Companies big and small still invest heavily ( with budgets in tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars) in writing and updating their 500-page, pdf maze, with a set of brand guidelines. Isn’t it the time to stop the madness and create something meaningful and useful at the same time?
When was the last time you read instructions of any sort (excluding anyone that has recently been to IKEA )? Did you read the user manual when you unboxed your latest-gen phone (the one with a truckload of features)? Did you even look at the handbook for the last car you bought (one of the most expensive purchase for most of us)?
Now think what you did the last time you wanted to understand how to do…anything. Chances are you googled it and that search led you to click on a combination of “how-to” articles and videos. Anything that felt like too long; didn’t read/watch, would likely be dismissed within the first 3 seconds.
If this is how we consume content in our busy, daily lives, why would we behave differently in our even busier work lives?
What are the current issues with brand guidelines?
The way brand guidelines have been designed and written has remained pretty much unchanged for the last twenty years. First, we, the “expert” brand agencies that write, design, and hand-off ‘guidelines’ in the traditional antiquated way, need to shoulder a large portion of the blame.
Clients pay agencies for guidance and expertise. This means brand consultants have a duty to ensure that what they are producing can be usable after the hand-off. Our focus needs to remain on the crucial purpose:
Are they comprehensive?
Do they allow more (or any) flexibility, or does their design and structure limit creativity and innovation?
Are they useful or irrelevant? Does this extend to the guidelines produced for the next generation of agencies and workforce?
Is it important to use them to set standards?
What if they are not enforced?
What about the impacts on creativity?
The role of the guidelines editor in all this has never been more important. The best guidelines teams make no apology for being excellent designers.
Re-imagining the approach to brand guidelines
In the age of digital media explosion, all those pieces of advice that we blindly swallow without having a clue as to what really they are for and why? Why does the existence of brand guidelines become even more important now? Let’s look at some of the reasons.
1. Because things have changed a lot since 1996 and you’re sitting on a potential time bomb. The old brand guidelines were developed in a time when most websites were paper-based. The online revolution has completely shaken up the web in so many ways that the old guidelines are outdated and obsolete.
2. As an online brand, there’s a huge problem with the gap between your brand’s ambitions and its actions.
Three key points to making brand guidelines work for the future
1. Focus
The biggest issue with so many brand guidelines is they become too long and unwieldy. Not only is the language often too jargon, lofty, and over-embellished, it has continued to expand in an uncontrolled way, like weeds. Less can be meaningfully more in this scenario – you want them to be both digestible and compelling.
The brand voice section for a global hospitality brand had grown to over 35 pages before someone decided that it was time for the madness to stop. With a bit of work (and aided by principle #2, they were able to reduce it to a succinct five pages. In another example, a recent engagement to re-imagine the brand guidelines for a global energy company, one of the stated goals was to “eliminate puffery”.
Keeping the weeds pruned requires teams to be consistently auditing and managing their content. Much like a garden that has been unkept for a while, if the weeds have taken over, then a more significant lift and overhaul may be required.
2. Show vs. Say
The beauty of having web-enabled guidelines is that we have so many more ways to express content compared to print or a static pdf. It’s important to strike a balance between finding ways to organize large batches of information in easy-to-find, digestible methods, while not losing too much of the detail that some experts find important.
This is where there is an enormous opportunity to use visuals, videos, gifs, and interactive elements to get the core information across in an engaging, digestible way. For example, using a video explainer can cut pages and pages of content.
Uber’s brand center takes you through the nine core design elements in a sequential manner, where you feel as though you are learning chapter by chapter, using a highly visual and interactive approach. They achieve this by using a blend of in-page sliders, carousels, motion and animation, tabs, and hover text to embed learning and education into the content.
3. Explain the ‘why’
Think back to when you were a teenager, or even younger. Can you remember what it felt like that time when you asked your parents why you couldn’t do something, and the curt answer back was “because I said so”? Didn’t feel great, did it?
As humans, we’re naturally fueled by a sense of justice. We are naturally curious creatures. Not only does this mean we want to know how things work, we especially want to understand the ‘why’ behind everything. This is exacerbated when the ‘why’ is perceived as subjective. Put simply, people will be more likely to follow the brand rules if they understand the reason behind decisions, and that those decisions actually help them.
This applies both at the element level (orange is our primary color because it communicates that we’re bright, optimistic…yadda, yadda) and at the macro-level (helping everyone understand their role in living the brand).
IBM outlines its design philosophy in a breezy, educational, and entertaining video, using hard logic while also delivering on emotion. It’s difficult to imagine even the most engineering-minded individual offering a strong rationale for disagreeing with the importance of being on-brand.
Time to embrace the change
The future of guidelines is a necessary topic for innovation, but it is only one component that needs to be addressed. As an interconnected ecosystem forcing us to revisit our approach to people, tools, and processes.
Brands need to embrace a new era of rapid, more agile communications; guidelines need to be designed for today’s unique consumers. Branding needs to be more relevant and meaningful; communications needs to be more collaborative.
The broader challenge over guidelines and brand management may seem overwhelming. The goal is to tackle one element at a time and celebrate the small wins. Starting with something you can control and own is a great way to start – keeping the following mantra in mind:
“Give me more guidelines; and make them longer and denser”, said no one, ever.