Branding Strategy & Style Guides

Your brand is your promise to customers and communicates what they can expect from your products and services. Your brand promise must offer a compelling benefit and be authentic and credible.

Defining your Brand

Defining your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It starts with identifying your target customers and understanding how your customers, prospects and employees already perceive your brand.

For your business to succeed, your brand promise must align with the products and services consistently delivered. You may position your brand as having the best customer service, quality, convenience or prices based on your business strategy, but you cannot be all things to all people.

Ultimately, your company's reputation, and your brand reputation, is created through customer’s experiences. Market research (customer and employee interviews, surveys or focus groups) may be recommended to identify how customers, prospects, employees and/or other constituents describe their experiences and perceive your brand or to test messages or a proposed brand repositioning.

Brand Strategy

Your brand strategy is how, what, where and to whom you communicating your brand promise. Your communications online, in print, visually and verbally are all part of your brand strategy. Your brand strategy needs to be fresh, engaging, and encourage loyalty.

Brand and Style Guide

The most basic purpose of a brand and style guide is to inform everyone who sees it—whether it’s an employee, a member of the media, or a graphic designer—what your brand is and how to effectively implement it. A brand and style guide establishes the voice and personality of a company and establishes standards and guidelines for all communications. It outlines all of the basic design elements that are needed to create company communications, logo usage, fonts, color palette, image use, key messages, as well as the tone and emotion portrayed by the brand.

While it takes thought and effort to define a brand strategy and compose a style guide, by having your brand and tone well-defined, your communication will be consistent and you will save time creating communications in the future.