Brand guidelines91

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BRAND GUIDELINES

You’ve gone to the trouble and expense of having your logo designed, your fonts agreed and your written tone of voice defi ned. Maybe you’ve had your ambient perfume commissioned, decided on your strapline, and chosen the exact Pantone reference for your two corporate colours. You need the whole organisation to use them the right way in the right places.

The idea People are inventive. They love to add their own decorative touches and interpretations. What they don’t always consider is that each time they alter your carefully thought out brand identity, they make customers less likely to recognise it.

If you make this clear to your staff, and give them guidelines to follow, then they’ve got the toolkit in place. Everyone can work together to make your brand more recognisable, not less.

There’s a very big communications technology brand that produced its brand guidelines as a lovely hardback coffee table book and leaves it out for customers to see – which is great. When it comes to the writing, it has a couple of pages explaining how their brand values should be encapsulated in the written tone of voice, which is to be friendly, human and chatty. Then it gives a page of examples of befores and afters, but it doesn’t give the staff the skills to change their own writing.

In practice • As well as the what and the why, you need the how. Show your people how to use the guidelines correctly. • Provide templates and standard formats for design and writing. Make them easily accessible on your intranet. Even better, give people training so that they learn how to produce their own. • Include what not to do, or someone will give it a try.