Do-It-Yourself Branding: What Is It and What Do You Need to Do?

1. Introduction: Hi, this is Michelle West with Aprosae for your class: Do it yourself branding: what is it and what do you need to do? We're going to cover what branding is and what you need to do to brand your business, non-profit, side hustle, whatever you're marketing or promoting to others to be involved with. You'll not only learn how to assess what you're already doing to see if it's effective branding or not but you'll also be given tools to develop basic brand standards that will ensure you present yourself with a clear and consistent brand every time. And the great thing is you don't need any previous experience with branding, but if you do, this class will only increase your skills. I've been the head of marketing for over two decades for everything from a non-profit organization to a for profit company to a university. In every organization, I've been tasked with branding or rebranding the organizations across all marketing efforts and communications. I've found that by focusing on the following things, you too can create a powerful brand that motivates others to get involved with what you're doing. You'll learn about what branding is and why you need it. The three types of branding, defining your basic brand standards, which will also be our class project, what full brand standards are, how messaging statements define and communicate your brand and managing your brand so you always have a consistent message. What I'm really excited about, is that you'll learn how all this applies to your marketing venture. Whether you're a hobbyist, sole proprietor, small business, or non-profit, you'll learn what you're currently doing with branding, what you need to start doing, and how to do that. And through your class project, you'll walk away with your very own basic brand standards guide. This will set you up for branding consistently and effectively. Here's one last and very important note for the rest of the class. From here on out, instead of listing all the types of people and entities that this class applies to, like hobbyists, creatives, sole proprietors, small businesses, and non-profits, I'll just say you're marketing venture. So please remember that what we're about to cover applies to everything from a side hustle to a corporation. Now, we're ready for the first topic: What in the world is branding anyway? 2. What Is Branding?: Branding is the use of a distinctive design and culture of a name, symbol, or any other feature that identifies a seller's products and or services. In simple terms, your brand is the look you portray and the feel people have as they experience your brand. If we're not intentional and coordinated about our branding, people can get mixed messages about what we represent. Your look is generally all the visual things you show your audiences. These you have more control over than the feel people have when they experience your brand because the feel is generated by people's impressions negative and positive that they get from all the interactions they hear about and personally have with your brand. If we're not intentional about branding, then people can get mixed communications and mixed opinions about what we're all about. Branding is part of the larger picture of marketing communications. It's important to understand the broader world that branding is a part of. Marketing communications has five main sections, one of which is branding. Here's a chart that shows that, which you can download a PDF of it in the project section of this class. The exclamation mark that's in the center of this chart contains the five sections of marketing. And fanning out to the left and right are the sub areas for each section. But notice the yellow point on the exclamation mark. That's the conductor. The strategic plan and marketing strategy of the organization. Branding is the section that's right above strategy, because it too is foundational to doing the other sections of marketing, public relations, digital, and internal agency. And branding is comprised of three main sub-areas. Brand standards, messaging, and brand management. But before we dive into these three main sub-areas, let's take a deeper look at the three types of branding so you can determine which one best suits your marketing venture's needs. 3. What Are The 3 Types of Branding?: It's important to understand the three types of branding, so you can intentionally choose the one that best fits your marketing venture. Though you might only have one brand right now as you expand and develop more programs and or business lines, you'll be forced to brand those. Having the understanding of the different types of branding now will set you up for making the right decisions then. The three types of branding we'll look at are branded house, house of brands, and hybrid house. Branded house is when all business lines or programs are branded under the parent brand. Let's look at a beautiful example of this taken from the fedex.com website. Every single business line they have is branded based under the parent brand. There's no question what company owns each line because the same logo, the same colors, and the same fonts are used consistently when they market any of their lines, they are essentially building brand awareness for the parent brand of FedEx every time. Going to the house of brands, you have your parent brand, but under that brand you have totally separate brands. Let's look at the Mars company. Here's a screenshot from their website, mars.com. Most people know some of the brands that Mars owns, but they have no idea that Mars is the parent company. Like M&M candies. Mars owns them. But Mars also owns Banfield Pet Hospital and some pet food lines. Mars also owns ethnic food lines, such as tasty bite Indian food. These are all totally separate brands, some vastly unrelated to each other, that most don't even know Mars owns. And that's due to branding each business linesseparately. The last branding type is the hybrid house. Coca-cola is a great example. And here's a screenshot from their website, Coca-Cola.com. Coca-cola is the parent brand. And they have a Coca-Cola drink that's identical to their brand. But they start to differentiate from that parent brand with Diet Coke, which is represented by the square in our flowchart because it's blue like the parent brand, but it's different, represented by the square. There are also brands that are totally different, like the green triangle of simply orange or the yellow diamond of Honest Tea. Brand usually use the house of brands or the hybrid house types of branding because of things like mergers and acquisitions. This is because the parent company acquires a brand that has a strong identity and it would hurt sales if they were to lose that customer loyalty and brand identity. It can also be because companies want to market a product or service differently than the parent brand for a variety of reasons. For example, if you have two or more products or services that are in different industries, have different goals and have different audiences you're marketing to, it could make sense to brand each one separately because when you market the one, you won't be hitting the audiences for the other. Like in the Mars example of banfield Pet Hospital and tasty bite Indian food. Having banfield Pet Hospital and banfield Indian food, Or having tasty bite Pet Hospital with tasty bite Indian food would not make for good branding. Which branding type are you already using, or do you want to use? I'd suggest that unless you have a very compelling reason to market your products and or services under separate brands that you use the branded house model. Building brand awareness costs a ton of money, time, and resources. So unless you have a huge, and I mean, huge marketing budget, it's very challenging to raise awareness of one brand, not to mention more than one. Those are the types of branding. Branded house, house of brands, and hybrid house. Whether you're a hobbyist, sole proprietor, small business or non-profit we're now going to learn about how your class project will help you define your brand for whatever your marketing venture is. 4. Class Project: Creating Brand Standards: Our class project is going to provide you with what you need to know to define the basics of what your brand is, your logo, how it's to be used, and design elements that you want, as well as colors and the fonts that will represent your brand. If these aren't defined before you start branding and marketing your venture, It's like wanting to demolition something and using any tool you grab first, you might get the job done, but it won't be done as efficiently and correctly as you need it to be. And it could just cause a big mess too. Starting with the next lesson, we're going to dive into the file for your class project that's under the projects and resources tab of this class. Please go there and open the file titled Word doc of brand standards guide. The first column lists which brand standard we're addressing. And the second column is where you'll define that brand standard to your specifications. To help get you there, we'll go over what each brand standard is and how to decide what you want it to look and feel like. This way you'll be applying what you learn along the way so that by lesson eight, you'll know what you need to know to have basic brand standards that will direct your communications in a consistent and professional way. So let's begin with an overview of what basic brand standards are. And customize this black and white guide to represent your more colorful brand. 5. Creating Brand Standards: Overview: Brand standards define the things you need to present a consistent image about who you are. Like all sub-areas of branding, brand standards are a foundational and critical need for any marketing of a product or service. Brand standards can be basic or full. Let's start with basic brand standards. They are what your logo is, how it's to be properly used. Design elements, a color palette that defines what colors can be used in your brand's marketing efforts. and which fonts represent your brand, also known as typography. Basic brand standards are usually things that you put together for staff so they know how to create materials and communications that all look like they've come from your organization and communicate the same message. Three of the big reasons I've seen brand standards be important to have defined for any size of a marketing venture are first, you might be thinking, I'm the owner, marketer and janitor for my marketing venture. This doesn't apply to me. But if you now or will ever work with a vendor like a printer or marketing agency they will also need to know these things. And all you'll have to do is give them your brand standards. Second, even or especially if you have one person who has decided these things and knows all of this in their head if that person leaves your marketing venture so does that knowledge. Lastly, when, say there are two people in a marketing venture and they disagree on how a marketing communications should look or be written it's a lot easier to settle the disagreement by having the published brand standards settle the score instead of varying opinions being stated back-and-forth. Now, you're going to define your basic brand standards in your class project so please get that file ready. On the header of your brand standards guide, please type in your marketing venture's name or logo where indicated. And here's a side note for your marketing venture's name. Please make sure you're consistent with what name you refer to your venture as. Take Coca Cola or Federal Express for instance. They're big enough to shorten their name to Coke and FedEx. Sometimes these shortened versions are due to customers usage. Other times the company markets a shortened version. Either way, they have the marketing budget to make this work. But for those who aren't part of the Fortune 500, the marketing ventures named shouldn't be too long or customers will likely shorten it. One of my clients had this problem when I started working with them. They started their organization with a very long business name. Then they started marketing a shortened version and made it their DBA doing business as name. But then their stakeholders started using an acronym to reference them because the DBA was still pretty long. On their website and social media platforms they had their first long official name and their DBA name and their acronym sprinkled all over. Even when I searched on Google for the three names, results only came up for two of the three. You can probably see the confusion that needed to be fixed. We had to choose one name and we chose the acronym that was the people's choice. Then we had to scour every marketing communication digitally and in print to standardize their name everywhere. And we had to retrain staff to not only use the acronym, then we had to have an external marketing campaign to make sure everyone in the community knew of this change. I want to save you this trouble. Please make sure you use the same name all the time and make sure it's not so long that people are going to create a shortened version that you'll have to chase after as long as your marketing venture exists. With that being said, To finish customizing the header for your marketing venture, you can right-click on the large black rectangle of the header and choose the main color that represents your brand by clicking on the bucket and choosing the color. If you don't have your main color pinned down yet, we'll get there. So you can come back to doing this after you select that color for your brand. Now we're ready to get to your logo and design elements. 6. Creating Brand Standards: Logo and Design Elements: The next thing to enter on your guide is your logo. If you already have your logo established, click in the cell to the right of the word logo and follow the instructions in that cell. If you don't have a logo or are considering rebranding your logo, please be careful when hiring someone to create a logo for you. If the only thing they do in their business is create logos, and they don't work with putting that logo into marketing communications of all kinds you could wind up with a logo that doesn't work well across print, TV, radio, web, and so on. For example, with one client I had, I had to recreate their brand for this reason. They purchased a very cool logo from an online service that specializes exclusively in creating logos. But when we went to put their logo on forms they use with their clients all the intricacies and colors of this very cool logo when looking at it blown up on their computer screen, suddenly became unnoticeable when it was significantly reduced in size for a form that was printed in black and white. You couldn't make out their venture's name. The color gradients, which are gradual blending of various colors that were in the logo, looked like a blob when we had to reduce it in black and white for the form. So logos should be created so that they're recognizable across all mediums. As a result, logos are generally very simple and your creativity can come out with the design elements and placement of other visuals like photographs. All that to say, please find someone who understands all this if you're creating a logo anew or rebranding what you already have. If you find your existing logo has these problems you can re-brand while keeping your brand looking very similar to what it's always been. A good graphic designer well-versed in a variety of marketing communications or a marketing agency is worth the one time investment to create a logo that will work for you not against you. Moving on is detailing things about your logo and its usage. This is important because some people could stretch your logo, put it on a psychedelic yellow background that clashes with your branded colors, and so much more misuse. I've added some general instructions on your brand standards guide that pertain to most marketing ventures. So you can read through those two sections of how to use different file types you might have your logo in and how to place the logo on marketing materials. You should modify those instructions to fit your marketing venture and add others you want to note. The grayed out text in these two sections are likely going to be what you want to review at a bare minimum. There's a spot for any design elements you use for your brand. Having some design elements are very useful, so you can use them in various marketing materials to have consistency and variety. For example, let's take this sample logo. Instead of using an o in there Branded name of cloth. They could use a design element for the letter O. Or they could use a design element by the side of their logo's name, otherwise known as a logotype. Here are examples of how that marketing venture could use this design element in different communications. You can even take elements out of the design element to add variety to a piece like this piece here that has half of the design element that's had its color reduced from 100% to 25%. By consistently using these design elements, but adding some variety to them like colors and size, people start getting that faint recognition of your brand no matter what marketing material they look at. Speaking of colors, Let's move on now to defining your brand's color palette. 7. Creating Brand Standards: Color Palette: Your color palette is the colors that are allowed to be used in your marketing materials and communications. But it's important to understand first that it's very unwise to just choose colors you might like and hope those colors look good together. You might like the combination, but if your goal is to create color combinations that are pleasing to everyone who you want to get involved with what your marketing then relying on the color wheel is the safest bet. The color wheel is guided by color theory, which is the science and art of how to use color. Let's dig deeper into what this all means. Since color theory is based on research and is accepted industry-wide as a guide for how to use colors together. It's important to stick to this if you're not a seasoned graphic designer. Now, in a few instances, I have seen some artists and designers veer from what color theory dictates, and they have pulled it off. But they're usually very seasoned and unusually gifted at applying color combinations. If this isn't you, then the color wheel can be your trusted guide on how to choose colors for your brand that will be harmonious and generally accepted by the people you're trying to reach. A color wheel is a circle of colors that show their relationships to one another. You can buy one of these at an arts and crafts store. And here is my favorite one. It has a spinning wheel with windows on top of the color wheel itself, and it shows the colors that best match together. Or you can search for images for color wheels online. And here's another option. You can find this at an arts and crafts store as well. But what's great about it is that it folds out and it has all kinds of color combinations already spelled out for you. Let's go into how to use the color wheel to find what colors you can choose for your brand. On your brand standards guide file, you'll see under the color palette section that there are brand colors and accent colors. Your brand colors are usually represented in your logo. If your logo has just one color, then you can add that color as one of your brand colors. I'd suggest having at least one more brand color. And the safest bet for identifying your second color is to look at the color wheel and choose its complimentary color. For example, blue's complimentary color is orange, red is green, purple is yellow, and so on. And make sure to notice that if you have a deep blue, the complimentary orange would generally be a deep orange. But if you want three brand colors then the color wheel could dictate this for you as well. The color wheel has three color combinations that are called either analogous, which is three colors in a row on the color wheel. Split complimentary, which is when one of the complimentary colors is split by each color on either side of it. Or a triad color scheme, where the three colors are equally spaced away from each other on the color wheel. And if you want four brand colors, you can also use the color wheel and look at the tetrad combinations dictated there. I wouldn't suggest having more than four brand colors, but you can have accent colors, which we'll cover next. You'll notice on your brand standards guide, there's a cell for you to define an accent color or more if you want, by adding another row and copying the template provided. Accent colors aren't used as the dominant color in marketing materials, but are subtly used here and there to add visual variety and appeal. If you have only two colors as your brand colors, then you could look at the tetrad combination of colors on the color wheel and choose the other two as your accent colors. If you have three or four brand colors, then you could do an online search for color palette generator and put in the brand color or colors you've chosen, and then choose from the palettes they generate. As you can tell, a lot goes into choosing colors. So just like with logo creation, the one time investment of having a graphic designer who regularly applies their designs to marketing materials, or a marketing agency, can help you determine which colors are best for your brand. Whoever you hire should ask you questions like, who are you trying to reach, and then help guide you to colors that will resonate with them. For example, if you have a side hustle that helps people invest money in the stock market and your logo is royal blue you generally wouldn't choose a fluorescent orange since people generally want more calm colors that promote trustworthiness when they're handing over their hard-earned money to someone to manage. But if you want to do it yourself, the color wheel and online color palette generators can guide you to make wise choices. When you've chosen your brand and or accent colors now you're ready to add them to your brand standards guide. Let's walk through an example of doing this. Let's say you want blue as your brand color, but you don't have a particular one. So you right-click on the black box in the first brand color cell. You click on the bucket that says Fill under it. Then click on more fill colors. You click on the blue you want to use, and click on the Custom Tab. You can slide the bar up and down to make the blue lighter or darker. And you also now are given the RGB amounts, which is short for red, green, blue. And it tells you the amount of each color that's needed to make that blue. You then plug those numbers into your guide. You're also given the hex code, which is what you'll use many times on your website and online platforms. You can, if you want to convert this color to CMYK, which stands for cyan or blue, magenta, yellow and black and or pantone. But only certain print jobs on certain presses will use CMYK and or Pantone so you're probably fine with having a printer or designer give you these conversions if you ever need them. Now click Ok. You'll have your brand colors color swatch. You can name that color if you want, like electric blue or your marketing venture's name then blue. You can do the rest with any other brand and or accent colors. If you don't have enough cells or rows, then just right-click in the cell you want to duplicate. Click on Insert above or below, and then copy and paste the content that's in the cell you want to duplicate. To delete cells or rows that you don't want right-click on the cell, click Delete, then delete rows, and you'll have it all cleaned up. As a side note, if this is a lot of information and if working in Word is new, don't worry. Unless you've had previous experience with Word and or marketing and or graphic design, this brief overview could be like drinking from a firehose and require further study on the points that you need more training on. Next up is typography, which is what fonts you're going to use. 8. Creating Brand Standards: Typography: When choosing the fonts you'll be using for your brand the top two things you'll want to keep in mind are that the fonts are legible and appealing. Regarding legibility, you'll want a font where the individual characters or letters are easily distinguishable. Regarding appealing, this is subjective and what your audience prefers should determine what's appealing, not what you think is appealing to them. We'll go over how to figure out what your customers like later in this lesson. On your brand standards guide, there are spots for you to choose your brand font for titles, and then for body copy, which is things like paragraphs and photograph captions. These are the fonts you'll use consistently in all your marketing materials so people recognize your brand more readily. The secondary fonts for titles and body copy are optional. Some like to have variety. And so you can choose a secondary font that can be used when you want some diversity in your design. Tertiary or a third choice of fonts can also be chosen if you have something like a large newsletter that has variety in its design. In my professional opinion, secondary and tertiary fonts should be used judiciously though, as they can dilute people's ability to recognize your brand in the sea of other marketing materials competing for their interests. While there are numerous types of fonts, such as serif, sans, serif, script, and decorative, which are also called display fonts. Script and decorative aren't typically, good for using as a core font for your brand. That's because they don't pass the legibility and universally appealing tests like san-serif and serif do. Then when deciding between the other two font types that are left, serif and sans serif, sans serif is the most favorable nowadays, Let's look at each type. Serif fonts have decorative strokes off of the letter. One of the most popular that you might have heard of is Times New Roman. While this particular font was used extensively one to two decades ago, it's waned in its use and is still a very good and acceptable choice for a brand font if you prefer it. Sans serif fonts don't have decorative strokes and are generally considered more modern and legible. These are the types of fonts I'd personally suggest you use for your brand body copy font with a point size of 12, minimum. While going larger than 12 can look unappealing it's important to note that if you're working with those who have low vision or if you want to be compliant with low vision standards, 14 point is the recommended font size for print. Most people with low vision use screen readers or can increase the text when accessing digital materials. Also, sans serif fonts are the recommended type of font for low vision readers, as it's the most legible for them. Script fonts look like cursive or handwritten text. These can be used when the size of the font is fixed in one piece of marketing material and only for titles and headings. For example, if you were to use a script font for your business card, it's not going to pass the legibility tests for everyone. But if you use it on a flyer for a heading, and that flyer is only going to be distributed online and in print where people will see the font as large as you have intended, then it's okay. For this reason, I'd suggest only using script fonts when you can ensure that the font will stay large enough for legibility and when it fits the design. For example, if you're a wedding planner and your customers are almost all women who prefer intricate and soft designs then an ornate script might fit. But you wouldn't use a script font if you were selling hand tools for the man cave, you might use a font that's a bit industrial looking, which would be an example of our next type of font, decorative, also known as display fonts. Decorative fonts are a type of font that has a ton of variety. It can be three-dimensional, artistic, ornamental, and so, so many other things. As its name denotes, they are to be used as decorative for titles and headings only not for body copy or text. And as with script fonts, they should only be used when the font size is fixed as a larger point size, which might be 16 points and above, depending on the font, so that it remains legible. If you're using script or decorative fonts, I'd suggest being very selective in how and where you use them. If you have a large newsletter that has 16 or more pages, then you could use a different decorative or script font for each spread, which is the two pages facing each other when you lay the newsletter flat. But if you have a one-page flyer, a tri-fold brochure, or even a website it's best to choose only one font for the titles, and in my opinion, a serif or sans-serif font. Unless you use a well-trained and experienced graphic designer, using too many fonts in one publication can look amateurish and unappealing. If you're doing the design for your materials, I'd stick to your brand fonts to ensure that it looks professional and appealing to all. Unless you have a graphic designer who can give you feedback on your use of multiple fonts in a publication, for instance. As you play with different font combinations and get professional feedback on what you've chosen you'll be training your eye to design in a more and more aesthetically pleasing way for all. And remember when any of us, who aren't trained and experienced as graphic designers, create materials we're usually going to be proud of what we create and when we present our creation to our friends and family a lot of them may not have the eye or the forthrightness to tell us it's not designed to the professional standard we're aiming for our brand to be. One good way to determine what your audience or customers like is to narrow down which fonts you're choosing between and give them samples of those fonts in marketing materials for their feedback. Submitting these to them online through a Google form for instance, will ensure you get the most honest opinions. When you get, ideally around a dozen reviews, you can see if there's a clear winner. If people like all of them, then you can choose your favorite. If this is all too complicated for you then I'd suggest just choosing a sans serif font, like Arial Black or Calibri bold, 16 point for titles. And Arial or Calibri, 12 point for body copy and calling it good. These are pretty safe bets and available in most word processing programs and website builders. Now, let's fill out the typography section of your brand standards guide. If you have fonts already chosen for your brand that are legible and appealing to your customer base then put those down. If you don't, you might want to look at fonts in Microsoft Word by going to home. Then click on the dropdown arrow where the fonts are chosen. And scroll down to see which font or fonts you want to consider. It's okay if you want to spend time selecting and getting feedback, you can come back later to fill this section out. Congratulations, now you have what you need to implement your basic brand standards. If you want to dig deeper into the topic of brand standards by learning what full brand standards entail, please continue to the next lesson. Otherwise, the lesson after that is all about messaging, which is foundational to any marketing venture. 9. What Are Full Brand Standards?: While we're not going to develop full brand standards in this class, I want you to be aware of what they entail in case the growth of your marketing venture needs these things after you start using basic brand standards. If you have more than one person creating marketing materials for you, even if that's one staff person and a marketing agency. Full brand standards could benefit your marketing venture because they will guide those people to create materials that are consistent with each others. Like with basic brand standards once you make the onetime investment of expanding to full brand standards, they will stay with you for the life of your marketing venture and will just need to be revised if certain items or sections require updating for some reason. Full brand standards contain everything that basic brand standards do but usually add messaging statements and editorial style guide. Let's look at both of these in greater detail. Messaging statements communicate to your customers about your brand in succinct statements that you can use in your marketing efforts. Our next lesson covers these in more detail. An editorial style guide details a lot and we'll go into seven of the common sections in this guide. The first one is voice and tone. Voice and tone are how you want to communicate externally to your customers and other interested parties. Questions to ask yourself to get to what you want your voice to be would be ones like, what person or perspective are you going to use in writing and speaking? First-person, which is I/we, second, which is you, or third, which is he, she, it, they. Questions to ask yourself to get to what you want your tone to be would be, are you going to speak directly with humor in your writing or aim for a high level of discretion and professionalism, or something else. The next question to ask yourself is about the second section of your editorial style guide, which is which style guide will you be using? Style guides are external resources that you can access in print or digitally to ensure that you're writing and formatting are in line with commonly accepted norms for English and communications for your branding and marketing efforts. The one guide that all marketing folks agree upon, especially the media, is the AP or Associated Press Stylebook. Yet this guide doesn't go into the nitty-gritty of all needs like style guides do. So, some add another style guide to fill in those gaps. Some of the more popular style guides are ones you might recognize from high school or college. Such as the APA, American Psychological Association manual, Chicago Manual of Style, or MLA, Modern Language Association Handbook. In business some prefer the Gregg Reference Manual because many find it to be one of the easiest for staff to use since it's created more for business than the others. If you choose to not follow the style guide or guides in certain areas, you would detail what you do instead in this section of your editorial style guide. For example, some guides might not specifically spell out how you want to write certain things like when to underline to not be confused with hyperlinks. Another example is do you always add a comma before the word And in a list of three or more items? Or how do you address gender neutral language? Any judgment calls on topics like these and others that you would make, you would add those to your full brand standards. The third section of your editorial style guide addresses acronyms and jargon. If you use any acronyms in your venture or words that only people in your venture or industry would usually understand these would be spelled out and described in this section. The fourth section of your editorial style guide details any references to your brand's name or names. For example, Federal Express may say that the primary or first reference to their business should be Federal Express. Yet they may allow for a secondary reference of FedEx. It could also detail whether they call their other lines of business programs, departments, divisions, or something else. Visual design standards are the next section of your editorial style guide. These visual design standards could include guidelines on how you format or layout publications, what graphic design styles you follow, how you treat or use digital assets like photographs and videos, and what consistent design templates you use for social media posts and email campaigns and more. These guidelines are important to use because when your brochure is in a rack with many others, you only get a split-second to touch that customer with your brand. If you're consistent with your branding and designing of materials, then they'll identify who you are in that split second glance. The sixth section of your editorial style guide addresses how you handle intellectual property or IP law. How you acquire and use writing, photographs, illustrations, videos, and other things so that you're in compliance with IP law and respecting the ownership of the creator of those assets. This likely will also include any releases or waivers that are needed. Crisis communications guidelines are the last section of your editorial style guide. If you're marketing venture is large enough and visible enough and could have a degree of bad press or liability associated with i,. like a medical care business or caring for vulnerable populations, then you'd note who gets contacted when, who handles what response, guidelines for interacting with the media and more. When you have more than one person creating marketing materials, full brand standards bring those people together by enabling them to be on the same page so everything is communicated consistently. It also sets an external standard that ends subjective calls on how things should be created while allowing for a certain level of creativity. Next, let's take a look at what messaging is and how it impacts branding. 10. What Is Messaging?: Messaging is what you communicate to your customers about your brand. Like branding, the way we message or communicate to our customers is not just what we say and how we say it, but it's also the experience and feelings that customer has as a result of our communication. Messaging should focus on the benefits to the customer. By creating messaging statements, you'll know how to communicate these benefits in a succinct and persuasive way. And you might already have some of these messaging statements. For example, if you're marketing venture has a strategic plan, you'll likely have your mission and vision statements already done. So what are these messaging statements? Let's look at this visual to understand how messaging statements define and communicate your brand. This visual depicts the process of building a house, which is similar to how you can build your brand. You start with a blueprint and end up with an open house or open business. You start with your mission statement. A mission statement is about today, what an organization's overall goal is and how it achieves that. In other words, this is the blueprint for your brand. It tells what you're doing to reach your goals. An example of this is Google's mission statement for 2022 our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Next is core values. These are the principles that guide an organizations actions and are embraced by employees to create a common culture. Another way to say this is core values lay the foundation for all efforts you take in your marketing venture. Core values can be either one word or two to three-word phrases like innovation, trust, passion, quality, and teamwork. Or they can be sentences. Here are some examples from Google's core values in 2020. Focus on the user and all else will follow. It's best to do one thing really, really well. The need for information crosses all borders. You can be serious without a suit. Great, just isn't good enough. Brand pillars can take some research to come up with because you have to learn what differentiates your marketing venture from your competitors and what benefits your customer feels and thinks that you provide them. In other words, brand pillars frame and finish the brand you're creating. They state what makes your customers choose you instead of your competitors, and highlight what you have to offer your customers. These are more for internal use, so you and or your staff can use this information to drive your decisions and craft your communications. A vision statement is about the future, the dream of what an organization wants to become. Another way of saying this is it's the final product you're working towards. An example of this from Coca-Cola in 2022 is our vision is to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love to refresh them in body and spirit. And done in ways that create a more sustainable business and better shared future that makes a difference in people's lives, communities, and our planet. A big, hairy, audacious goal, or bhag, is a clear, ambitious, compelling, and measurable target that can be used to determine when your marketing venture has fulfilled its vision statement or met its ultimate goal for existing. A good bhag example is from Amazon. When they once said, every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds. That's clear, ambitious, compelling. And one of the most things people miss: Measurable. A value proposition answers why a customer should engage with your brand over a competitor and what benefits they get from your brand. It's a derivative of the brand pillars you use internally in the form of a statement that can be used externally for marketing purposes. Another way to say this is that your value proposition communicates to your customers why they should buy and what they're going to get from your brand. Examples of value propositions that have been used in the past are uber says: get there, your day belongs to you. Lyft says: rides in minutes. Target, expect more, pay less. Walmart, save money, live better. Dollar Shave Club, a great shave for a few bucks a month. And those are the messaging statements I've found are important to note for branding. Even if you're marketing venture is just you these things can be very useful to define whether you communicate in person, in writing, or some other way. You can accurately and succinctly communicate why people should engage with your brand. You will not only be articulate, but you'll convey trustworthiness and the confidence that these statements provide. Now we're ready to talk about how to take what you've learned and put it into practice by managing your brand. 11. How Do I Manage My Brand?: The last sub area of branding is brand management. While brand management can be more complex than this if you have at least one person who ensures that your brand standards and messaging are represented on all marketing efforts that are distributed to anyone outside your marketing venture, then you already have a brand manager. But it, anyone can create marketing materials or communications and choose your own colors, for instance, and write whatever and however they want, then it'll make your brand even stronger to learn about brand management. So, what exactly is a brand manager? A brand manager reviews anything that's distributed to people outside your marketing venture to ensure that branding and other things aren't missing. If you have more than one person in your marketing venture, it's always helpful to share your brand standards with that person and have them serve as your second set of eyes. If you do all the branding and marketing for your venture, than it's helpful to have someone else look at your marketing materials and ask them to tell you what they get out of it. If they don't tell you what you're expecting to hear, then that gives you help on what to revise to make it more effective. A brand manager doesn't change content, but makes sure that the brand standards are consistent, that there aren't any spelling errors. And that it makes sense to an external audience. It's important to set up expectations early so that your brand manager isn't disappointed when their suggestions aren't implemented and the people creating the material don't feel threatened by someone else's critique. Another aspect of brand management is making sure that your existing materials all look like they've come from the same place. This is called a brand discovery. If you're new to creating marketing materials, then you can start by making sure that everything that's created is in compliance with your brand standards. Then in about a year or two, depending on how much you create, you'll want to do this brand discovery. Yet if you've been creating materials and are just now getting your brand defined than this brand discovery should be done as soon as you have your brand standards in place. This is how a brand discovery works. Lay all your digital and print materials on a table or a floor if you don't have a table large enough. What kinds of things should you include in this? Anything that does or should have your logo on it. Letterhead, social media accounts, website, emails, brochures, flyers, PowerPoint presentations, advertisements, press releases, and anything else that promotes your marketing venture to people outside your organization. While you could also put it all in a PowerPoint, I advise printing everything and laying it all out together so you can see it in one eyeshot versus flipping through a PowerPoint, trying to remember what you saw last. By seeing it in one eye shot, you'll be able to get to the reason you're doing this brand discovery in the first place - to see what's off-brand. And when you've laid everything out, those things that are off-brand will usually stand out like a sore thumb. You'll also notice which pieces don't jive with the design or style that you prefer. For example, if you've chosen to represent a soft and comforting feel for your brand, and you see a flyer that has a shockingly yellow background with red text, that piece will be screaming to you to pick it up and put it in the pile that needs rebranding. Look through the pile that needs adjusting to your brand standards and prioritize which ones need to be done first to last and then you can plan to start adjusting them one by one until they're all done. After you've picked out all the pieces that need adjusting, then what's left is a second pile that's your established portfolio of marketing materials to use. As you adjust the pieces that need rebranding, you can add those revised pieces to your branded portfolio of items approved for use. Now, if you happen to find that all your pieces fit your brand standards, then you have the easiest brand discovery process ever and your branded portfolio is established with no other steps needed. The last aspect of brand management we're going to cover is that the design of a brand might need to be refreshed every two to five years depending on your budget and industry. And when I say refreshed, it's more like adding a design element here or there and giving your brochure a little facelift. It's not changing your brand standards. The reason to add a little facelift to your marketing materials is so that you don't start to look dated. Think of hairstyles. Very few people from the seventies keep a winged haircut because they want to look fresh and current. It's the same with graphic design of your marketing materials. For example, throughout the years, I've seen icons come in and out of style with businesses marketing materials. I've seen dark backgrounds favored only to be casted out for lighter ones. With hairstyles, clothing and marketing materials, there are trends and you'll look more credible if you represent what's current in your design. Usually non-profits can get away with five years. As can more conservative industries like finance. People offering products or services to youth can't get away with five years, because in five years, that can be an eternity for design trends with youth. So think about what industry you're in and who you're marketing to and gauge when you'll refresh your brand's design or style. Congratulations, you've learned about what branding is, what the three types of branding are, created basic brand standards, learned what full brand standards are, as well as what messaging is, and how to manage your brand. Now, let's look at the last lesson to discover what you can do now with what you've learned. 12. What's Next?: Now that you know what branding is and how to define your brand and how to use it in a consistent way, what's next? Well, you have several options. First, I'd suggest taking your basic brand standards and distributing them to any vendor, volunteer, or employee who's involved in marketing efforts. And if you feel that brand standards are needed or you want help creating messaging statements, please let me know. And if I get enough interest, I'll do classes on those two. Then I would elect a brand manager. If you're the only person in your marketing venture, then try to find a person who's a marketing professional or someone who has an eye for Marketing and show them your materials before you finalize them for distribution to external audiences. This person is just a second set of eyes. So tell them what you're looking for and then let them review what you've created. Next, you can perform a brand discovery. Invite your brand manager, your second set of eyes, and even your clients or customers to get their feedback. After that, when you have your pile that needs adjusting, you can prioritize and start adjusting the first one. And last but certainly not least, please post your brand standards guide class project. I'd love to see what you've done and give feedback if you want. So please let me know if you have any questions and I'll get back to you. If you haven't already, please check out our other classes and follow us so you'll know when we've posted new ones. Were planning on more marketing related classes like social media strategy, advertising plans, creating publications, getting earned media, and much more. Whatever you do with branding, please remember you can't do it all in a day, nor should you. So congratulations on taking your first step to understanding what branding is so you can increase awareness of your brand and keep a consistent message and image out there for your clients and customers to experience. Remember we're here to help get you there. Please post your brand standards guide so we can give you feedback and so you'll be one step closer to where you want to be.