How to Manage Your Brand Identity
Your brand is the summation of your products, your people, and your customer experience. It's your reputation and your identity, codified visually and stylistically. As your business scales, it can be harder to maintain a consistent, recognizable character. One rogue department or franchise can cast a shadow over the entire brand.
The way you present yourself to the world is crucial. You need to make sure your brand is cogent across all channels, or you risk losing the potency that distinguishes you from competitors.
Squarespace Enterprise streamlines design and development while giving you a layer of control over your brand. Here we'll cover how you can use the platform to manage your corporate identity across stakeholders and franchises.
Brand identity and why it matters
Brand identity is much more than a logo and a color scheme. It extends beyond advertising into every aspect of business operations.
A brand is everything an organization does to establish itself as trustworthy and authentic. It starts with a purpose—the reason your company exists—which is often captured in a mission statement. It includes the logo you use to encapsulate your company, the colors that accentuate your brand's personality, and the words you use to describe your products.
These elements all contribute to your brand's overarching identity and affect how customers perceive you. Over time as a company grows, it's easy for its brand to become more and more diluted. New hires may want to make their mark and inadvertently go against regulations. To reach a new customer segment, a department head may green-light messaging that contradicts standards. So how do you promote consistency as your business becomes more complex?
Brand ownership
Depending on the size of your company, it may be easier to assign brand ownership to one stakeholder or team. This helps to ensure that brand guidelines and the identity of your company remain consistent.
The right stakeholder or team will depend on whether you're releasing products across multiple countries, regions, sites, or franchises. They need to balance vision, aesthetics, and the bottom line. Often they're a marketing team, an agency, or a consulting firm.
When the right person or team owns your brand, you can delegate other governance responsibilities to them as well, such as setting standards for design language, colors, promotional materials, and more. They can ensure that your assets stay relevant, deliver results, and remain true to the brand. They often do so by creating and adhering to brand guidelines.
Brand guidelines
Brand guidelines help a brand maintain consistency over time. They capture the elements of your brand identity and put them in one place to help new hires and partners understand the context of your company. These regulations—ideally published within a secure website—give your brand longevity by making sure everything shares the same core.
Perhaps you have a set of brand guidelines already. If you don't, be sure to set time aside to work with your team to develop them. The sooner you do this, the better. It's easier to prevent inconsistent assets and practices than it is to retract them.
In the past, many brand style guides were exported as PDFs. We encourage you to create digital style guides instead. Digital style guides are easier to update and distribute.
How does Squarespace Enterprise facilitate the design process?
Squarespace Enterprise helps you scale your brand by integrating design and engineering in one simple-to-use location. It includes plenty of features that help you manage your brand identity, including dynamic templates for creating different types of pages.
Home pages orient and facilitate action. Product pages showcase merchandise or services and give customers the information they need to act. Landing pages are designed for conversion. The style of each page should be documented so franchises and different business verticals can amplify your brand.
For instance, you may decide that home pages should have one dominant hero image while product pages contain a gallery with a testimonial. If you specify this in your brand guidelines, there will be less room for deviation as your business scales.
Quick development
Once your brand standards are codified, it's simple to spin up sites that abide by those guidelines on the Squarespace Enterprise platform. Squarespace sites are built on templates made by award-winning designers. They're ready for showtime out-of-the-box and easy to customize for your brand.
The site styles panel allows you to modify sites with ease. You can carry through design elements like typographic treatments across your site—or on different types of pages—with just a few clicks. Once it's set, you can duplicate the site so other teams can work within the same stylistic ecosystem.
All Squarespace sites are designed for every device. That means they're automatically optimized for mobile development. Instead of having an engineer fixate on breakpoints, they can focus on broader considerations that impact the bottom line.
More benefits
Squarespace Enterprise further simplifies development and management for your organization. It provides one place to create, test, and publish sites while giving you visibility into everything that's being made.
Enterprise trial site creation allows multiple people on your team to test new sites. Everyone will have their own logins, and the Enterprise dashboard lets you see the progress your team is making. You'll have the ability to review and approve the sites you want to become public. If you decide to publish any of them, you can manage billing by setting up a consolidated invoicing plan to fit your schedule and scaling plans.
Additionally, you'll have a direct line of communication with your dedicated account manager, who can loop in other Squarespace experts to help with specialized requests. Members of our product and design team are available for custom consultations to discuss potential enhancements to the platform and possible roadmap developments.
Summing up
Maintaining brand integrity is critical. It helps you build on the momentum you've gained with new customers without alienating those who have been with you from day one. Brand guidelines can help you preserve your identity as your business grows.
With Squarespace Enterprise, you'll save time on engineering, reduce room for error in implementing brand standards, and have visibility into what stakeholders and franchises are building.