We are exposed to hundreds of brands every single day and we remember a fraction of what we see. Everyone has shorter attention spans these days resulting in us speed-reading news, scanning emails, and scrolling through our favourite apps as quick as possible. Marketing today is tailored into short-form content to quickly grab our attention and cut through the oversaturation of brand exposure consumers get everyday.
So how do we get people to stop in their tracks and get them to engage with your brand? A good brand guideline for your company is what you might need in order to get more meaningful engagement from your customers.
What are Brand Guidelines?
Brand Identity Guidelines are a set of rules that determine the overall aesthetic and feel of your brand. These sets of rules help create a consistency that helps build brand recognition across all platforms.
A brand style guide outlines everything from your colour palette, typography, tone of voice, tagline, photography style, and company mission. When brands adhere to their own sets of guidelines, it provides all the information you need to communicate your message in the most consistent and effective manner that truly represents your brand.
Why Brand Guidelines Matter?
There are multiple reasons why successful brands have comprehensive brand guidelines and why they religiously apply it across all their marketing channels. Here are some of the reasons why they matter:
1. Identifiable
Brands need to be distinguishable from their competitors in order for their customers to be able to identify them. When everyone in their industry starts doing the same thing, brands need to leverage their unique qualities into distinguishable assets in order to stand out from the rest.
2. Increase in Brand Recognition
Brand consistency is important in almost every industry. When you use your brand guidelines across all your marketing collateral such as social media posts, campaign ads, this has the effect to increase your revenue by as much as 23%
The effect of consistency comes from the fact that repetition enhances brand recognition. Just using the same brand colour scheme can increase the amount of consumers who can recognise you, hence why most consumers who see a colour combination of red and yellow, will most likely recall Mcdonalds, the power of what that consistency can do to our brains not to be overlooked.
3. Fosters Loyalty
When your customers stay loyal to your brand, it’s not always about the type of product or service that you provide. Think about a person’s preference of orange juice, there are many brands that provide nearly identical products, yet many users gravitate towards a specific brand.
Consumers develop strong emotional connections with brands because they share the same core values or have been repetitively been engaging with that brand which makes it hard to break from it. With brand guidelines, it helps to leverage those values and characteristics in a unique marketing strategy. Gaining a loyal customer base is important because they are more likely to spend more money than new customers.
4. Grows Brand Equity
Brand equity is the commercial value that derives from the consumer perspective of the brand itself rather than the product or service they provide. Perception is key in any industry if you want to attract and retain customers.
There is a reason why successful brands have a consistent feel about them. And that is because they leverage their unique traits into something that is marketable to their potential customers. When you start highlighting your distinctive assets in a holistic marketing plan, this grows the value of your own brand because it has the potential to create tangible results for your company.
In conclusion, having brand guidelines it important to keep your brand identity consistent, identifiable, and ownable, even as different people develop marketing strategies for your brand. It is important to spend the time and resources to get your brand guidelines right in order to achieve maximum effectiveness in growing your brand.