Stand by your brand: Fighting the good fight – internally – to manage your corporate identity

By Terry Graves Fowler
President, Graves Fowler Creative

Our branding assignments have changed over the last few years at Graves Fowler. They’ve grown from design for one-time, start-up organizations to national institutions and corporations with complex needs. But no matter what size the group is, the issue always seems to be the same: creating a corporate identity is a lot easier than maintaining it.

In the past few weeks, we’ve been confronted with several situations where internal decision-making threatens to bring a good brand down. The cause varies. For one client, the immediate demands around launching a new product jumped ahead of less urgent job of hammering out the guidelines for all their divisions and field offices. For a nonprofit with many local chapters, the identity was launched with intentions of providing a style guide later. It never happened. That left their corporate identity vulnerable to anyone who wanted to give it a tweak and make it unique for their local group. And for a large agency, different creative firms were hired to design identities for different slices of the organization. No one was charged with testing the solutions against one standard and ask, “Does this solution build our brand or dilute it?”

In all these situations, our mantra has been, “Style guide. Style guide. Style guide.” If you have one—use it. If you don’t have one, get one. Make it the first thing you give anyone who does communication work for you. Keep it current. And make especially sure that the people inside your organization understand its value.

Here are three things to remember that may help you stand by your brand:

1. A style guide doesn’t have to be all-encompassing and complex. It can start as a simple summary of how to use your logo accompanied with the correct file formats files for print, online and other uses. Most style guides are posted online or on internal servers these days. New levels of information can be added as needed. If a style guide is too complex, people will find excuses not to use it anyway.
2. A style guide doesn’t kill creativity. We creative people can be our own worst enemies. Sometimes it seems like we’re genetically coded to want to push the boundaries and break the rules. At the other extreme, we can become so rigid about obeying the rules that a brand will die from boredom. The operative word in style guide is guide. It is not a set of rules engraved on stone tablets; a good one offers enough flexibility to embrace creativity. You can have both.
3. A style guide needs regular checkups. It’s just like that six-month appointment with the dentist. Give your style guide a thorough cleaning and evaluate where work needs to be done. Technology changes constantly, and new, improved tools are always rising to the top. Do you use EPS or WMF files? GIFs or JPGs? The more you keep the style guide relevant to what people need to do their jobs, the better your identity will be maintained. And that’s what it takes—buy-in from the people who use it day in and day out. You can’t be the brand police. Keep it current and let people know when you’ve added new information to make their lives easier.

For more information about corporate identity and style guides, contact
info@gravesfowler.com.

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