branding guide compass

A Branding Agency’s Guide on Branding Guidelines

Creating a strong brand can be a challenging task. It’s not something that you can easily achieve alone. By working with a branding agency, a professional can guide you through the process. The branding journey involves introspection, where you determine how you want to portray your vision, mission, products, or services to the public. It also requires market research to establish what would appeal most to your target audience. In addition, it will require extensive design work to bring it all together.

Work with a branding agency to build your brand strategy

Collaborating with a branding agency will enable you to work through these elements until you find the perfect representation of your business to the world. To create or develop a consistent brand, you need to start with the look and feel, the identity, and the message that you want to convey to the public. This usually involves creating a logo, choosing typography, colours, and other design elements. Furthermore, once you have established your brand identity, you need to create certain “rules” and “guidelines” to maintain consistency. This is known as a Style Guide or Brand Guideline. A branding agency can be of great help in its creation.

To ensure that nothing goes against your brand identity when presenting it to the public, graphic designers, marketers, web developers, and packaging departments can align themselves to the rulebook and create a unified vision with one voice.

branding guideline
Image Credits: Behance

Brand guidelines, also known as a brand style guide, showcase the composition, design, and general look and feel of a company’s branding. They demonstrate the “do’s and don’ts” for your logo, blog, website, advertisement, and other marketing collateral.

Some of the most famous and memorable brands follow style guides to ensure consistency across their platforms and send one unified message. Let’s take a case study such as Hello Kitty. It is arguably the world’s most recognisable little licensed character and the most used artwork applied to consumable products.

hello kitty brand guideline
Image Credits: Ginger Sauce

Her style guide is an excellent example of using artwork, typography, elements, and packaging correctly. It is crucial that all elements are used correctly when creating a style guide. This mitigates fraud and poor quality end products. In other words, the creator is telling the licensees and end-users the right way to use the artwork. It outlines the correct representation of their brand across their products and marketing materials on shelves and online.

What are the elements that a branding agency would include in your brand guideline?

There are some key elements that would be in your brand guideline, such as your mission statement, brand persona, brand voice, logo use and variations, typography, colour palette, brand usage, and graphic designs or patches. These elements ensure that your message is clear. The end goal is to ensure consistency in your message, and the brand guideline focuses the direction to achieve this.

Lastly remember, your branding plays a role in buying decisions. Anyone franchising your business model, designing products, or marketing on your behalf needs to adhere to your guidelines. This ensures the delivery of one clear message to the marketplace.

Find a branding agency in Cape Town that understands how to establish a strong, consistent brand

As an established branding agency in Cape Town, we help businesses from start to finish establish strong brands and consistent branding aimed at building a recognisable brand that will be remembered by audiences and invoke emotions leading to buying decisions from their relevant target markets.

Contact a branding agency today that understands branding and start your journey towards building a strong, memorable brand that sells.