Ensure your brand guidelines are accessible and tailored to everyone across the business, says Simon Wright, managing director at Greenwich Design
Many B2B organisations invest significant amounts of money in creating their brand, a visual shorthand for their business that creates a distinct and recognisable face within the marketplace. Brand consistency is an absolute prerequisite as it helps to reassure all stakeholders they will receive the same brand experience wherever they are.
Yet, numerous companies leave to chance how their brand is used across different business touchpoints. The main reason is their brand guidelines don’t work. These are often created as massive tomes containing every conceivable bit of rationale, information and specification – but they tend to end up on the shelves of the ‘brand manager’ who commissioned them and the agency that produced them. They look great but are often too complex for providing the relevant information to those on the ground tasked with implementing or using the brand.
There will be a large and varied group who need to know what to do, but not necessarily why. For these people, applying the rules accurately and consistently may be way down their list of priorities; for example, yellow is just yellow for them, while for a brand team only the right yellow is good enough.
So what should businesses do to ensure their hard-earned values and brand integrity give the same messages wherever they are seen, ultimately building a stronger, better differentiated brand?
1. Review the touchpoints
Agency and clients need to work together to understand every potential touchpoint and iteration of the brand. There could be hundreds of these depending on a company’s size and structure; from a global campaign using every conceivable comms channel, through to local charity sponsorship that requires a single banner.
And don’t just think about the immediate future – plan ahead for activity that may be on the horizon, such as development of an app or additions to a website.
2. Cascade down
The global/national brand team needs to take ownership and control of overall policy, but then cascade it down to implementers. Brand implementation can be massively contentious. Somebody somewhere is making a set of rules that everybody is meant to abide by. As for anything visual, brand identities are open to the subjective response of everybody, but if you don’t get their buy-in to the importance of upholding brand guidelines, it simply won’t happen.
The temptation is always there to try to explain, justify and rationalise every decision. It’s an art to balance the level of soft ‘reasons why’ against the hard specifications needed to get it right.
The ‘reasons why’ are massively important where interpretation is the name of the game, such as getting the tone of copy right in an advert or video. So give relevant information, bespoke to each audience and the role they’re tasked with. Also, bear in mind this is a continuous process as staff come and go and your business evolves.
3. Make things simple
Simplify your brand guidelines and take the time to explain them to those parties relevant in a clear manner.
You need bite size chunks, especially at the sharp end, as a facilities manager tasked with installing signs that are brand accurate will not wade through pages of rules to find the information relevant to their job.
4. Consider delivery
Consider how best to communicate guidelines. Is this via email, a PDF, an app, microsite, intranet or social enterprise? They must be accessible to those who need them and new technology is making this easier to achieve.
Today, we can create online guidelines that mean in just a couple of clicks, an implementer can find the ‘Janet and John’ instructions tailored to their needs. And the beauty of levels-based visual identity (VI) implementation is that rules can be kept consistent with ease. For example, now we can have a single ‘colour palette’ policy and links to it from all the other policies. So, if we update the palette it only has to be done once, not across several other policies, therefore saving money, time and management.
5. Limit options
Be clear about what part of the branding is fixed (for example colours, logo, typeface) and what is variable (such as photography/images). However, for the latter, ensure you limit the potential for interpretation.
6. Audit regularly
Have regular audits across your brand communications and touchpoints to identify gaps, loopholes and dubious implementation standards. The frequency of these depends on how big and complicated your business is, but it’s worth doing six months after launching a new visual identity and then at least every couple of years. The learning from these then informs your ongoing brand guidelines to limit the potential for mistakes, and of course informs you where the VI programme may need adjustments, development/refinements.
A strong brand is like a jigsaw puzzle. Whether it’s made of four pieces (a small business) or 4000 (a global corporation), the picture doesn’t work if one piece is missing or in the wrong place. A well prepared set of brand guidelines helps to keep all the pieces in the box.
