The Crave
Weekly tips and stories that will help you do your job and make you smile (or groan).
By Julie Alexander April 28, 2022
How to bring your brand guide to life
(and make people actually use it)
Probably one of my favorite parts of working in a scale-up is the constant influx of new people. It’s like a never-ending resource of fresh ideas and perspectives — there’s always someone coming around to shake things up, and that’s what helps you continue to grow and expand. Of course, there are plenty of challenges that come along with hiring lots of new people, and because you read the title of this piece, I’m sure you already know where I’m going with this. Every new person to join the company is another shiny opportunity to test the strength of your internal brand communications. In my tenure as a content and brand owner, I’ve seen many methods for regulating the brand, and in this issue I want to focus specifically on brand guides.
Brand guides should be living, breathing documents. Your brand will continue to evolve, and as it does you need to be able to keep everyone in the company up to date on the latest guidelines.
The 4 most important aspects of a brand guide:
- Clear and concise — Brand guides should be made to be used. You want people to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Cut out the fluff and offer clear navigation.
- Easy to access — Where does your brand guide live? Is it buried in layers of folders in a drive? Is it locked up behind a password no one can find? If folks can’t find the brand guide, then your work was for naught.
- Easy to maintain — Brand guides should be living, breathing documents. Your brand will continue to evolve, and as it does you need to be able to keep everyone in the company up to date on the latest guidelines. Choose a format that is easy for anyone in the brand team to update on the fly.
- Single source of truth — No one ever wants to deal with version control, but especially not when it comes to their brand guide. That means ensuring that everyone in the company is accessing the same (and most recent) version of the brand book at all times.
Solving for all 4
When you bring it all together, creating an appealing and effective brand guide comes down to two main factors: format and distribution. Format matters. I’ve managed brand guides in PDFs, on websites, as simple Word or Google documents, and now as a content experience. PDF
Please, please please please: if your brand guide lives in a PDF, find another way immediately. Any other way. A brand guide in a PDF is not easy to update, version control is a nightmare, and you eventually lose your single source of truth. You know people will download it and continue to use the version saved on their computer until kingdom come, and that’s the last thing you want. Google or Word Doc
The next level up would be a Word or Google document. At least you can keep this up to date, and if you’re saving it on a shared drive you can maintain some semblance of version control. The downside, however, is that your design options will be severely limited, so you’re going to lose points on the “clear and concise” factor. Webpage
So what about hosting it on a webpage? This is a better option, but much like designing a PDF, it will require some expertise to build and keep maintained. Depending on your CMS, this might not be a very user-friendly option. Keep in mind who owns the brand guide in your company, and think about their programming skills. How easy will it be for them to add modules? Will it be a pain for them to jump in and update it? Also, how will you keep it private? You might need to give it a home in your Knowledge Center, or you might want it to be in a password-protected section of your website (in my experience, this is not optimal unless your org has a shared password management tool). Content Experience
That leads me to my current, highly preferred — and recommended — scenario: turn your brand guide into a content experience. What I love about this option:
- A drag and drop editor makes it easy for anyone in the brand team to adjust the brand guide when necessary. Our Creative Director owns our visual brand, and I own the messaging and story. In this scenario, he’s able to create a beautiful visual brand guide, and I can go in on my own and update copy and messaging. It’s kind of perfect.
- The format is engaging. We can include videos, gifs, stats — everything we need to bring out brand to life and show what it can (and should) look like at its best. In other words, our brand guide is appealing and interactive.
- It lives online. But it doesn’t (have to) live on the website — it stands alone, much like a landing page. This means we can update it whenever we want and know that everyone is always accessing the latest and greatest version. It also means I don’t have to deal with version control. Ever. 😌
- Because it lives online, we can have an internal version and an external version. The internal version isn’t password-protected, it uses single sign-on SSO. Meaning I don’t have to send people passwords, and that makes me happy.
- You are in control of how readers navigate. You can choose a linear storytelling model, or you can set up find-and-read navigation to help people find what they need as fast as possible. This is super important because the success of your brand guide depends on how fast readers can find what they need. (This one is directly from Vincent, our Creative Director.)
Here’s a link to the (external) Foleon brand guide so you can check it out and see what I’m talking about.
But how to make sure people can find it and use it?
Distribution will always remain a challenge, but there are two simple yet effective things we’re doing now that work well:
- We have a Slack shortcut that links directly to the brand guide any time anyone mentions the phrase “brand guide.” It’s my favorite thing.
- I give a brand onboarding presentation every month to all of the new starters where I take them through the brand principles and share our brand guide, persona documentation, etc. If you’re not doing this, I highly recommend it!
I know it’s not best practice to write even-numbered lists, but there you have it. I hope this has been useful, or at the very least, inspirational. It’s so much fun to get people excited about the brand they work for, and offering an engaging and accessible brand guide is pretty pivotal to doing that.
Let’s talk about it together!
Share your thoughts on LinkedIn using #thecravediscussion This week’s topic: What’s the best brand guide you’ve ever seen? Let’s share examples and discuss!
Julie van der Weele
Head of Brand & Comms
About the author
When I’m not thinking up B2B marketing strategies and processes, you’ll find me in the kitchen, at the yoga studio, or in my favorite chair with a cat and a book.
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