Brand purpose is important because it shows your customers that you're not just your products, services, or advertising campaigns. You have a purpose—and it's bigger than just turning a profit. "A rising generation of consumers is looking for brands to stand for something bigger than the products they sell," says Bemporad. The core purpose of such a guide is to establish rules for how a brand is presented to the world in visuals and messaging. Major corporations protect their brand by setting standards and practices for virtually every possible marketing scenario on the planet Earth. Are such lengths necessary for a pet supply store on Main Street? All marketing messages should encourage brand awareness while embracing your USP. 3 To gain and keep customers, you need to know where they are and what they want. While customers must know your brand in order to buy it, your brand also needs to know its customers to reach them. A brand style guide is an essential tool to ensure your company produces consistent, cohesive work — especially if you work with creative partners like freelancers or a marketing agency. Define the brand. Before the style guide addresses logo, typography, and brand colors, it should establish the brand identity. Phase 1: Discovery. If you're starting a new business and don't yet have a visual identity, discovery is easy. Your company is not known to anyone, and there's nothing to discover. You can proceed to Phase 2 and create your brand identity. But if you have an established business, be sure that you don't skip this step. The short version is that a brand's architecture is a way of organizing the different subsections of a larger brand. Brand architecture shows us how the sub-brands of a larger whole are organized, and how they all relate to each other. It can help a marketer see how to keep parts of a brand separate when needed, and also how to allow them to Brands are psychology and science brought together as a promise mark as opposed to a trademark. Products have life cycles. Brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility and A clear brand strategy helps you stay focused on your mission and vision as an organization. Your brand can help you be strategic and will guide your marketing efforts saving time and money. Your brand helps you connect with your customers emotionally. A good brand connects with people at an emotional level, they feel good when they buy the brand. Brand guidelines help you pull together all the elements that make up who you are, so you can build an identity beyond what you sell. Your customers will be able to visualize what you stand for when they hear your name. Think of Nike, for example. Brand consistency is the practice of always delivering messages aligned with the core brand values in the same tone, presenting the brand logo in a similar way, and repeating the same colors throughout your visual brand elements. Over time, these elements become ingrained in the minds of consumers, and they're more likely to remember your brand.