Brand Standards and the Standards of Business

Why is it that you still don't have standards for using your company's brand assets?

There are plenty of large and small companies that go through the painstaking process of developing a new logo, or going through a rebrand. So why is the ball always "dropped on the 99 yard line" as my old Creative Director used to say? The visual creative elements are only a part of the greater vision and strategy for the brand. In fact, they are more likely the end result of what the vision should be guiding for the company. So essentially what is happening is that people think that the logo is the brand, that they just need a good, creative logo and that will help grow/accelerate their business. If that were the case, we would have Creative Directors running every company, and even CD's know that would be a bad idea!

Brand standards are the essential piece to the puzzle that helps everyone you work with maintain consistency when representing your company in all aspects of creative, operations, distribution, sales, etc. If you can walk into a conference room filled with your target market buyers and ask about your company, they should all be able to give you the same or similar summaries. Until you can scale that to a full-size conference, and then to the entire target market population, you are not done branding! In order to grow your business you always need your customers to understand what it is that you do as soon as they see, hear or experience a part of your brand.

So what's your excuse for not focusing on brand standards?