Why Brand Guidelines Are Important

This is an essential tool that provides businesses and designers clear guidelines on how to effectively and consistently communicate the brand.

Using these guidelines ensures that your brand looks and feels the same across all your brand touchpoints.

Failing to develop and enforce brand guidelines can become a threat to your brand’s integrity.

Without this direction your visual brand identity will quickly go off the rails, with incorrect colors, random fonts, misplaced logos, and off-brand graphics.

Everything you design should accurately represent and support your brand.

This can be an extremely difficult undertaking to monitor and oversee, especially if you are a large organization who has several projects being designed by multiple design departments.

This is why brand guidelines are so critical to the success and growth of your company.

When everyone is on the same page, and has the resources they need readily available in a format that is easy to understand, you can relax just a little bit, knowing that all the designs going out the door are accurately representing your brand.

Here are just some of the reasons why properly developed brand guidelines will benefit your business:

Brand Guidelines Enforce Consistency

Consistency because it plays an extremely significant role in the success of any business.

When you present every single visual component of your brand using the same colors, logo placement, typography, and graphical style, you will imprint these visual cues in the minds of the consumer.

They will begin to recognize your products on the shelf, or your digital ads, because of the design, long before they see your logo or can read your name.

However, if you are inconsistent with your visual identity, then your brand will never have the opportunity to connect with the customer and create a memorable experience.

Brand Guidelines Create Quality Control

When you create, distribute, and enforce well documented brand guidelines to every employee in your business, it’s not just your creative team, or art director that is responsible for quality control.

With dozens of eyes on every piece of content that gets designed, you can be confident that you’re always putting out content that you are proud of.

Brand Guidelines Help With Comprehension

You’re going to spend a lot of time, effort, and energy designing your visual identity.

Well developed and documented brand guidelines allow your designers to clearly communicate your brand to the consumer.

When your creative team designs around these guidelines of proper color use, typography, imagery, and logo placement, it creates a better content experience for the customer.

When a customer is able to easily relate to your personality, comprehend what you do, and understand how it will benefit them, they will be more likely to purchase your products or services.

Brand Guidelines Build Trust

Whether they are aware of it or not, most people recognize and appreciate great design when they see it.

When a potential customer sees something that is well designed, and looks professional, they will automatically perceive that product or brand as a higher quality than a poorly designed product.

This perception will gain the trust of the consumer. And if you can gain a consumer’s trust, you may also acquire a sale.

Brand guidelines not only make a brand trustworthy though design quality, but also in its consistency.

If a brand is constantly changing how it looks, and acts over time, the consumer will feel like they don’t know who they really are, and may lose trust in them.

Brand Guidelines Increase Recognition

Brand guidelines help your business deliver a cohesive brand experience, making it easier for people to recognize your content.

Your brand guidelines will provide this positive experience to the customer every time, and at every touchpoint.

The customer will learn to expect and rely on only the best high quality content from your brand.

Which in turn, will create loyal brand advocates, and increase your valuable brand equity.

To continue your training and dive deeper into how to properly develop, manage, and enforce brand guidelines in your organization, check out my free 7 Day Brand Bootcamp by enrolling below or by visiting 7DayBrandBootcamp.com.