New Guidance on Brand Guidelines

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Michael Bürgi

Clubhouse, the new audio-only platform, happens to be the hottest social media app right now, as its value just skyrocketed to $1 billion. It’s only a matter of time before marketers try to get in on the action. Opportunity aside, one huge challenge those marketers will face is not only translating their brand identity into audio-only form but also ensuring that translation fits all other expressions of the brand.

This is where a multitude of brands and marketers find themselves these days, whether they want to or not: keeping their brand identity intact and as close to sacrosanct no matter the platform, media, or content through which it’s experienced.

It is a circumstance exacerbated by the pandemic. Zach Baze, chief intelligence officer at CRM (customer relationship management) specialist agency Hawkeye, says some of his clients have experienced between four and six years’ worth of digital growth in the past 10 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact also forced many brands to reimagine themselves as digital entities, not only building branded experiences online as part of their marketing efforts but also pivoting, at least in part, to operate in the online space. For example, supermarket brand Kroger — a quintessential brick-and-mortar brand — broke into the top 10 U.S. e-commerce companies in 2020, as consumers avoided the close-up experience of in-store shopping in favor of delivered goods.

For brands born in a digital world, such as Uber, Twitter, or Airbnb, establishing a detailed set of brand guidelines is a natural course of action, as their identity can easily be manipulated by the millions of people who use and share their logos on websites, apps, and social media. For more traditional brands only now realizing their future is digital, developing a digital-friendly set of brand guidelines may come with a bout of growing pains.

 A Balance Between Control and Freedom

Hayes Roth, principal at HA Roth Consulting, his own brand consulting firm, says before any brand guidelines are whipped up and locked in, a company needs to be prepared to defend and enforce them — something that doesn’t happen often enough. Brand guidelines “are useless unless you have the authority to enforce them,” he adds.

One of the challenges Roth points out is how hard it is to write rules for all the ways in which brand identity gets expressed online, but that’s why they are guidelines and not rules.

Craig Dobie, creative director and founding partner of Applied Design Works, has a similar line of thought to Roth’s. According to Dobie, brand guidelines should have two parts: guiding principles and fundamental elements (logo, colors, type, etc.). “A balance between control and freedom to create can be struck by outlining guiding principles and providing fundamental visual elements,” he says. “That way it’s easier to create a constantly recognizable brand impression and still give a lot of flexibility to the medium/message.”

The external brand guidelines for Twitter outline appropriate use of color with the logo and how to use the logo on imagery. Twitter’s identity was recently refreshed to offer users more ownership of the brand, according to CMO Leslie Berland. Twitter

Beyond the basics, there are considerations specific to 2021 that marketers will need to include. Brand Active, a brand implementation firm, points out three trends for this year, and possibly longer, in a recent blog entry authored by Ed Burn, the firm’s lead in brand management systems:

  •     While budgets will be restricted, expectations will remain unrestricted, keeping the pressure on to “produce measurable results, grow brand equity, and increase market share.”
  •     As digital channels continue to proliferate, “marketing teams risk building unintentional silos that ultimately undercut efficiency and brand consistency.”
  •     Decentralized marketing services in larger organizations need to think about moving “towards shared services departments which automate processes and empower users through technology.”

In other words, in a post-pandemic world, budgets to redesign or update a brand most likely will be limited. Marketers should lean on whatever tech they have available and think about sharing resources across any decentralized marketing units, but avoid becoming cookie-cutter. It’s worth adding that, in the age of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) and podcasts, brands should also consider an audio element to their brand if they don’t already have one. Among the more famous, as examples, are the a capella “bum-ba-bum-bum” of Farmers Insurance and the quick xylophonic riff Mastercard rolled out as its sonic brand in 2019.

 A Brand Evolution

Even digitally native brands are thinking about how to stay fresh, including Twitter, whose CMO Leslie Berland announced changes on her own platform. “We felt the brand expression we launched 5 years ago didn’t fully reflect the complexity, fluidity and power of the conversations today,” read one of a series of tweets introducing the changes on January 27. “So the team embarked on a unique challenge: to build a creative system for an iconic brand that’s complex and imperfect, by design.”

Berland’s tweet thread shed light on the changes: “We threw paint on photos, ripped posters, scratched out words, and faded images. We added textures and pixels, movement and memes.” The team also developed a new font, aptly dubbed Chirp, with a Swiss type-design firm called Grilli Type. Untouched were the instantly recognizable bird logo and its accompanying blue color palette. Finally, Berland explained that Twitter also ceded some control over ownership of the brand, because of the platform’s ethos: “We do this because Twitter and the conversations that happen here are living, breathing, and always evolving. They’re defined by the people talking, shaped by their voices, imprinted by the images and words that fill our timelines every day. The brand isn’t us, it’s all of you.”

Applied Design Works’ Dobie agrees that one can’t control too much in a digital world. “The approach of controlling everything doesn’t work well anymore because so much branded content is being made and at a fast pace,” he explains. “The marketing department can’t police all of that in real time — it isn’t practical from a resources standpoint and gets in the way of the need to be responsive as a brand. A different approach where some level of control is given over to the content makers is needed.”

For the rest of those brands trying to catch up to the digital age and think adding flexibility to their guidelines means they can throw their brand standards out with the bathwater, Greg Stuart, CEO of marketing organization MMA Global, has some tough words: “If your marketing department hasn’t formed some sense of a digital brand identity by now, you’re most likely going to be road kill soon.”

 

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