Nathaniel Seevers

Key Components of a Brand Guide

Key Components of a Brand Guide https://www.shoutoutstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/brandguide_postheader.jpg 1920 703 Nathaniel Seevers Nathaniel Seevers https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/903959c6b29e9bf8b829b9f9749601d6?s=96&d=mm&r=g January 2, 2018 October 30, 2018

A well-formed Brand Guide can act as a playbook for business decisions and marketing strategies. It’s a point of reference as to why the brand was started in the first place and a compass for maintaining your intended path. Keep in mind, when we say brand we’re talking about much more than the design components. More than just the looks. The brand guide should, as accurately as possible, describe the entire character of the brand – the promise, purpose, the walk, the talk as well as the look.

Putting together a full-fledged Brand Book can take some time but it can pay off tenfold across the life of your business. Consider the following key components of a brand guide when you get started.

Introduction

Give a quick synopsis of the brand. This is your prologue to the rest of the document. The “why” this document (your company) even exists. This part provides context for the reader and helps rally the team working on behald of the brand.

Brand Platform/The Core

This is where you begin to flesh out the character of your brand. Just like talking about a close friend, you should be able to describe what your company’s goals are, what it stands for and the company’s personality. Are you a little goofy or very much buttoned up? The value of this section is in details such as below.

Proper definitions courtesy of Brand Channel.

Brand Purpose/Mission: How the brand will act on its insight.
Brand Values: The code by which the brand lives. The brand values act as a benchmark to measure behaviors and performance.
Brand Essence: The brand’s promise expressed in the simplest, most single-minded terms. For example, Volvo = safety. The most powerful brand essences are rooted in a fundamental customer need.
Brand Personality: The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics. These traits inform brand behavior through both prepared communication/packaging, etc., and through the people who represent the brand – its employees.

Communication

Who are you working to create a dialogue with and how…

Market – What is the ideal demographic? Who is our brand for?

Voice – how do we speak to the market? At Shout Out we worked through an exercise to identify an actual person representative of our company voice.

Visual Identity

Now it’s time to get into design guidelines. This part is incredibly important for maintaining a cohesive visual brand. Hand this section to partners, new hires, anyone impacting or using any part of your visual brand. It should contain:

Primary Logo and Proper Usage
Secondary Logo and Proper Usage
Logo No No’s
Typeface
Color Palette
Photography Style

In the end, developing a proper brand guide can be an exercise in brand self-awareness as much putting together guidelines for others. Often times it helps to seek out the perspective of trusted contacts not directly involved with your company. Ask them to answer a short questionnaire based on what they do know about your brand.

Nathaniel Seevers

What Instagram Can Do For Your Business That Twitter Cannot

What Instagram Can Do For Your Business That Twitter Cannot https://www.shoutoutstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IG.jpg 1920 700 Nathaniel Seevers Nathaniel Seevers https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/903959c6b29e9bf8b829b9f9749601d6?s=96&d=mm&r=g October 30, 2014 May 20, 2018

I don’t follow a ton of people on Twitter but I’ve carefully built a feed of:

1) people or brands who share and create useful content
2) people or brands I know or those I’ve connected with in some fashion and
3) folks who are simply kind, entertaining and engaging online.

I’ve built some rewarding relationships on Twitter, met great people and even collaborated on ideas and projects. It can be a valuable platform as long as you’re giving as much as you’re taking away.

Despite all of this deliberate cultivation of tweet sources, Twitter can feel like a social media Groundhog Day – a loop of the same “6 Ways to Whatever” and a broken record of links. To combat this problem Twitter has better integrated images and videos into tweets over the passed year. And it has helped. Stats show engagement rates increase as much as 151% on tweets with images. We’re visual people. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text.

So imagine your brand’s visual story being told on a platform inherently geared toward images. Instagram isn’t all selfies and lattes. Companies large and small across a variety of industries are finding creative ways to utilize Instagram as a vehicle for social communication.

What Instagram Can Do For Your Business:

Help You Show More Culture: Consumers, in general, you, me and we, want to know more about the people behind the brands we engage with. It’s easier to connect and relate brand voice and brand tendencies with a person or group of people than it is to a logo or name or product packaging. That hasn’t necessarily changed from consumer interest 20-30 years ago but the way it happens and the scale at which it happens certainly has.

Instagram is the chance to provide a glass door look into your culture; from philanthropy to pumpkin carving, Instagram is a chance to show the human side of the business and even activate employees to do the same.

Help You Show More Quality and Value: If you create a product Instagram is the perfect place to provide proof of quality, from the materials you use in the process, to the packaging. If you provide a service give folks a peek at the brainstorming. Let them see the breadth of team, skills, and work that goes into delivering a great service experience.

Help You Show More Travel: Heading out for a conference, client meeting or event? Use Instagram to capture highlights and local interests. Relevant hashtags and location tagging helps you connect with audiences that could ultimately turn into buyers.

71% More Likely to Purchase Based on Social Media Referrals

This stat is from a 2012 article but even if that number is skewed slightly the fact remains that social done right builds trust. Instagram provides a visually driven way to communicate and connect. More Instagram How-to’s here.

How is your company using Instagram? Share your challenges and successes in the comments below.