What do you do if your brand style guide is not resonating with your audience?

If your brand style guide is not resonating with your audience, consider focusing on brand salience and the brand resonance model to build a relationship and emotional connection with your audience. Measure brand salience through surveys or focus groups, and create a social media style guide to maintain consistency in your social media presence.

1. Conduct Audience Research - Understand the Gap - Surveys and Feedback - Social Media Listening 2. Analyze Current Brand Perception - Internal and External Assessment - Brand Audit - Competitor Analysis 3. Refine Your Brand Identity - Align with Audience Preferences - Update Visual Elements - Revise Tone and Voice 4. Test and Iterate - Validate Changes - A/B Testing - Pilot Programs 5. Communicate Changes Internally - Ensure Consistency - Internal Training - Update the brand style guide 6. Engage with Your Audience - Build a Connection - Tell a good story about why you made changes - Be transparent about why you made changes 7. Monitor and Adapt - Continuous Improvement, Regular Reviews - Stay Agile

When my brand’s style guide isn’t striking a chord with our audience, I delve into a thorough feedback loop to pinpoint disconnects. This involves deploying targeted surveys and fostering open dialogue via social media to capture honest reflections on our brand's visual and communicative expressions. Synthesizing this data, I re-evaluate our creative direction, ensuring it aligns more closely with our audience’s expectations and cultural currents. The revised style guide is then rolled out in phases, allowing for real-time adjustments based on continuous audience engagement, ensuring our branding resonates more profoundly and authentically.

- The logical next step would be to do a dipstick analysis to gauge why the reason/reasons for customer disconnect. - Maybe it is the platform that is not working, check if the result is consistent across all platforms. - Double down on the factors that have worked well in the past so that you can remove any inefficiencies.

Data analysis is a powerful tool for refining your brand's visual identity. Look into metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to identify patterns and optimize your brand style guide. You can update your guide by refining colour palettes, curating image styles, and suggesting optimal visual formats for different content types.

Use data analytics to understand how your brand's visual elements are performing across different platforms. Look at engagement metrics like click-through rates, time spent on your website, and conversion rates. Personal experience: By analyzing the performance of different campaigns, I noticed lower engagement on posts that strictly followed our old style guide compared to more visually dynamic content.

Every brand on the market must show some degree of flexibility in the modern realm of business. Brand mus be able to redefine their strategy because consumer needs are in a constant state of change I.e. look at the way we work - in the office, out of the office or a mixture of both. Brands need to show they care about the environment, they recycle, they are manufactured using sustainable methods and or raw materials. Differentiation has always been about brand positioning but Differentiation for good is now a real game changer. Without flexibility some brands will die. The biggest example of brand flexibility or a brand understanding what is now important in their market place could be 0.0 alcohol offering being promoted by Guinness.

It's vital to revisit brand goals to ensure it stays relevant and resonates with your audience. Key points include: 1. Alignment is Key: Core values, goals, and style guide should work together seamlessly. 2. Evolving with Your Audience: Revisit your goals and how you present your brand as audience values and preferences change. 3. Focus on Presentation: Present your brand in a way that reflects your goals and resonates with your target audience.

Revisit your brand goals to ensure that your style guide aligns with what you're trying to achieve. Sometimes, a misalignment between your brand's strategic objectives and its visual representation can cause disconnect. Personal experience: We realigned our brand visuals with our mission of innovation and creativity, which had been underrepresented in our previous style guide.

Update your design elements based on the feedback and data. This might include modernizing your color palette, typography, and other visual elements to better communicate your brand’s identity and values. We introduced brighter colors and a more modern font in our visual palette, which immediately made our brand feel more accessible and engaging.

Roll out the updated brand style guide across all channels. This includes updating marketing materials, digital assets, and internal communications to ensure consistency. Implementing the changes involved not only external but also internal adjustments. Training sessions for our marketing and sales teams ensured everyone understood the new guidelines.

After implementing the changes, continuously monitor how the updated style guide is performing. Use the same metrics as in your initial analysis to measure impact. Personal experience: Post-implementation, we continued to monitor engagement metrics and collected feedback actively. This ongoing analysis helped us fine-tune additional elements over time.

Consider evaluating the user generated content that is being organically created. What does it look like? Are the users you don’t pay to create content for you, the people who are actually interacting with your brand, does their content align with your brand values? A reminder that your brand is who your customers say it is - not who you say it is!

A brand style guide is a living document that should evolve alongside your business and audience. When it doesn't resonate with your audience, be open-minded and willing to adapt. Consider the possibility that it may be resonating with a new or different audience. Do all of the steps mentioned in the article to determine if that is the case, but ensure that any changes you make are authentic and true to your brand.

How often have you communicated what your brand values are. What does your brand stand for, who are your brand ambassadors if any - if you haven't got any do you need one? Where is your brand / products sold - what barriers are you facing in opening new accounts. What is your brand wish list I.e. what are the aspirations for brand - sales, growth, values, new product development - hiw are you going to communicate them internally and externally.