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Time and Money Well-Spent

Do you have multiple versions of your logo in all sorts of file formats and variations? Not enough businesses take the time to create a company brand style guide. If you aren’t sure of what your brand looks like, then your customers are confused and are having a disjointed experience as well.

A clear visual identity is essential in establishing brand engagement, especially in the market of auto repair where your customers have many choices. At it’s core, a brand is meant to represent much more than just style; it’s consistency relays a reputation of reliability, positive tone, attention to detail, and presents your company’s unique identity.

Where exactly will I use a branding guide? EVERYWHERE!

A custom-created style guide defines what your company’s brand elements are and the details of how they should be applied across all visual media. This guide ensures that you’re consistently putting forth the same representation of your brand across the wide breadth of Internet, print, and broadcast. Communicating with too many different styles or voices can compromise a brand’s image — retracting these inconsistencies and their repercussions becomes increasingly difficult over time. Whether it be your shop sign visible from the road, a business card at next week’s local Rotary Club meeting, or especially your website, there are opportunities for motorists to form their first impression of you.

brand style guide
brand style guide
brand style guide
brand style guide
brand style guide
brand style guide

How can different fonts and treatment affect brand recognition for your potential customers?

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Both of these logos are a golden ‘M’ but when you look at these symbols, only ONE of them is immediately associated with food. Depending on your relationship with the brand, just looking at this element can cause your brain to create the urge to eat fresh french fries; your mouth may even begin to salivate simply by driving by the sign on the road, or seeing an ad on TV. This is exactly the type of positive association that any shop should want to foster between their company’s image and their customer base.

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In the before-and-after implementation for one of our shops, the dated branding image has been transformed into one that is clear, compact, and entirely original to the shop. It presents the shop’s unique business perspective: “Honest. Accurate. New Concept.” while moving away from a previous catch phrase expressed in the 2005 version of the logo.

Besides establishing a new business image, a branding guide helps you keep track of the color scheme used, font-faces, and appropriate use of logo implementation for various mediums (as seen in the example pages to the left). Different scenarios call for different forms of a logo — for example, solid black for fax correspondence as to a small badge for social media. A custom style guide includes all these variations and instructs exactly when to use them, clearly and simply in an easy-to-read format.

As there is an ever-increasing variety of media that a company can become involved with — both online and offline — having a brand style guide is important for any shop to keep their visuals and overall message consistent across all platforms of communication.