In reference to brand guidelines...

81% of customers need to trust a brand before they will even consider buying from it.

That has not changed.

What has changed is how brands show up and who is now responsible for making that happen.

Today, more marketing is handled in house. Store teams, office staff and regional managers are all producing content. AI tools sit on everyone’s desktop. Design and advertising agencies are no longer the sole guardians of the brand, they are part of a much bigger ecosystem.

So if trust is built on consistent, authentic experience, the question becomes:

How do you make brand guidelines that real people, and now AI, can actually use?

From brand book to brand system.

For people, trust is built over time. Make a good first impression, be understanding, build a relationship, be yourself.

For brands it is no different. You need to:

• Know who you are and what you stand for

• Understand your audience and their pain points

• Show up regularly with consistent, relevant comms

• Honour your vision and values in everything you do

The difficulty is that, unlike people, brands are expressed by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Your company vision needs to find its way into the hands, heads and keyboards of everyone who creates something on your behalf, from Head Office to the high street.

Traditionally, the answer has been a set of Brand Guidelines. Usually a PDF. Sometimes a beautiful one. Occasionally read.

Today that is not enough.

Brand guidelines now need to be:

• Easy to deploy

• Simple to understand

• Usable by non designers and non marketers

• Built for AI as well as humans

In other words, they need to behave less like a book and more like a system.

The problem with traditional brand guidelines.

Classic guidelines tend to focus on the usual suspects:

• Logo and how to use it

• Colours and typefaces

• Stationery and basic layouts

More sophisticated brands extend this into:

• Tone of voice

• Photography, illustration and iconography

• Typographic styles and layout principles

Retail and franchise brands often go further with:

• Templates for point of sale

• Digital and social assets

• Local advertising formats

All of this has value, but there are two familiar problems:

1. Too prescriptive, creativity dies
   When every element is specified down to the size of a bullet point, people stop thinking. The moment a curveball brief appears, no one quite knows what to do, so either consistency slips or everything slows down.

2. Too vague, consistency dies
   If the guidance is woolly, Designers and marketers go into freestyle mode. Work may be beautiful, but little by little the brand is diluted and the experience becomes fragmented, especially across multiple locations.

The trick is to provide just enough structure to protect the brand while still leaving room for intelligent creativity. Historically, that relied heavily on experienced agencies and designers who could “read between the lines”.

In an in house, AI assisted world, that is no longer a safe assumption.

Designing guidelines for novices, not just designers.

In my experience, the best guidelines are exactly that, guidelines, a general rule, principle or advice. They set the boundaries, explain the why, and give specific instructions only where they really matter.

However, they also need to work for:

• A Store Manager creating a local recruitment post

• A regional marketer adapting a national campaign

• An office administrator updating a PowerPoint

• Someone using AI to write emails, socials or web copy

These people do not think in grids, leading and white space. They think in “I need a quick poster for Friday”.

So modern guidelines must:

• Remove jargon and use everyday language

• Show lots of before and after examples

• Highlight what is mandatory, what is flexible and what is for experts only

• Be searchable, scannable and available where people actually work, not buried in SharePoint

This is where templates and tools become just as important as the rules.

Templates, tools and plug ins, not just PDFs.

At We Are Acuity we have seen the biggest step change in effectiveness when guidelines are paired with ready to use assets and simple, guarded workflows.

For multi location and networked brands that often means:

• Template libraries for print, digital and social, pre built and locked down where needed

• Localisable campaigns where imagery, offers and contact details can change without breaking the brand

• Channel specific examples that show how the brand flexes in store, online, in email and in local advertising

The smartest brands now go one step further and make AI part of the toolkit too.

Bringing AI and GPTs into your brand toolkit.

If office staff and non specialists are already using AI, you have two choices. Ignore it and hope for the best, or design with it and keep your brand safe.

Brand guidelines can now be accompanied by:

• Custom GPTs or brand assistants trained on your guidelines and examples

• Tone of voice helpers that draft or edit copy so it sounds like you, not a generic AI

• On brand checkers where staff can paste an email, social post or flyer and ask, “Is this on brand and relevant for my audience?”

• Prompt libraries baked into guidelines, which help people ask AI the right questions, for example:

“Write a friendly, clear email in our brand tone for customers in Manchester about…”

“Suggest three local social posts for our Birmingham store that keep to our brand’s personality and these key messages…”

For novice marketers this is incredibly empowering. For the brand it means every piece of content, even when created under pressure by a non expert, has a much better chance of hitting the mark.

These AI tools sit alongside templates in a single ecosystem, so guidelines are no longer something people read once, they are something they use every day.

Balancing control and creativity in a world of AI.

None of this removes the need for real creativity. If anything, it makes it more important.

The role of guidelines becomes:

• To protect what is sacred
Your core visual identity, your voice, your values, your promise to customers.

• To liberate smart local creativity
Within those boundaries, give people the space to respond to what is happening in their community, their market and their channel.

With AI in the mix it is even more important that guidelines:

• Make the thinking behind the brand explicit, not just the surface style

• Explain why certain phrases, images or approaches are avoided

• Provide clear, human examples for AI to learn from and reference

That way, when someone or something new joins the creative process, they have a clear north star.

What great guidelines look like now.

For me, the strongest modern brand guidelines tend to:

1. Start with story and principles
   Purpose, promise, personality, audience and the key behaviours that should show up everywhere.

2. Translate that into simple visual and verbal rules
   Not ten pages of do and do not, but clear, memorable principles backed up by a few critical specifications.

3. Show lots of real examples
   Best practice from national campaigns and local activity, so people can see what good looks like in their context.

4. Provide a practical toolkit
   Templates, assets, pattern libraries, plus GPTs and plug ins that help non specialists do the right thing quickly.

5. Live where the work happens
   Inside the tools, platforms and workflows that your teams already use, not in a forgotten folder.

6. Evolve over time
   They are curated and updated, not set in stone, so they stay relevant as channels and behaviours change.

A quick note on beauty and influence.

The first set of guidelines I ever read taught me an enormous amount about branding. Since then, many more have inspired me and, I will admit, I have stolen from all of them.

Great guidelines can still be a thing of beauty, visually and in the thinking behind them. They should absolutely be essential reading for junior designers.

The difference now is that they also need to be:

• Friendly for the non designer

• Practical for the in house marketer

• Legible to AI

When you get that combination right, guidelines become more than a document, they become an everyday support system that quietly raises the quality of everything your brand does.

And if you would like to turn your static brand book into a living system, with templates, tools and a brand safe GPT your whole organisation can use, that is exactly the kind of challenge We Are Acuity loves to solve.