Why Is It Essential for Every Company to Have Brand Guidelines?
There is a narrow strait that differentiates a company from a brand. We call it image and personality.
Let’s sink this in with a quick example. Suppose you are a professional basketball player looking to purchase new basketball shoes. You come across two products, one from Nike and the other from a local shoe manufacturer you’ve never heard off. Both offer the same features and quality, and the one from the local manufacturer is even priced slightly lower.
What will you pick? Nike, for sure. Nike is commonly associated with ruggedness, excitement, active lifestyle, motion, and speed, a few powerful emotions for a sports athlete.
How can you develop such an authoritative brand personality?
What are the brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines, also referred to as brand standards, brand books, or brand guides, are a set of rules that states how a brand works. It can also define how your brand can look like and how it cannot. Brand guidelines are crucial when you’re either launching a new brand or rebranding your existing business. And this article will help you to build brand guidelines for Indian brands.
Why is it essential for every company to have brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are crucial because they enable you to define how your brand elements will be used and what you want to communicate to your audience. Here’s why brand guidelines are vital for every business.
Brand recognition
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when we speak of Mercedes? The luxurious S-Class or the mighty, super-fast AMG GT? Whatever comes to your mind is due to powerful branding, which means a person can differentiate Mercedes among tens of different brands. By having robust and consistent brand guidelines, you will enable users to recognize and recall your brand with ease.
Brand consistency
Brand consistency directly oscillates with brand identity, and by putting out a standard set of rules, you can robustly maintain and promote your brand identity. Consistent branding enables you to convey the values, mission, vision, and personality of your brand.
Sets standard rules
When you have brand guidelines, you can develop a set of rules that align and adhere to your identity. This includes everything ranging from the color and signage of your brand to its element’s comprehensive look and feel. These rules also delineate what your team can and cannot do with the brand elements. For example, you must have seen the logo of BMW. What colour is it? Blue and White at the quadrants and metallic on the line that circles the quadrants and divides them. You’ll never see a BMW logo in any other color; courtesy: brand guidelines.
Fun fact: In the BMW logo, B is written above the Blue quadrant, M above the Metallic line, and W above the White quadrant.
Sends a close-knit message
As discussed before, a brand consists of several elements, and all of them must send out a united message. Thus, the web designer, graphic designer, content creator, all should be on the same page, and well-written brand guidelines make this communication easy.
Avoids confusion
If you are a startup or a business, you must be having a plan to scale up. Even if you don’t, there must be a desire to expand. And, when you grow, you will be adding more employees, and you will need all of them to be acquainted with your brand’s vision and personality. Brand guidelines can act as a quick tool to make new employees learn about what your brand stands for and what they should avoid at all costs. Thus, you won’t need to spend time training every employee about how to represent your brand.
Saves time and efforts
By having a set of rules every member of your organization needs to follow irrespective of the task, project, or process, you can save up a significant amount of time and resources as all you need to do hand over the brand guidelines.
Conclusion
Building a strong brand with a highly relatable persona will result in high popularity amongst your target audience. Therefore it is imperative for a brand to have concrete brand guidelines that can help you get the recognition your business deserves.
