What do all famous brands have in common? They are instantly recognizable – meaning that they do not always need to incorporate their name in a logo. However, a great logo is not enough to become instantly recognizable. Recognition is achieved through continuous, consistent branding across all communication channels.
Why You Need Consistent Branding
Consistent branding leaves no room for confusion when it comes to brand communications. It means using the same logo, brand colors, fonts, imagery, and tone of voice, whether it is a social media post or a PowerPoint presentation.
How to Achieve Consistency
To protect the brand, companies invest in a brand style guide. A brand style guide contains the correct logos, fonts, colors as well as the core values of the brand. Brand consistency requires the entire company to fully understand and implement the brand guidelines in all internal and external communications. The more detailed the brand style guide, the less room it leaves for inconsistency. You can go as far as describing the spacing between the lines of a written document.
A Brand Style Guide Should Contain:
- Brand mission and vision
- The brand logo
- Color palette
- Typography
Here is something that can help you determine other aspects of your brand personality:
How to Get Everyone on Board and Achieve Brand Consistency
Let us face it – enforcing brand guidelines is not easy. So, you must make the brand style guide easily accessible to everyone. By doing so, people will be less likely to Google your logo or use a random text font next time they are making a PowerPoint presentation. Also, you can provide templates for presentations, proposals, business cards and other MarCom materials. By making use of said templates, people will be working within an approved, on-brand framework.
Recommended readings:
- Brand Management: 6 Elements of Success
- 10 Best Tech Company Brand Books
- Is Brand Consistency Important?
Top Examples of Awesome Brand Style Guides
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn has a clean and straight-forward web page that divides all components of the brand book into .zip files. You can download these files separately, or you can download the complete brand book.
2. Red Cross
The Red Cross keeps it concise. Their brand poster tells you everything you need to know about Red Cross brand in a PDF.
3. *Santa*
Although Santa is technically not a brand, *Santa*’s brand book is a clever example of keeping things playful. This brand book is an initiative of the Quietroom.
4. Coca-Cola
The most recognizable brand in the world. From industrial design principles for equipment to overall proportions of the bottles, Coca-Cola’s brand book does not leave any room for misinterpretations.
5. MailChimp
Check out the section uniquely describing the tone of voice of the brand.
6. Cisco’s Interactive Style Guide
Cisco has decided to create an interactive Brand Style Guide to really highlight their brand. There are multiple ways you could do this, if you would like to go that route, and there are many benefits of having an interactive brand style guide.
You could, for instance, use Lytho’s Brand Center to create an interactive brand style guide. This allows all stakeholders (internal and external) to access the style guide everywhere and download logos, font, and other assets directly from within Lytho.
Creating your style guide, in Lytho’s Brand Center, also means that everyone is always accessing the latest version. You will not need to worry about people using a previous version that they downloaded years ago and is not up to date anymore.
When conducting our research for this article, we came across multiple outdated versions of Apple’s affiliate style guide. These outdated versions can easily lead to inconsistency in Apple’s brand efforts.
7. Apple’s Style Guide for Channel Affiliates
Having so many resellers, Apple opted for a brand style guide to let all stakeholders know how to use their brand appropriately. Imagine having so many partners and no guidelines. The great Apple brand could just not remain consistent
Do you want to store all your brand elements in one place? Lytho helps you streamline workflows and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!
Do you want to give yourself and your creative team more room for creative stimulation by automating the boring stuff? Lytho helps you streamline your entire workflow and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!
Ready to simplify your creative operations and start having a little fun at work again? Schedule time to talk with us.
Let us show you how Lytho’s Creative Operations Platform helps in-house creative and marketing teams do better work, ease the stakeholder experience, and stay on brand.
Schedule a Demo