How do you keep everybody in your organization using your brand consistently? A Brand Book and a Brand Style Guide are similar documents that can both be key tools for brand management. What are some examples of great Brand Books and Style Guides that you can use for inspiration?
The brand of your organization is ideally built from the ground up from the Purpose or core idea of your organization, with the visual or tangible elements as a prime identifier for it. The brand of your organization can be thought of as making itself tangible through four vectors: Product, (Physical or Digital) Environment, Communication and Behavior.
As you can see, a Brand Book is geared more to meaning and inspiration, while a Style Guide is geared mainly toward maintaining visual Brand Consistency. Both of these documents contain aspects of your Brand Guidelines.
Brand guidelines are considered to be the log book for a brand's identity. They are not just a document that collects information about your brand. Brand guidelines are key to brand alignment. Storing brand guidelines on a PDF document and sharing updated versions over and over again will lead to misalignment because so many versions exist. It becomes a hassle for your colleagues to find out which file is the correct one and who's hard drive it's on.
If all your stakeholders know how to find your brand guidelines, know what they are and how they apply to their specific role, you have achieved brand alignment, a critical measure when it comes to customer attraction and satisfaction.
See more on what interactive, cloud-based Brand Centers have achieved for leading brands.
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Are you looking for inspiration for your brand book? There are plenty of companies that have published their brand books online.
Lytho also has you covered with a free white paper so you can get started with creating your very own brand style guide.
Here is a selection of our favourite brand books and style guides:
Love to Ride is an online bicycle community with a mission to encourage people to bike. Their brand book is colourful and doesn't contain much text.
Red Cross keeps it short and simple. This brand poster tells you everything you need to know about Red Cross brand guidelines in a PDF.
Cisco has decided to create an interactive Band Book / Style Guide to really showcase their brand. There are multiple ways you could do this, if you would like to go that route and there are benefits of having an interactive brand book / style guide.
You could, for instance, use Lytho's Brand Center to create an interactive brand book. This allows all stakeholders (internal and external) to access the brand book everywhere and download logos, font, and other assets directly from within Lytho.
Creating your brand book in Lytho's Brand Center, also means that everyone is always accessing the latest version. You won't need to worry about people using an old version that they have downloaded years ago and isn't up to date anymore.
Coca-Cola’s brand book beautifully displays what associations and emotions their brand should evoke in their consumers. You don't have to say a lot to emit a strong message. Coca Cola's Brand Book / Style guide is the go-to place for many partners.
Urban and stylish. These two words sum up I Love NY's brand book.
This attractive and illustrative brand book has a warm, Italian feel to it. Macaroni Grill uses the word "crave" as an acronym and choses keywords that fit the brand.
A little pinch of retro. Scrimshaw Coffees brand book.
Clean and clear. That's how Google presents their brand. Check out their brand style guide. You can imagine that larget brands like Google need to showcase in a simple way how their brand elements are allowed to be displayed. Google's Brand Book / Style guide is key to brand consistency.
The Bacardi brand book is one of our personal favorites. It breathes the Cuban vibe and has a nostalgic feel to it. See their brand book on Here Design.
Mailchimp has a special link uniquely describing the tone of voice of the company. Mailchimp has recently redesigned their entire brand, going from a email marketing tool to a full stack marketing solution. Their Brand Book / Style guide, helps them to consistently tell their story after their redesign.
Spotify is not only known for their logo. They have been using other brand elements that are recognizable as well. In Spotify's Brand Book / Style guide, you can clearly understand how all elements that make the Spotify brand, may or may not be used.
Although *Santa* is not an actual brand, *Santa*’s brand book is a clever example of keeping things playful and very visual. If it suits your brand, why not? This brand book is an initiative by Quietroom.
Glossier's Brand Book / Style Guide goes into detail on how the logo and wordmark can be used to keep their branding consistant. You can imagine that without guidelines, people could use the assets in many different ways.
Having such a strong brand as Apple and thousands of re-seller, a brand book / style guide is a real must. In our opinion, they should invest in an interactive brand center. When conducting our research for this article, we came across multiple outdated versions of their affiliate brand book. These outdated versions can easily lead to inconsistency in Apple's brand efforts.
