Small Bytes: Discover the Hidden Depths of Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are the most important document for a business, as they control and maintain consistency in branding. They can go deep and include strategy, tone of voice, and messaging. Even small businesses should have brand guidelines to guide their brand identity. Not having brand guidelines can lead to issues like inconsistent colors and messaging. Brand guidelines help document and communicate shifts in target markets and prevent confusion. While it's not necessary to outline every detail initially, the minimum for brand guidelines is logos, fonts, and colours.

Key Takeaways

• Brand guidelines are essential for maintaining consistency in branding.
• They can include strategy, tone of voice, and messaging.
• Even small businesses should have brand guidelines.
• Not having brand guidelines can lead to issues like inconsistent colors and messaging.
• Brand guidelines help document and communicate shifts in target markets.
• The minimum for brand guidelines is logos, fonts, and colours.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:48 The Depth of Brand Guidelines
• 4:00 Brand Guidelines for Small Businesses
• 5:32 Issues Without Brand Guidelines
• 7:01 Documenting Shifts in Target Markets

Transcript

Martin Sully (00:00.396)
We need to talk about brand guidelines. This is the Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Martin Sully, a brand strategist, designer and founder of Snapper Studio. And I'm on a mission to help you gain clarity and confidence in your brand. I'll arm you with bite -sized tips.

and introduce you to friends of the show who are taking their brand to the next level.

Martin Sully (00:38.556)
Now before you glaze over like a donut, they are the single most important document your business should have. Logos, they can go do one and so can your website. I said it, I said it. I knew that it was going to happen one day and I was going to have a full -on brand guideline meltdown. Anyway, so yeah.

Your brand guidelines should be driving everything. They are the one document that controls things, keeps things in line, and basically fully adaptable. Like, you can do one thing one day and adjust something and maybe have to reflect that entirely in your brand guidelines and update.

keep everything on top. It's the one thing that keeps everything looking succinct together, blended, know, however you want to put it, consistent.

Martin Sully (01:46.766)
and they can go deep like so deep you'll be swimming past anglerfish. They if you don't know what anglerfish are they're the fish in Finding Nemo with the giant teeth and the little antenna that lights up to lure small fish in. And I got asked the other day if it's worth having a set of brand guidelines or like a centralized

if you're a small business. They actually then went on to say things like, you know, I've got my logos in one file here. We've got you know, some data and tone of voice in, in, in our click up. I'm like, that's, That's a mess. That's, That's going to cause issues. If you go in between multiple different things and trying to pull everything together, from lots of things, some were along somewhere in the middle

everything's gonna go

pear-shaped. Let's say pair -shaped. OK. So Just because you're a small fish doesn't mean that you shouldn't be guided by guidelines. That's like, you know, if you're going to do it, look at brand guidelines is like the base. You can go really, like I said, you can go really deep. You can include strategy into it.

You can obviously branch out and get tone of voice, things in there, all the messaging, you know, have lots of things to help you control what you say to people that you want to actually say and how to make it actually look like you want to actually make it

Martin Sully (03:38.348)
So while you might not benefit from a point of view where you can start using them to induct new employees when you're small.

Martin Sully (03:52.494)
But it's honestly, It's a mistake to think that it's better not to have any.

It's a mistake to think that they have no use.

And I'd love to count them out on my hands where I have been approached by a business to work with them. And I asked them for brand guidelines and they have nothing. That's a dissid, you know.

That's a big disadvantage.

Martin Sully (04:36.858)
And when you've got that, the problems that happen are things like colors get altered between people. When you're looking at things like I worked with a business a while back who had a set of documents that would be used for formal meetings, they may only be internal,

I guarantee you some of them got sent externally because they were actually things like some of them were like meeting notes. That there were just a set of, you know, documents that needed to be used to keep things flowing, to keep the business running, follow up procedures on, you know, problems that have been solved, things that things that were happening outside of their organization. So, yeah.

That's a giant disadvantage. Anyway, going into it. like I said, yeah, the colors get altered between people. sometimes you can even, know, colors can even completely fall out of line during your own work. If you haven't got a centralized point where you take things from and you're referring to different documents,

Along the line, a little mistake can get made and things shift.

And that's kind of that's just the start. If you haven't got a centralized sort of way of doing things. And I found with that previous business, the way I adjusted their documents, that fonts were all completely. All over the place, they were and they had about three or four different ones that were getting used.

Martin Sully (06:35.086)
the tone of voice can shift your, the messaging can shift. So you end up targeting, you know, different markets by whether it's on purpose or by accident. When those shifts occur, they need to be documented so that you can say, okay, all right, we were looking at a different target market. And I would argue if you

feel like you need to shift into a new target mark, might need to revisit your strategy and your messaging anyway. But if that does all get shifted, you need some way of documenting it so that people in your team know that this is happening. So that nothing, you know, if it gets altered and.

Martin Sully (07:24.382)
you people aren't aware of it, you can start really confusing people and confusing messages end up making your brand weaker and weaker and weaker. then that's it. Who knows? Like, Do you go bust? Who knows? It's so hard to to measure that impact. And that's one of the intangible things about brand branding. and brand strategies

Actually, there's a lot of testing and there's a lot of it. We don't know how something is going to react. We can make some really good assumptions. We can get some really good data and pull everything together that way.

But yeah, are semi flying a little bit blind.

Martin Sully (08:18.508)
Now to begin with, I actually don't think you necessarily have to outline every single little thing. So you don't have to outline all of your brand strategy. But in time, yes, like ideally you do include brand strategy info, tone of voice and details of your how the visual identity used. But in the short term, to start

Just like a look at your logos, the fonts you use, the colors, that's the minimum. OK, so if you can get those nails, if you can nail that, great. And going forward, If you get to a point where you've got all your brand strategy and tone of voice and everything in place, if you have that, great job. But they are going to need to be

updated every now and again to reflect your current business direction.