Brand rules your own staff can follow: why a written guide outlasts a logo

What goes in a brand guide for a small business?

Six things: how to use the logo, your colors with their codes, your type, the kind of photos you use, how you sound, and how you answer customers on WhatsApp and in reviews. In our work, the last two get used most, and most guides leave them out.

Logo use

List the files and say which is for what: the full logo for the website and letterhead, a square mark for the WhatsApp and Instagram profile picture, a one-color version for stamps and embroidery. Then show three wrong uses as pictures: stretched, recolored, placed on a busy photo.

Colors with codes

Write every color as a code, so nobody picks “the green” by eye: a HEX code such as #1F4E5F for screens, and CMYK values or a Pantone number for print. Then check each text color against its background. The web accessibility standard asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text (W3C, Understanding WCAG 2.2, Contrast (Minimum)).

Type

Name the heading and body fonts, where the files live, and what to use when they aren’t installed, say in Word. Otherwise staff pick whatever looks close.

Photo style

Pin four or five photos that look right (your real staff, your real work, daylight) and name what you don’t use, such as stock handshakes.

Tone of voice, with do and don’t

Mailchimp’s public style guide puts the difference neatly: “You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes” (Mailchimp Content Style Guide, Voice and tone). Pick three words for your voice, and give each a pair of real sentences.

• Do: “Hi Sara, yes, we’re open till 8 tonight. Shall I hold the 6:30 slot for you?”
• Don’t: “Dear valued customer, kindly note our timings are 9am to 8pm.”

The word “warm” means something different to each person on your team. A sentence means one thing.

Answering a WhatsApp message or a review

Write how you greet, how you sign off, and who replies after hours. For reviews, Google advises keeping replies short, apologizing when appropriate, never sharing the reviewer’s private details, and skipping deals and promotions, since reviewers are already customers (Google Business Profile Help, Tips to get more reviews). Add one model reply to a one-star review, so nobody writes their first while upset.

Why does one page beat a 60-page PDF?

Because the person who needs it is replying to a customer on a phone, and a long PDF is hard to read there. Nielsen Norman Group, which studies how people use screens, advises that a PDF “should never be used for on-screen reading” and says readers get lost in its print layout (Jakob Nielsen and Anna Kaley, Nielsen Norman Group, Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading, 28 Jun 2020). Even on an ordinary web page, Nielsen’s 2008 analysis estimated that people have time to read at most 28% of the words, and 20% is more likely (Jakob Nielsen, How Little Do Users Read?, 5 May 2008).

In our work, the long brand book gets opened at launch and then sits in a shared drive, while the one page gets pinned by the front desk and saved on phones. Keep the full files for your designer and printer, and give your team the page.

How do you keep the guide alive?

1. Give it one owner, by name, and a version date at the top, so staff can tell whether they have the current one.

2. Hand it over on a new hire’s first day, before they reply to anyone.

3. Load your model replies into WhatsApp Business as quick replies, pre-written answers to your most common questions (WhatsApp Business, Why small businesses should use WhatsApp Business app). Then the guide sits where the typing happens.

4. When a reply works well, add it. When a rule keeps getting broken, ask why. In our experience, the rule is unclear or the file is hard to find.

5. Review it each quarter, and after any new number, move or rebrand. Our post on why your brand looks different on every channel has a one-afternoon audit to run alongside it.

A one-page outline you can copy

Fill in the brackets, keep each line short, and stop when the page is full.

1. One line on who you are: [Name] is a [what you do] for [who] in [where]. Then the version date and the owner.

2. The full logo, the square mark and the one-color version, each with its uses, a link to [the folder], and three wrong uses as pictures.

3. List each color with its name, HEX code, and CMYK or Pantone number, and mark which is for text and which for buttons.

4. Set headings in [font] and body text in [font], with [fallback] when those are missing.

5. Pin four or five photos you like, and one line on what you never use.

6. Pick three words for how you sound, each with a do sentence and a don’t.

7. For WhatsApp, write the greeting, the sign-off, who answers after hours, and your three most-used replies.

8. For reviews, thank people by name, answer their point, move problems to a call, and keep one model reply to a bad review.

9. End with who to ask when unsure: [name], on [number].