This week, I’ve looked through two sets of guidelines, both for household-name B2B brands. Both are multinationals with budgets to get most agencies salivating. They’re on nice, shiny, well produced documents, which look good in print.
But I’m looking through them to see how we use the brands for online projects we’re planning, and realising that, if these documents are anything to go by, we’re all in danger of letting our brands run amok.
Times are changing
There’s pretty much nothing about online design in either of these guideline documents, unless you count one very rough web layout which is obviously done by a print-based designer. It’s a wireframe at best, and it’s not very useful. In fact, as interfaces go, it’s actually a bit rubbish. Oh, and they advise me to use Gifs online. Thanks for that.
Both documents were produced relatively recently, one in 2004 and one in 2007. But a lot has changed in the last few years. The way people interact with brands is now different.
Many interactions with brands happen online. Brands need to be designed to work on the web, because that’s often where they’re built, experienced and shared – and not on a letterhead.
This change means that most of what these ‘guidelines’ contain is a now a total irrelevance to the way a brand needs to be used. What we need to know of how the brand should live in the online environment is completely absent.
So, the question is, how can we be on-brand if the document that is supposed to govern this was written from a bygone era? It’s like watching Madmen to learn how to manage your agency (though not as much fun).
First, stop telling me what to do
Anyway, they are not so much ‘guidelines’, as ‘rules’. These brand ‘guidelines’ are still obsessed by control: they are telling you dos and don’ts; defining safe areas; describing how a business card looks; and telling you exactly how you must describe the business.
It’s all one way. It feels very old school. You can’t control now; that age of marketing has gone. It’s no wonder we joke about ‘brand police’, but shouldn’t we now be talking about ‘brand mentors’?
It seems these brands are also obsessed with print representation and barely consider how the brand is rendered online (that’s the least of their troubles), let alone how the brand lives online in our connected, converged world. Yet, in many cases, this should be the first place they are tested.
Going beyond ‘corporate identity’
I don’t think these really are brand guidelines. In my opinion, calling them that is wrong. They are really just corporate identity guidelines for print, and little else. I totally agree that the integrity of a brand’s identity is essential to maintain. But I think calling these documents brand guidelines is some way off the mark from what they are. I think their production has become formulaic. It needs to change dramatically.
But, let’s face it, they already exist for a lot of businesses, and as the suggestion of a ‘brand-refresh’ in the current economic situation gives most financial directors heart palpitations, we must work with them. But I hope that marketing and brand managers will recognise when they have no real relevance to the sort of marketing they need to do now.
Robust and realistic guidelines
So here is what I think any brand guidelines of 2009 should include:
- Our brand online
- How the user should experience our brand online
- How our company blogs
- How we present ourselves on social media
- How we look to encourage participation with our brand
- How we participate with other conversations or groups
- How to monitor our brand online
- How we tweet
- Our website behaviours and interactions
- How we use microsites/landing pages
- Tone of voice and copy guidelines that consider SEO etc.
And so on.
I will admit, however, that there is a need for balance here. Some guidance on print production is necessary because most brands still use print.
But the emphasis has now changed and if the guidance we give to our working partners and agencies does not help them to support the brand online, we will lose all chance of consistency and end up with discordant and ultimately weaker brands. This is a very high price to pay for a shiny brochure.
