. Even if it means trying a new approach and losing immediate click through rates and prompt revenue. Bottom line: Make sure you take your teams along on the ride!
These are only a few examples of challenges I was faced with when supporting the work on the new guidelines, but of course, we had a lot of great opportunities as well:
Opportunities of creating new brand guidelines
It’s exciting: Creating new guidelines and adding a fresh perspective to the table is fun and inspirational. Besides having many meetings and discussing a lot of bigger and smaller nuances, the overall exploration and implementation of a new approach always enhances a chance to bring in creative ideas you weren’t able to advocate for before. As a copywriter, I was able to critically assess copy directions I wasn’t fully happy with anymore, and instead shape a new tone of voice that was more localised and would align better with our new vision. For the first time, we were able to re-define our brand voice on a global level rather than localising existing guidelines — and seeing it come to life not only meant a lot of responsibility but also a lot of opportunities to grow — and that is extremely exciting.
Room for Collaboration: As I mentioned before, our new brand guidelines were changed on a global level, which essentially meant we finally had ‘a seat at the table’, even if it was just a small one. Being able to add our perspective and implement our ideas in a collaborative way was a huge step in the right direction. New guidelines don’t come up overnight and the more collaboration we obtain, the better aligned we are as a brand — which leads to an even more cohesive brand experience on a global level.
Understanding the bigger picture: Projects with this scope almost always end up becoming more complex and more challenging than anticipated. But with that you also learn to see your own work more holistically. You leave your small bubble of email subject lines and campaign titles and move into a world of shaping a new brand platform, general brand consideration and customer analysis. And that needs a broad understanding of where you want to go as a brand and how you want to achieve it.
Throughout this project I definitely learned a lot and although it still takes a lot of work up to this day, I am excited where these brand guidelines will take us in the future.
