Brand Standards

Especially early on, a “brand” is a vulnerable thing that needs to be protected. This can be particularly true in large companies where maintaining the integrity of a new identity and voice is made more difficult simply by the number of people applying it. Brand standards — a cohesive set of guidelines — are essentially an owner’s manual on how to use your brand, and should be referenced by anyone charged with communicating about your company and its products and services, externally and even internally. Standards will steer the initial presentation as well as support future evolutions of an identity. Because of that, it’s important to define enough of the guidelines to keep a brand consistent, while keeping them brief enough so contributors can actually absorb and, more importantly, properly use them.

There are no hard and fast rules for a standards manual’s make-up. They can be brief and straightforward or more detailed and didactic. Which direction is usually dictated by the breadth of required applications, as well as budget.

One caveat: No one can foresee every possible application or new media unit that may arise over an infinite future. Because of this, there are times when the hard and fast rules in a manual hamper the most effective potential communication for a given scenario. As a result, we believe an effective set of standards should have some elasticity built into them, and that the standards should be reviewed periodically and evolved to drive the strongest depiction of the brand over time.