A brand standards manual is an essential part of your brand strategy. This manual or guide provides clear, easy-to-use information to employees and corporate partners on how to use your brand in print, video and even email and voice mail signatures. Before we discuss the nuts and bolts of a brand standards manual, it’s instructive to delve a little deeper into the brand strategy and how that affects the brand standards manual.

When you are developing a brand strategy, there are several elements of your brand you may want to address. For GBC, those elements are: mission, value proposition, essence, character, personality, motivators, and market deliverables.

Without going into too much detail, let me address three of the more important elements: mission, value proposition and character. You may find it helpful, as we did at GBC, to develop a brand strategy platform to prioritize and organize your values. After all, a brand is a means to help consumers choose your company over the competition in an otherwise crowded marketplace. If your brand is displayed inconsistently over several different mediums, consumers may have trouble recognizing who you are.