A clear brand identity allows customers to better relate to your business and associate your services with quality, reliability and professionalism – giving them more confidence to spend their money with you.

Establishing a brand identity is fun, easy and a great way to audit your business from the perspective of the customer. We have built an easy to use “Brand Identity Style Guide” that makes the process simple for everyone. Any business can use this guide to establish a brand guide for their business.

Once you have an idea of your Brand Identity, you can establish Brand Guidelines so that your identity is consistent across all mediums. Brand Guidelines allow you to establish a consistent message to customers about your business.

“Brand Identity” vs. “Brand Guidelines”

Brand Identity: how a business wants to be perceived by their customers.

Brand Guidelines: components of the brand that are created to reflect the value a business is trying to bring to the market and connect with customers.

Components of establishing a solid Brand Guidelines:

• Logo
• Color Palette
• Tone
• Type Face / Font
• Photography Guidelines
• Copywriting Guidelines

Every business, whether big or small should have a set of guidelines that they use to tell their story consistently to the world. While the end result is directed at the customer, the process of keeping your message clear and on point starts with your staff. Brand Guidelines allow whomever is working on marketing materials at your business to follow the same set of rules as everyone else. If your club is like most, you probably have many different people that put out material on behalf of your club. Different people that design your cart signs, flyers, email campaigns, print ads, digital ads, etc.

Keeping your message the same with all those different people is impossible, and that’s the reason many of the clubs we talk to struggle with having a consistent and reliable voice for their business.

All of us have “brand guidelines” that we follow everyday. The simple example is how we dress. You have established a certain “style” that you want associated with your personal brand – for golf professionals it’s usually a collared shirt and dress pants. That is your brand identity and each morning you subconsciously review your “guidelines” as you dress. Imagine if one day you showed up to the course in pajamas – people would be confused and your identity would suffer. While it may be funny, it is not what your customers have come to expect. Your brand would take a small hit. If you add up enough of those “small hits” you become unpredictable and unreliable. People don’t become raving fans of businesses with those attributes.

We encourage all businesses to schedule some time and discuss the message they want to send their customers in the coming year. We have put together a simple and easy to use step-by-step guide for working through this process. It’s fast, easy and a great way to unify your brand moving forward.