Create a style guide for your brand
Most companies spend time considering their brand. Questions they may ask are:
- What is our brand?
- How does our brand look and feel?
- How is our brand being carried throughout our marketing?
Whatever the answers to your questions, it is important that your branding be consistent. Things like using the same yellow swatch or the same fonts need to be considered when you work on the style guide for your brand. This should be specific as possible – if you always want to allow 1″ of room around your logo which can’t be read if it is smaller than .75″ wide, put those details in your style guide.
Vendors, printers, advertising agencies, and marketing firms like Catch Fire Marketing will want your branding guideline to ensure we don’t “break the rules” of your companies brand. These rules are how the world’s strongest brands were created – Does Coca-Cola ever produce a product that has a lime green label? No! If they did, it would be impossible for us to recognize them. That is not to say you can’t have multiple colored labels for your product – but there needs to be something consistent that ties one product to the next. The consistency of your messaging and the manner you communicate to your audience is always important.
If you are stuck on figuring out what your brand should look like, Catch Fire is here and happy to help. There are lots of so-called marketing companies that will gladly take your dollar to produce you to the cheapest products, but they seldom consider the reason you are producing the product or the branding efforts of your company. If you have started a brand, but haven’t created a style guide, we would love to evaluate what you’ve done, make suggestions if we can, and help you figure out the details.
