What is a Brand Guide?
A Brand Guide, also known as a brand style guide or brand book is a document that comprises any company’s visual identity, guidelines, and rules, which defines your company’s branding. It enables you to represent your company’s identity in public, through logo usage, typography, font type and colour, grammar, and tone, along with the brand’s mission statement, positioning, identity, and values. It reflects the true personality of your brand to create better recognition and reliability of your brand.
The Brand Guide is used by writers, designers, marketers, and anyone else who is representing your brand in public or making communication with your audience. It helps you to develop your brand’s identity and therefore in building your brand’s integrity. Hence, a brand guide is very significant in today’s competitive and fast-growing business to build your brand’s ideal identity in the public, which is very essential for the people to get inclined towards your brand name. It gives look and feels to your brand when presenting your brand to the world. It helps a brand in any public-facing communication and in perpetuating its identity. A Brand guide helps your audience understand what your brand is communicating, through which they understand the mission and vision of your brand.
What are the Benefits of a Brand Guide?
- Brand Consistency
A brand guide plays a vital role in maintaining the consistency of your brand’s image in the public eye. Consistency is another important factor for the brand’s business since it builds the brand’s reliability and authenticity on all the marketing platforms like social media, website, business cards, packaging, etc. A Brand guide helps create a unique brand’s identity. Consistent branding helps your user know your brand better which creates a bond between your public and your brand.
- Setting Standards and Rules
A brand guide consists of rules which guide how to use different business assets like the brand logo, typography, colour, etc. When a company has such a set of standards and rules, then all its members are adhered to them, all the time which creates the brand’s cohesiveness and help everyone be on the same page. For instance, the colour of the logo of a brand will remain the same for everyone in a company and this applies to various other elements of a brand.
- Brand Recognition and Image
Brand recognition increases when it is consistent on all channels or different marketing platforms i.e, website, social media platforms, and print platforms like business cards, packaging, etc. When a brand is consistent it gets more recognized by the public. A brand guide helps build a brand’s unique identity and image. Through assets like brand logo and colour, you create your brand’s unique image in the public’s eye and mind. They recognize you more and hence rely on you more.
- Save Time and Effort
Having a set of rules can save a lot of time and work for any company or organization. Rather than wasting time explaining any new task to each one of your employees, you can simply hand them over the brand guide to get insights into any new information or data related to your brand. Also when a new employee enters a company, he can simply know a lot of important aspects about a company through a brand guide in his hand. This can save the precious time of both employees and the organization.
- Avoids Confusions
A brand guide aids a company in telling its new employee about its brand and what it stands for. Informing every new employee about your brand can be a bit difficult. A brand guide helps tell your onboarding employees about the brand’s unique identity (logo, colours, guidelines, etc) without any hassle. This helps in providing a clear understanding of your brand to your employees.
