Brand Guidelines & Brand Playbook for Enterprise Growth
Growing pains are a natural part of any thriving business – as the adage professes, there’s seldom any gain without discomfort. Like any healthy living entity, successful businesses can expect challenging growth phases where old systems must be swapped for new ones that encourage progress.
Should such companies fail to reevaluate their processes and push past their comfort zone, they may find their growth halted by unanticipated roadblocks. Perhaps a new satellite location struggles to field traffic in its opening week due to a lapse in employee training. Or customer support professionals may alienate clients by sending correspondence with an improper tone. Or even worse, perhaps a marketing team member ignites a PR scandal by publishing social media posts with the wrong brand of humor.
The faux pas possibilities are endless for scaling companies, which may understandably keep their executives up at night. However, nurturing your company’s growth with the proper tools and resources can help inoculate your brand from stretching too far too quickly – and fortify it for the challenges ahead.
Make Your Company Growth-Proof
Among the must-haves in your company growth plan is a solid brand playbook that keeps your employees aligned across departments or locations. You might personally monitor public outreach and customer interactions among a handful of startup employees – but once you scale into double-digit headcounts, it becomes less feasible. Therefore, as you onboard more managers and draft new communications policies, it’s important to publish them in a clear and accessible way.
Printed manuals and slideshow presentations have limited engagement potential and are often approached by employees with the reluctance of reviewing homework. That’s not surprising given their restrictive design and interactive capabilities – for visual and audible learners, they’re not the optimal way to internalize information.
Creating a dynamic online resource to document your brand playbook can help usher your company into its next exciting phase. While this may seem like an involved project, Squarespace Enterprise empowers you to launch one securely with no technical expertise required.
What Should an Online Brand Playbook Include?
Your online brand playbook should be a one-stop resource for all legal, design, communications and identity-related guidelines. It should prescribe exactly how your employees must interface with customers in terms of tone and support, and how they should handle typical requests or potential issues.
Furthermore, it should document all attributes that define your company’s personality and style, from font and color palettes to grammar and punctuation guides. It should also prominently feature your brand mission and vision statement.
Supplement the text in your brand playbook with multimedia files like video and audio to capture what’s difficult to convey with words. Not only does this support a variety of learning styles, but watching colleagues deliver information – or put company ideals into action – can humanize policies for employees and boost their learning retention rates.
Would you rather read a laundry list of company values, or watch footage of your teammates living them out by volunteering in the community? Simply listing your company’s charity partners isn’t as compelling as interviewing their beneficiaries – so try to craft a narrative about the individuals they serve. If you’re able to interview at least one beneficiary on camera and capture employees interacting with them, it’s a powerful way to communicate your ideals and rally support for them.
Whenever possible, show instead of tell — and choosing a platform like Squarespace Enterprise that simplifies adding video will help you achieve this. Be sure to include dropdown menus and links throughout your brand playbook site to allow visitors to quickly navigate sections and concentrate on the most relevant material.
Summing Up
No matter what your brand playbook contains, taking readers on an interactive, multimedia journey through its content can increase adoption. Without internalizing your brand policies and personality, your employees may provide a different customer experience than you envisioned – and that puts your business growth at risk.