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Brand Manuals – Style Guides

Brand Manuals will ensure your message will properly be communicated in dealing with marketers, designers, photographers and printers. A style guide will help prevent inappropriate use of logos, careless handling of style elements, incorrect colors, and inconsistent messaging.

Brand Manuals address:

• Brand description – The story and values of your brand and company.
• Logo – The proper usage of the brand and logo ensuring consistent placement and sizing across all communication vehicles including website, email, stationary, and brochures.
• Color – You want a consistent color palette across all marketing material. Color has a key role in memory retrieval and helps increase brand recognition.
• Tone – What you say and how you say it.
• Typography – A description of fonts used, how often and in what contexts.
• Images – The look and feel of all visuals should be similar in style and support brand positioning.

Using a Brand Manual will protect the consistency of your brand, increase customer confidence, and improve your competitive advantage. Less energy will be spent checking on the details, freeing up valuable resources to focus on the big picture.

Branding Basics

Branding is about building a relationship with potential customers.  The first step for any successful business is to establish a brand strategy. What do you want to say about your company? A brand strategy provides you with focus and structure by defining your brand promise, your position in the marketplace, your target audience and your brand values. It is an identity and a blueprint for your company.

Branding: Personality, Positioning, and Promise

Your brand describes who you are, what you do and how you do it.

Who you are? – Personality

Who you are, What you do, and how you do it?

A brand personality is built  around three characteristics. More  than three traits will weaken and obscure your message. Is your brand personality traditional, refined and authoritative? Maybe your brand personality is quirky, modern, and energetic? This personality will dictate how you interact with future consumers, the tone, style, and the approach you use. Your brand personality will differentiate your company from the competitors. It will create an emotional connection with the consumers’ understanding of your brand.

What you do – Positioning

This is the distinct quality that differentiates your company, product, or service from your competition. What is your unique selling point (USP), the single or combined qualities that make your company unique, based on feature, price, or service? Your positioning should be meaningful, easy to communicate, easy to remember and easily accessible to your target market. Why should someone buy from you and not the competition?

How you do it – Promise

What is your promise to potential customers? What experiences can they consistently and reliability expect from your brand?  Your brand promise is your commitment to your customers and encapsulates your company’s values, position, vision and mission. It is the promise you make every effort to fulfill. What expectations can your customers have? What benefits can they expect from your brand?

Questions about your audience

What is your target market?  

Who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Define your target audience, so that you can direct your messaging and reach them efficiently. You need a clear understanding of the customers you want to attract so you can build your business from there.

What do your customers need to know about you?

What questions will your customers have about you, your products, and your services? Your communication materials need to address these key points.

Where are they?

Where are your buyers concentrated? Geographics are a key factor in developing relevant and cost-effective marketing communications.

When to communicate to your audience?

When does it make the most sense to speak out in the marketplace? Market timing is a key factor in your communications strategy.

How to reach your market?

What combination of marketing will reach your audience? Does it include a website, email campaign, search engine advertising, a social media ad, a direct mailer, or print advertising?  How to most efficiently reach your customers.

Why they should buy from you?

Why should your customers buy from you rather than your competition? What are the benefits of your product or service? You want to make sure you place emphasis on benefits, not features.

Answering these questions will help keep you focused, on track and save you money.