Growing without the pains.

Staffing up? Now’s the time to make sure your brand guide is all caught up.

You’re growing! That’s great, but that probably means as your team has changed over the years, your brand has, as well. This is also great. But what about your brand guide? Is it just a remnant of your evolved brand or has it been updated to inform how it should exist out in the world now? And more importantly, who’s keeping track of it all? 

Brands must evolve to stay relevant and competitive. But you’ve probably noticed that previous team members made changes or additions to your brand assets that they were excited about—and made sense—at the time, but now make no sense and go against some of the original strategies that were established when setting up your brand. That’s ok. Rules are meant to be broken, and in some cases, necessary as your business grows. But it’s important to remember why you put them in your guide in the first place, so let’s start there.

Brand guides guide your brand.

Simply put, a brand guide is a playbook on how a brand should be portrayed and its assets used in order to protect the brand integrity that you’ve worked so hard to create. This will help keep the multitude of people who are working with your brand, across multiple touchpoints, from going out of bounds while ensuring that your brand identity remains aligned with your objectives. 

Rules are more of a suggestion. 

Seems counterintuitive, right? But as your brand evolves and assets have been added, the rules on how to use them should also evolve, which is exactly why it’s important to give your brand guide a tune-up to reflect those changes. 

Big thing to keep in mind: this is about deliberate, nuanced updates. None of this is to say you need to do a brand refresh, or even a complete, full-on rebrand. Imagine it this way: you’ve added to your brand’s wardrobe, now it needs a larger closet to put it all in. But you’re not tearing the whole house down. Think “makeover” not “do-over”.

Now back to the reason you’re doing this in the first place.

Oh yeah, growth. When you started your business, you had fewer daily responsibilities and were building your brand as you went, so you could inform your small staff on how to properly use it and the perception you were working to build in whatever market you were in. But now that you’ve gotten busier and have grown, you’ve got less time to be the point person for your growing personnel, which brings us to our first reason why having an up-to-date brand guide makes sense.

Onboarding.

A well-done brand guide can be the heart and soul of your brand. It holds a wealth of information that not only seasoned staff can refer to, but it’s also a great onboarding tool for new employees. So staffing up, or even working with new partners and vendors, is the perfect reason – and time – to take a look at your brand guide and make any necessary updates to your mission, vision, brand positioning, brand values and character. That way, everyone can be on the same page to ensure brand consistency and the pursuit of those underlying brand goals.

Speaking of consistency…

Because you’re building new departments, hiring more employees and working with more agencies, manufacturers, consultants and contractors, there are a lot of different people touching your brand. And because everything moves quickly, things can easily get missed or overlooked, creating inconsistencies—or worse, contradictions— in how your brand is represented. But with an updated and current brand guide, you have an easy-to-point-to toolkit to achieve uniformity across every touchpoint.

A growing staff is just one part of your overall growth.

While staffing up is an important reason to make sure your brand guide is in good shape, things like market expansion, new and emerging targets and diversifying product lineups are also all part of a growing brand, and reasons to make sure everything is buttoned up. Here are a few other reasons to consider making updates:

• You’ve developed a new product.

• You need a new campaign with a specific identity.

• You’re looking to redesign or rethink your website.

• You need to develop a better mobile experience or app.

• You have a new subsidiary.

• Your divisions are marketing in different ways, and you need them unified.

• It’s been more than a year since you last reviewed or updated your guide.

So, what’s up for an update?

Once we start to dig in and reevaluate your brand guide, you’ll realize what things to update, or even take out, based on the growth you’re experiencing and how it’s affected your brand.

Brand Positioning

Your positioning is the foundation that everything—differentiators, values, brand drivers, product/service definition, and more—is built from. It makes sense then, that it should be one of the first things you consider making updates to, especially if you’ve significantly shifted who you’re targeting or drastically changed your product offerings from when you originally started the company.

Character
If your target audience is expanding because you’re broadening your customer base, then your brand character – the persona that comes to mind when they think of your brand – could shift to meet this need. In this situation, it’s important that this is purposeful, well-explained and documented. 

Logos
Maybe you introduced a new product or offering, and with it, a logo lockup. Or you may have created additional versions of your logo to accommodate a tagline, business descriptor or product extension. These new logos should be added to the style section of your brand guide with directions on their use and how they fit into the larger brand family. 

Imagery
Your image library may show dated pictures, or the style of photography may have shifted for one of your product lines. Reviewing your brand guide regularly lets you remove imagery that should no longer be used, and update photography, illustrations and other visual assets currently relevant to your brand. 

Fonts and Color
In creating new product lines, you may have decided to incorporate additional fonts and colors that are relevant to each. To increase brand resonance, we should review which should be included, which should be eliminated and develop specific instructions on when and how to use them.

Brand Name 
In time, you may want to augment, add to or even strip things away from your brand name. This could be a reflection of a change in culture or product offerings and services which should be captured in your brand guide, and reflected in an updated set of assets. 

New name, new look, same brand. Can you imagine the chaos and inconsistencies these brands would have gone through if using an out-of-date brand guide while trying to achieve these changes?

It’s a team effort.

Because you’ve grown, it could be difficult to gather and document all the changes that have happened to your brand’s assets on your own. So, this will be a collaborative undertaking that involves input from various stakeholders within your organization, including marketing, design, digital, web, communications, leadership teams and even facilities managers. And that’s a good thing, because it gives everyone a chance to get up to speed and be aware of how brand assets should be used from that point on.

SOME FINAL DECISIONS

Designate a gatekeeper.

As you can imagine, lots can change and it can happen quite often. So doing some housecleaning on your brand guide may require you to commit to more checkups, more often. That being said, whose job will it be moving forward? Whoever it may be, designate a keeper of all-things-holy-to-your-brand, tasked with initiating and overseeing updates, and being a source of information to answer any questions that may arise.

Move fully online.

This one seems like an obvious decision, but it’s an important one. Not only does it make updating your brand guide easier to do more often, but because it can be shared digitally, more people that work with your brand on a day-to-day basis will have easy access to it whenever they need it… and therefore reference it more often. 

So, wrapping things up – the more you grow, the busier things get, the easier it is for the day-to-day to get in the way of maintaining your brand. But giving your brand guide a periodic clean-up is necessary to ensure consistency, and it can be made to be flexible and more accommodating to growth as your brand evolves with your business’ continued momentum. And having a guide that’s consistently well-maintained, thorough and sophisticated takes the burden off the business founder and keeps the brand direction clear to everyone involved, including new personnel joining the organization. Keep it up-to-date and it will continue to guide your brand and organization well into the future.

Which leads us to the big, important questions:

What’s the state of your brand guide? Has it been over a year since you’ve updated it? If so, think about what’s changed with your brand within that time or what you anticipate changing in the near future. 

Related to that question, who have you put in charge of making updates to it? Choosing an official brand guide updater might be a good first step. We’ve taken on this role for many of our clients, and it’s helped them immensely by having a current resource for all their assets.

Are you expanding your geographic footprint or releasing new products? Or do you have new hires who are under-aware of the brand and need to be properly onboarded? An updated brand guide alleviates issues associated with growth and can help your entire team exude all aspects of it, no matter what their role.

Lastly, what are you waiting for? Though growth is a great reason to start, there’s never a wrong time to update your brand guide to ensure you’re going to market with purpose and consistency.