So many small companies roll in with this mindset: “We’ll address brand guidelines later.” And later, what? Without a brand style guide, you lose the soul of the brand. Your brand guidelines make you look professional, build credibility, and maintain consistency, which is important to building a memorable brand. The brand guidelines that your team follows across all touchpoints make your wellness brand relevant and persistent.
You can stay consistent with your brand personality only by developing your brand guidelines. In this way, every kind of content shared while branding and marketing the product or service would reflect your brand values and identity. Whether you drive a nutrition clinic, yoga studio, fitness training, or spiritual wellness program, you need proper brand guidelines to be consistent and recognizable to your audience. Scroll till the end and get actionable insights that will definitely help you know 10x better about the brand guidelines that you need to develop for your wellness business.
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are well-defined rules that spotlight how your wellness company communicates to the audience. This rulebook is the whole nine yards of your brand, from logo, color, font, imagery, voice, and tone that outlines the brand’s personality. It’s a roadmap to represent your brand identity to the audience. This encourages your team to stay relevant and consistent with your brand values, mission, and personality every time across all communication channels.
Set up Your Wellness Brand Guidelines to influence the market.
Strong brand guidelines can help you build a memorable brand through a consistent brand style. A comprehensive brand book summarizing these guidelines clarifies for business employees how to communicate with consumers.
Follow these steps below to create a brand guideline to make an instantly recognizable brand.
1. Define Your Brand Essence
In the first place, dig deeper into your brand’s core to create a rulebook. The brand’s essence defines what it stands for. A strong brand essence serves as a foundation for creating a cohesive brand, from visual identity to brand personality and marketing.
It builds an emotional connection with an audience that truly shapes their perception of your wellness company. Your brand essence expresses your company’s core values, mission, and purpose. Therefore, you have to be clear and identify these to define your brand essence to resonate deeply with your audience. Brand essence builds consistency across all consumer interaction points.
- Purpose: Your brand purpose is beyond generating revenue; it’s the root cause of why you think to create your wellness company. Consider what you strive to build your brand to bring to the audience’s life. When you know your brand’s purpose, it integrates into every aspect of your brand.
- Brand value Brand Core Values are the cluster of principles that direct the company’s action. They set a base for company culture. Employees always consider the company values while operating and communicating at work. Living up to brand values creates aligned cultures that ultimately increase company profit.
Let’s take one of the famous American wellness companies, Headspace, which is helping millions with meditation and making sleep simple.
Headspace’s core values define their company culture and show who they are. Their core values revolve around empathy, innovation, integrity, and empowerment. Their core values revolve around empathy, innovation, integrity, and empowerment. Headspace’s brand purpose is to improve the mental health of humans around the world by making mental healthcare tools accessible. These values, purpose, and mission are the guiding principles that shape their brand identity.
2. Logo use
Crave to make your logo iconic? Stay consistent with its usage. Your wellness logo is a crucial asset of your bra,nd so it musconsistently t reflect your brand valueonin every platform.
Set specific rules for logo usage across communication platforms to retain brand values. These guidelines will, more importantly, help reduce inconsistencies that hurt brand recognition.
- Logo description: Explain the idea behind your logo, what it stands for, and how it connects with your brand identity.
- Logo variations: Add different logo formats, such as full logo, secondary logo, and icon mark, and describe how each format is used.
- Color variation In addition, include resizing clear space and color choices like a primary, secondary, tertiary, opposite-colored option, and a monochrome option for the wellness brand logo.
You can also make a list of dos and don’ts of your logo design to retain your brand identity. Meanwhile, these variations allow you to use a logo in different contexts without tweaking the brand identity.
The Headspace logo’s imperfect circle mark resonates with its values that embrace life imperfections as human experience. The logo guide outlines that the proportion of their logo mark and typeface should not be changed.
While using their logo in design, give it a clear space to breathe. A guide to using alternate logo colors relying on the background color. In case of collaboration with other brands, they give the use of logo rule with examples that make it look balanced.
3. Color palette
Well, you might know that color evokes emotions and impacts behavior, which is obviously important for wellness brands.
Brand colors capture the audience’s attention and build a memorable brand when used consistently in design.
Include your brand color palette, and color codes and roll them in suitable formats (CMYK, HEX, and RGB). By doing so, your staff will use the right colors while designing.
List down the color hierarchy, accepted color combinations, and colors that contradict your brand identity that you don’t want to use together.
For instance, Headspace picks up a bright, hopeful, approachable, and visionary color plate to make its audience feel fresh and joyful.
Their primary brand color is Orange, which prompted the traditional meditation and practice. Orange is mainly set to apply with warm grey and white. Their primary, secondary, and tertiary color palette add liveliness to their design, illustrations, and UI segments. At the same time, Headspace’s color palette aligns with its bright and vibrant brand personality.
4. Typography
Besides colors, fonts have a great impact on emotions so your guide must explain the use cases. Mostly, the brand uses 2 to 3 fonts, write the usage scenarios for each brand font including the size, weight, and spacing.
Set the standard of what to do or not do with your brand typography in your brand Guidelines For Wellness.
Do
- Always consider readability to make sure that your audience easily reads the text.
- Be simple and consistent on all platforms.
- Use 2 to 3 fonts for a cohesive look.
- Analyze your fonts across various platforms to make sure they look stunning and resonate with your brand and audience.
Don’t
- Avoid using many fonts
- Don’t pick a font that contradicts your brand message,
- Avoid using trendy fonts as they are likely to go behind the times.
Headspace created a custom version of the Aperçu typeface to spark a friendly vibe with a curve of a smile. They specify the use of Each weight of Headspace Aperçu like,
- Black for bold, assertive moments
- Bold for headlines
- Medium for subheadlines and pull quotes
- Regular use for body copy
They provide examples for setting typeface to create a clear hierarchy. Headspace also outlines the dos and don’ts to apply on typeface. Additionally, when Headspace Aperçu is not available, they allow alternate fonts such as Source Sans(Google Slides and Google Docs), Roboto (preferred web and email backup font), and Arial (fallback as a web-safe font).
5. Imagery
Basically, the imagery doesn’t just describe the story; it engages the audience and creates a rich, unforgettable experience. Like the image of the moon on a clear night, it will definitely evoke a sense of calm and tranquility. Doesn’t it? It defines the untold story of beauty, clarity, and sparkle it has. Meanwhile, your wellness brand has the power to communicate your brand values through imagery.
Photographs and illustrations you use on your website and social media reflect the visual identity of your brand. A brand guide on photographs and illustrations helps to maintain consistency as your team makes new images by following the brand aesthetics.
The image’s mood and tonality specify how your wellness company wants its consumers to experience while interacting.
It’s worthwhile to list up rules on how brand colors are used in images. Also styling of the person in the image sparks off different cues to your audience so align it with your brand message and values.
To construct the guideline easily, make up the images category such as people, products, landscapes, and architecture. At the same time, display the actual examples so your team can correctly apply the standards.
- Add inspiration for style reference.
- Examples
- Event snapshot directions
- Editing dos and don’ts like cropping, fusing images, drop shadows, and using filters.
- How to utilize each style of photo according to the project
- Photography file format
For instance, Headspace Lifestyle photography guidelines demonstrate to keep some descriptors in mind.
- Hopeful
- Happy
- Cheerful
- Real
- Unpolished
- Helpful
- Compassionate
- Optimistic
- Honest
- Innovative
- Slice-of-Life
- In-between moments
They set the standard to share photographs that tell stories and convey emotions, action, or context.
Headspace embraces imperfection in photography as they believe that sometimes the imperfect ones are the most stunning images. The ones that build a genuine connection don’t have to be perfect. They propel users to take photographs in natural light or experiment with different artificial lighting for a warm and tempting feel. Because good lighting makes a tremendous difference in your brand photography.
6. Brand tone of voice
Just like the brand guideline for logo, color palette, and photography is important, the tone of voice has its own place in the style guide to remain constant. Your tone of voice depicts the personality of your brand and how you speak to your audience.
It must be reflected in your website copy, social media captions, product packaging, marketing, and image design. Your tone of voice has to be the same across all communication platforms. It can be energetic, serious, affordable, and comfortable, and when your audience views your content, they get it from where it’s coming from.
However, it needs to be different from your competitors so you can set your wellness brand apart.
Figure out how you want your brand to sound like. Relaxed? Knowledgeable? Compassionate? Find your unique tone of voice and use it consistently to build audience trust over time.
Your consistent brand voice helps to gain the trust of the audience, who want to transform their lives with your product or service.
Nail down the tone of voice roadmap in our Brand Guidelines For Wellness so your team can maintain consistency on every platform.
- Everyday Words & Terms Use
- Various Kinds of Content
- Company Precise Words & Phrases
- Glossary of Standard Terms
- Dos & Don’ts
Headspace has a friendly and kind tone of voice. The guide explains how to apply these brand pillars.
- Hopeful
- Visionary
- Approachable
- Reliable
These pillars help to create warm, inspiring, and accessible language and visuals. So they can show support to their members in every life moment.
They focus on avoiding language that is racist, exclusive, and ableist. Headspace shares a list of words to say or not say about meditation, mindfulness coaching, therapy, psychiatry, and work.
Where To Create Branding Guidelines for Wellness
Before you know how to create an effective brand guideline for your wellness company, look at the options you have and where to generate them.
- Online tools: Some tools like Canva, Frontify, and Marq provide pre-designed templates that encourage everyone to produce a visually appealing guideline.
- Branding agencies: One of the great options to get your brand guidelines done by a branding agency or design firm. They can help you develop an aesthetic brand guideline to stay consistent across all communication channels.
Whatever option you choose, make sure that your style guide is effective, extensive, and resonates with your brand values and target audience.
Final Thought
Don’t be left behind in the wellness industry by not making your brand guidelines. We only trust brands with consistent personalities. Don’t you? And trust builds over time with the same stable brand personality.
Like whenever your target audience looks at your wellness brand either through Instagram posts or your website, it feels the same and recognizable. And here well-designed brand guidelines present a flexible structure of rules, aspects, and resources that greatly help in brand consistency and design.
So brand guidelines for a wellness company are not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have to outweigh its competitors and persuade the consumers.
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