Every brand is a story, and how you tell that story matters. Brand guideline management is the process of ensuring your story is told consistently, with clarity and impact, across every marketing and communication channel.
These guidelines are your brand's blueprint, defining how it should look and sound. They ensure that everyone, from your internal team to external partners, understands your brand's identity and messaging.
With well-crafted and centralised guidelines, you maintain control over how your brand is perceived, building trust and recognition at every touchpoint.
The importance of Brand Guidelines in Financial Services
In the financial services sector, your brand is not just a logo or a name, it's your promise to consumers.
A strong brand distinguishes your company from the competition and communicates trust, quality and reliability. When consumers choose a financial product or service, they are not merely purchasing a solution; they are choosing a brand that they believe will safeguard their interests and provide exceptional value.
This is why brand guidelines are essential: they ensure that every element of your brand, from the logo and colours to the tone of voice, is consistently applied across all touchpoints, reinforcing your brand's identity and promise.
Consistency is crucial in building and maintaining trust in financial services brands, where reliability and stability are highly valued.
A well-managed brand creates a professional image that assures clients they are making a secure choice. It also sets the standard for excellence, demonstrating to stakeholders that your commitment to high standards and integrity is unwavering. Effective brand guideline management reduces the time spent on approvals and revisions by providing a common framework that aligns marketing and compliance. This not only enhances internal collaboration but also extends to external partners like agencies and vendors, ensuring that everyone involved understands and supports your brand's vision.
Key Components of Effective Brand Guidelines
To ensure your brand stands out and remains consistent, your brand guidelines must cover every aspect of your brand, not just how it looks. Here are the key components that effective brand guidelines should include:
Brand Essence: Articulate your brand's mission, vision, values and personality. These elements define who you are and what you stand for, forming the foundation of all your brand communications.
Visual Elements: Specify every detail of your brand's appearance, including logos, colour palettes, typography and imagery. This should include digital and print assets.
Tone of Voice: Establish the language, style and messaging that convey your brand's personality. Your voice should be distinct and consistent, reflecting your brand's character in every interaction.
Usage Rules: Provide clear instructions on how to use brand assets correctly. Include dos and don'ts to prevent misuse and maintain the integrity of your brand's image.
Examples: Offer examples of proper and improper usage to clarify your guidelines. These illustrations will help stakeholders understand and apply the guidelines with confidence.
Common challenges in Brand Guideline management
We know brand guideline management is crucial, but it often faces hurdles that can undermine its effectiveness. Here are the common challenges we see and how they can impact your brand:
- Inaccessibility: Without proper Brand Asset Management systems in place, brand guidelines are often difficult to locate and navigate. If your teams can't find or understand them easily, they can't use them effectively.
- Inconsistent Interpretation: Without clear and accessible guidelines, different teams may interpret the rules differently, leading to inconsistency in how your brand is represented.
- Resistance to Change: New guidelines often face pushback. Some teams are reluctant to adopt changes, preferring outdated practices that cause brand inconsistency.
- Ignored Updates: In a busy marketing environment, updates are often overlooked, leaving teams working with outdated information. This lack of current information leads to misaligned communications and brand dilution.
- Lack of Support: When teams feel unsupported, they may resort to interpreting guidelines on their own, which can result in a fragmented brand image.
Transform Your Brand Guidelines Management with bethebrand
Bethebrand is an industry-leading platform designed to streamline and standardise regulated marketing through efficient workflow, asset and approval management.
Our innovative brand guidelines module is crafted to eliminate common challenges, offering seamless and effective solutions for marketing and compliance professionals:
Single source of truth: Streamline your brand management by replacing cumbersome PDFs and disparate files with a dynamic microsite. The bethebrand platform enables your team to effortlessly update brand guidelines, keeping them current and accessible. Centralise your assets in one location, providing direct access to the resources your team needs, precisely when they need them. Simplify the process of downloading and using brand assets, ensuring efficiency and consistency.
Real-time updates: No more distributing new documents with every change. bethebrand updates are made in real-time, so your team always has the latest information. Automatic notifications keep everyone informed through banners and email alerts.
Customisable layouts: Adapt the system to your brand's unique needs with customisable page layouts for text and images. The platform provides the flexibility to design your guidelines your way.
Resize and reuse with ease: Streamline your image management with our on-demand resizing feature. Work from a master image to save time and reduce complexity, eliminating the need for multiple versions.
Interactive learning: Enhance understanding with embedded videos that offer tips and insights, making your brand story clear and engaging for everyone involved.
Streamlined review process: Ensure quality control with a built-in review system. Team members can submit work directly for a 'second pair of eyes' review, guaranteeing accuracy and consistency across all communications.
Wesleyan Case Study
The true measure of success lies in the results our clients achieve with bethebrand. Here's what they have to say:
Founded in 1841, Wesleyan Assurance Society (Wesleyan) is a financial services mutual dedicated to supporting some of society's most trusted professions. They are committed to creating brighter financial futures for doctors, dentists, and teachers, allowing them to focus on the vital work they do. Brand Executive Katie Wright shared, “Originally we had a number of storage solutions across the business for our assets and brand guidelines. When bethebrand built our system, it gave us the opportunity to bring everything together into a system that was simple and intuitive. Like many companies, we utilised external agency support to keep our brand guidelines up to date. Also, like many brands, our guidelines and accompanying asset suite are constantly evolving. The brand guidelines module has completely changed our approach. We can now manage assets ourselves and keep our own guidelines up to date, with no time lag and no additional external expenditure. It has made us more responsive, and colleagues, as well as our external agencies, can enjoy appropriate access to all they need to bring our brand to life.”
Katie added, “A great example of the benefits of the module can be found in how we have been able to create amazing consistency very quickly in our slide decks. Every company has the same issues with slide decks in that they morph through usage. By having our template decks within the guidelines module, and a template within the assets area of the system, it not only aids presentation quality and consistency but also supports compliance oversight and ultimately makes it easier for our teams to use the decks.”
Looking for a better way to control your brand guidelines?
Contact our Sales Director, Ross Jenner, directly at ross@be-thebrand.com to see our system in action.
