Your team is growing – How do you stay on top of your brand?

Your brand is like your company’s identity or personality. It’s how customers and prospective customers relate to your company and what sets you apart in the market. Having a defined and consistent brand that consumers immediately recognize helps with credibility and customer loyalty.

Think about it this way: You’ve invested so much into making sure the world sees your brand in a certain way. Why let that go to waste by letting your brand be misrepresented?

How to ensure brand consistency in a growing organization

Keeping a brand consistent is easier said than done. Theoretically, it sounds easy: Make the rules. Make sure people follow them. But as an organization grows and adds more team members and external partners to the mix, it can get unwieldy to make sure that everyone working with your brand does it correctly.

1. Create a single source of truth for brand guidelines

Make a style guide which contains everything that people working with your company needs to know regarding your brand, including logos, colors, fonts and rules for usage. This needs to be super clear: no rainbows behind the logo, no wonky stretching, no usage with atrociously clashing background colors.

2. Make your style guide accessible to everyone who needs it

Great. Now that you have a style guide, it’s only useful if people can actually find it. Everyone who works with the brand – internal team members, media, agencies and designers – should have access to the style guide and brand assets.

Many companies create their style guides as PDF documents, so the marketing team still has to send the actual brand assets, such as logos, separately as email attachments. If you’ve ever done the email tango of finding and sending the right logo file – PNG or EPS, horizontal or vertical, black and white or color – you know it can be a headache and a half or even bottleneck your process.

Canto style guides are central hubs for all brand assets that can be shared with a link, and can be either internal or external-facing. Teams can house all brand guidelines and assets – including all variations of their logo – in one location that internal team members can access within their Canto instance, or external partners can bookmark as a link. For growing teams, this saves time and makes work everyone’s day flow more smoothly.

3. Enforce it!

Be prepared to repeat yourself and correct mistakes so that people take the brand guidelines to heart. Be an advocate for your brand and encourage your team members to do the same.

This is easier to do when the style guide is readily available in a central location, and team members don’t have to dig through their email attachments to find it. When everyone knows where the style guide and up-to-date brand assets are, there’s no excuse to be inconsistent!

Learn more about Canto style guides here!