Brand Guides Must Evolve
Historically, the goals of Brand Guides were to support brand management and provide governance — creating rules and rigidity in order to establish and improve KPIs like: brand equity, brand recall, and brand image. As digital transformation seized the communications landscape and brand co-creation with audiences grew, many in our industry predicted the end of branding as we know it.
And they were right, to some degree. The practices of strict brand policing and singular brand ownership don’t work like they used to. In fact, they can stifle a brand’s ability to work towards the one thing brands need to be in today’s marketplace — responsive.
Creating effective Brand Guides requires shifting the view of brands as collections of symbols and artifacts to brands that can react to the world around them. Logos, colors, and type are incredibly important but a brand, they do not make. Brand is supported by a value system and a story that underpins every expression of it. While this often looks like the inclusion of purpose, mission, vision and values language, they also often become additional, static artifacts. The reality is, values and story need to be codified for decision-making across every aspect of the brand and business. This should include investment decisions, innovation explorations, and HR initiatives, for example.
It’s why we see Brand Guides as an opportunity to build action-oriented brands for and from every angle. They should help those responsible for managing the brand to understand, adopt, and apply it for responsiveness and consistency. This requires the document itself to be more adaptive, generative.
Branding is a verb, therefore Brand Guides must help people understand how to move. The work of branding is a lot like the work of mycelium (if you haven’t watched Fantastic Fungi on Netflix, we highly recommend it). Mycelium is in constant communication with its environment, devising diverse responses to complex challenges — which is exactly the same challenge modern brands have today.
Brand Guides should be a living breathing thing — aware of the present, responsive to change, and collectively keeping long-term health and its environment in mind.
Enter our Brand Field Guide: a tool designed to prioritize the usability of both brand and communications strategy. It is the output of bringing these two strategic work streams together as a unified process - streamlining and connecting insights and opportunities across both strategies. It was designed to enable anyone within an organization to identify the what, classify the why, and react with the right how on behalf of the brand.
How our Brand Field Guide was designed for today’s landscape:
Prioritizes usability: providing unified, complementary brand and communication tools from brand DNA to consumer journeys to channel briefs - connecting and streamlining what is often a clunky process.
Focuses on what your brand needs: addressing an organization or team’s scale, resources, processes, and implementation needs and is right-sized and customized for current and future state.
Not only guides but motivates users: It helps engender the people and culture of an organization to the brand and the strategy.
Empowers everyone to drive the brand: developing leader and teams oriented toward action, who can confidently navigate the brand on multiple levels across multiple channels, both internally and externally.
Eliminates the guesswork: because action takes practice, our Brand Field Guides are ALWAYS accompanied by training no matter the size of the business or project.
We think it’s time to revisit and reorient Brand Guides towards more functional and flexible action – empowering those who handle them to learn and evolve them along the way. Shifting the exercise of branding towards constant progression over perfection.
If you agree and are looking to do just that, reach out! If you don’t agree, we love a good debate. Let’s chat!
To learn more about Hush or the Brand Field Guide, contact us at Kate.Moret@thehushcollaborative for a follow-up.