Originally published July 2019. Updated October 2026.
A brand guide is useful when people outside marketing use it to make decisions. If it only tells a designer which blue to use, it’s a style sheet, not a brand guide.
Here’s what separates the two.
Do
Start with positioning and your ideal customer. Before fonts and colors, write down who you’re for, what you do better than the alternatives, and why your best customers chose you. Everything else in the guide follows from this page.
Include messaging people can reuse. A one-sentence description of the company. A short paragraph. The three or four points every sales conversation should hit. Your team should be able to copy and paste from it.
Define your voice with examples. “Professional but approachable” means nothing on its own. Show it: a column of “we say” next to a column of “we don’t say.” Real sentences, not adjectives.
Cover every touchpoint, not just the logo. How the phone gets answered. What the proposal looks like. How the email signature reads. What a customer hears when something goes wrong. The brand is all of it.
Keep it short. If it takes an hour to read, nobody will. Put the most-used parts first.
Give it an owner and a review date. One person is responsible for keeping it current. Review it once a year, and any time the business changes direction.
Don’t
Don’t make a PDF nobody opens. Put it where people already work, and link to it from the places they’ll need it.
Don’t make it design-only. Logo spacing rules matter, but they’re the least important part. A guide that’s all visuals leaves sales, service, and leadership with nothing.
Don’t list values nobody can act on. “Integrity” and “excellence” don’t help anyone decide anything. If a value can’t settle a real disagreement, cut it or rewrite it.
Don’t treat it as a marketing document. Sales, operations, HR, and leadership should all use it. If they don’t know it exists, it isn’t working.
Don’t set it and forget it. A brand guide written for the company you were five years ago will steer people wrong today.
A quick test
Ask three people outside marketing to describe your company in one sentence. If you get three different answers, the guide either doesn’t exist, doesn’t say the right things, or nobody can find it.
A brand guide is part of our brand strategy work, and it’s built from the positioning, not the other way around. If your brand and your business have drifted apart, start with a Revenue Diagnostic.