SPURspectives

Quite often Spur Communications is asked to develop brand standards for our clients. The rest of the time we work with the brand standards that the client provides. Either way it’s great. It’s important to clearly define your brand and make sure everyone involved in the brand expression is on the same page. But every time I’ve developed a set of standards or work with someone else’s effort, I feel disappointed, hemmed in and lacking clarity. The result is usually a tug-of-war between designer, clients, marketing managers and account execs as we try to litigate the letter of the law. I finally realized that the problem was my point of view.

We recently began working with a client’s new brand standards. They have an expansive system that is very comprehensive covering most instances that their massive organization will need. Of course, as soon as we started working with it we encountered the usual unanticipated conflicts, unworkable ideas and unforeseen issues. I went home to get something to eat and try to figure out how I would work through the problems with the client the next day.

As I started to make dinner I surveyed the available ingredients in the kitchen and pulled a cookbook off the shelf for inspiration. While I was doing this it occurred to me that I no longer use cookbooks to recreate recipes from the book. The results always strike me as a little lackluster. The ingredients are never exactly right or I don’t have the same type of pan or utensils. So I use them as a starting point for making something good with the available ingredients. I know a little bit about how food works and how various cooking methods impact the ingredients. It’s pretty easy to look at a recipe and imagine how it could be altered into something else given the current circumstances. I also very rarely disappoint my dining companions (and no, I do not have a dog). For me, the recipes are the spirit of the law, a point of departure and direction to pursue.

I think the same holds true for brand standards. They are a direction to pursue, not a law carved in stone. By agreeing to use the standards as inspiration for solving the problem at hand with the current constraints, the brand standards become inspirational, not restrictive. By agreeing that we all want to do what’s best for the brand and that we are navigating along an uncharted path through time a marketing team can be free to respond to all of the unexpected, unworkable and unforeseen issues that were impossible to predict when the standards were made. Brand standards aren’t a book of laws, they’re an ideal to pursue.

Photo by Ninette Enrique is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Tags: branding, identity, marketing