I recently came across a beautifully written, designed, and implemented brand standards manual for a large corporation — the thing has to be over 200 pages. It really is a wonderful piece, and very well executed.

After perusing the manual, a colleague and I were also able to take a look at samples of some of the company’s printed materials and advertising. We were immediately struck by the incongruity of the messages — it was obvious that the intelligently directed and meticulously prepared guidelines set forth in the manual were not adhered to by the producers of the samples we were viewing. Our first reaction was disappointment — with such a wonderful plan all laid out in front of them, why hadn’t the company followed it?

The answer, as you know, could be any number of things, from uninformed managers delegating the work to a rush to meet deadlines. It happens all the time, but the the sad thing is that it happens at all. If your company has spent the time and resources to define its brand and document the brand guidelines, it makes sense to rigorously enforce their use. And if your company doesn’t have a documented set of brand guidelines, there’s no time like the present to get moving in that direction.

[tags]brand guidelines, brand standards, brand standards manual[/tags]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Brand Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.