Nail your brand guidelines, and you’ll always have the right answer to the question: “Does this fit our brand?”
We often sort things into two buckets: good or bad.
When someone comes into contact with your brand, they subconsciously make a split-second decision about whether it’s worth exploring the product/service further.
This is the type of oversimplification that allows us to make sense of everything presented to us in today’s world of information overflow.
The typical person comes in contact with dozens of brands during the day, so we subconsciously take cognitive shortcuts to make sense of what’s being presented to us.
Naturally, if you want your brand to stick out in the crowd, you must leave a lasting impression.
In the grand scheme of things, it might seem like the rules of good branding are invisible. But they’re usually just hiding behind a good strategy.
Don’t mistake brand strategy for marketing.
A strategy is your plan for achieving everything you’ve defined as the mission and vision of your business. Marketing consists of the tactics and actions you take to implement your strategy.
That’s why once you define your brand guidelines and strategy, it becomes that much easier to come up with the right tactic of positioning your brand as the perfect choice for your customer.
Turn the unknowns into knowns.
Reframe the questions around what your brand represents, and the answers become far more useful.
Think of the consumer, their interests, their desires, and their reasons for paying attention to your brand. When creating brand content, there are 3 questions you always have to answer from the shoes of the customer:
What is this?
They need to understand the essence of what you’re offering and why it exists. If this isn’t clear, nothing else will land.
Is this for me?
They’re searching for the relevance of your offer and whether it’s something that fits into their world. They want to feel that you understand their needs and what matters to them.
What’s next?
This is your call to action. If you’ve managed to answer the first two questions right, then you can guide them toward the next step, and they will follow with confidence.
The purpose of your branding is to guide customer aspirations.
Brand guidelines free you from hundreds of exhausting decisions.
Many brands lean on short-term decisions that seem to work in the moment: This design looks nice, let’s stamp our logo on it. That sentence sounds good, let’s post it.
However, this might lead to many moments where doing the “right” thing for your brand feels uncertain.
That is why we remove a large part of the guesswork by conceptualizing and setting clear brand guidelines.
So how does one build a solid foundation?
Design a system that works even if one component is missing.
Branding happens at multiple levels of your organization.
If everyone follows the same concepts, there will be less space for confusion in your team.
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- Templates provide the perfect starting point for new projects.
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- Shared assets make your brand materials accessible to everyone who needs them.
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- Briefs ensure everyone is on the same page.
Nail your brand guidelines, and you’ll always have the right answer to the question: “Does this fit our brand?”
