Rebranding presents a quandary: It's all about change, but customers love consistency.
Although a rebrand offers the potential for new markets, more awareness, and stronger positioning, balancing the desire for change with a coherent story is essential to any rebrand's success.
And that's where your brand style guide comes in: It's a single document containing comprehensive guidelines about every component of your brand so you can project a coherent and consistent image and story.
In short, whereas change is at the core of rebrands, style guides are inherently about consistency.
And with a good style guide to direct your brand communications, your customers will recognize, trust, and re-up their loyalty to your brand far more quickly than they otherwise might.
While helping my company, Atom, through a high-profile rebranding, I confirmed that a style guide is an essential component of a rebrand. Here's what I learned.
Our Story: The Role of the Style Guide in Rebranding to Atom
Atom was launched under the name Squadhelp in 2011, having started as a crowdsourced naming platform that provided an effective and innovative solution to the problem of finding a powerful name for a powerful idea.
Over time, we expanded to include a complete suite of startup tools and made domain sales a core component of our business. With that evolution, we outgrew our initial name. To take the business further, we needed a new platform to tell our customers a better story of what our business is: Atom: where everything starts.
Of course, rebranding is a huge challenge. We had to communicate our new name and message to our diverse stakeholders and our various teams, including sales, customer service, tech, and my own content and comms team. Building a brand style guide was a piece of that puzzle.
During brand-building or a rebrand, a style guide is key for internal communication; thereafter, it will help you communicate with the public.
Why You Need a Style Guide
When marketing yourself to other businesses, it's possible to lose sight of the human connection. A brand style guide enforces consistency and defines your identity, bolstering the key relationships in your industry.
Brand consistency can increase revenue 20%, and a brand style guide is your way to ensure that every customer interaction stays perfectly on brand. The sum total of those interactions is your industry reputation—a fundamental piece of the puzzle for B2B companies.
That's one great reason to build a style guide. Here are more:
- Forge a unique identity through style choices
- Improve top-of-mind awareness by connecting your brand to powerful imagery
- Build trust through consistency
- Find clarity across all communication channels, from social to email
- Create instant recognition from typography and color palettes
Rebranding churns the usually smooth waters of your brand positioning, making a clear strategy all the more important.
How to Write a Style Guide for Your Rebrand in Five Steps
1. Review your brand mission
Your brand's mission and values are powerful ways to connect with your audience:
- How are you changing the operating practices of your customers?
- How are you affecting the industry as a whole?
- Are you encouraging sustainable business practices, or streamlining internal communications?
Place those core values at the heart of your style guide plan, and refer back to them when articulating later design and tone choices.
At Atom, our rebrand style guide placed trust and expertise at the heart of our new identity, and that's why they are at the center of our style guide.
2. Re-examine your target audience
If your target audience is changing as part of your rebrand, that should be reflected in your style guide. Do they want to hear a formal or casual tone in your language? Are they drawn to an academic and analytical vocabulary or a layman's tone?
Your rebrand might be expanding the scope of your services, which means you'll need to appeal to a wider audience than before. You may need to broaden your language to encompass a greater range of experience and expertise among your customers.
Knowing whom you're communicating with is essential to tailoring that communication effectively.
3. Redefine your brand tone
The next step in building your style guide is to define, or redefine, your brand tone.
Your tone should be built out of an understanding of both your values and your customers' needs and expectations.
Growth leads many businesses away from their initial brand tone. When you're just starting out, you may be connecting with a close-knit group of customers, and that may be reflected in a casual, playful brand tone based on familiarity. On the other hand, you might never have considered a consistent tone and just ended up flat and factual!
When writing your style guide for a rebrand, it's essential to consider how much of what you have you want to keep. For example, Squadhelp could get a little technical at times whereas much of our copy leaned towards "fun." I wanted Atom to communicate technical concepts clearly and remain friendly, so staying positive while always responding clearly and specifically to customer needs is part of our tone guidelines.
4. Build your style template
Your style template should consist of the colors, typography, and design elements that your brand will become known for. Consistency through those stylistic choices makes you immediately recognizable in a crowded market.
Humans are visual creatures. The design choices of your old brand, whether chosen consciously or not, will be strongly linked to your brand, and you should transplant as many of those elements as possible into your rebranded style guide in small ways.
However, you still have room to maneuver when introducing new style elements to your rebranded identity. Consider taking your previous foreground colors and integrating them into the background, for example.
5. Consider continuity in tone
You have built valuable relationships with your customers, and it's going to be essential that you communicate a sense of continuity to those customers.
Whether you're modernizing your brand or pivoting your service, a primary aim of your rebrand should be to carry as much brand equity over to your new brand as possible in its voice.
So what do you keep? When writing our new brand guidelines, I considered what worked about Squadhelp's voice and decided that Atom needed to use that "fun" tone we slipped in and out of—but a somewhat softened version so it wouldn't be a distraction.
Wrapping Up: A Style Guide Makes Your Rebrand Comprehensible
Your post-rebrand style guide is crucial for helping communicate to your customers what's changed and what's remained the same. It can also play a fundamental role in how that message is communicated.
When rebranding, messaging is important. Whatever your reasons for rebranding, something was lacking in your former brand. Your style guide ensures that your new brand hits home: It arrives fully formed into the world, with no doubts about what you stand for. The style guide becomes a resource for all your employees, keeping them on message, and it can help media outlets and agencies promote your new brand effectively.
So, whether you're rebranding or just getting serious about presenting a coherent brand identity, you'll need a style guide. Try this AI brand-builder tool to help you get started.
More Resources on Rebranding and Style Guides
Why You Need a Brand Style Guide (Even If you Think You Don't)
Anatomy of a Rebrand (Part 2 of 3): So You Need a New Identity... Now What?
