Before you pay for a logo

A quote lands on your desk: a logo, and a set of brand guidelines to go with it. It might be for a new company, a new division or a rebrand.

It sounds complete, and it’s a reasonable thing to ask for. The guidelines become the brand manual, the document everyone after you will work from: the website, the signs, the slides, the way someone answers an email. Buying the logo and the manual together feels like buying the whole brand.

The trouble is one line the quote usually leaves out. Guidelines have to guide someone, and nobody has said who yet.

Good guidelines put the people who will use them before the logo. When I first read Pfizer’s 2009 brand guidelines, the ones Siegel+Gale built, what struck me was that before the book shows you a single logo, it tells you who it’s guiding and why. By the time you reach the mark, you already know who’ll be carrying it, into rooms the designer will never see.

Those people are the guidelines’ real readers: the person writing a job post, the one ordering a sign, the one answering a hard email.

As a company grows, there are more of those readers, and fewer of them were in the room when its purpose was decided. That’s why companies write their purpose down: so the people who arrive later can still act on it. The brand manual is one of the documents that reaches every one of those readers.

A brand manual is only as valuable as what you put into it.

If all you put into it is a logo and a palette, that’s all it can pass on: which blue each division is allowed to use. Put in why the company exists and how it behaves, and every division gets that too, including the ones that open after the people who wrote it have moved on.

We learned this on a small job. A medical-tech startup asked for a logo and full brand guidelines, and I took the logo job for $300. They came prepared with a set of why statements. But who the company was, in character terms, was still an open question, its market positioning was still a hypothesis built on one community, and everything the logo would end up on was still an idea. They were asking for a manual before there was much to put into it.

Every asset made before the strategy is settled gets paid for twice: once to make it, and again to remake it.

That order is ours to own. I agreed to begin with the logo knowing the guidelines needed answers we didn’t have yet, and I went looking for those answers once the work was underway, instead of before it began. It cost them money, and it cost us the work we most wanted to do.

Their why statements were good raw material, and I took them seriously. The idea comes from Simon Sinek, whose 2009 talk at TEDxPuget Sound, How great leaders inspire action, and book, Start with Why, made his golden circle familiar: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In the years since, purpose has become part of how companies describe themselves.

A purpose statement is a statement of intent. Until it’s tied to behavior and a measure, it isn’t a strategy.

Before a brand can guide anyone, it has to make two things out of that intent: a character, the behavior people will recognize as the company’s, and a promise the company can keep, with a way to check that it did. That’s the work I’ve studied since I found Pfizer’s guidelines, and it’s what belongs in a brand manual before any logo does.

It’s also where purpose tends to stall, because saying it is easier than showing it. When Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim measured purpose from about 500,000 survey answers in which employees described their own employers, purpose on its own wasn’t related to financial performance. It paid off where management made the path toward it clear, and the effect came from middle managers and professional staff: the people who carry a company’s intent into its daily work, and the people guidelines are written for.

So I asked our startup who the company was, in character terms, and how we’d know the platform did what its marketing said. Those two questions, and one more, are what to settle before anything goes into the manual.

None of these needs a designer, and the answers are yours to keep whoever you hire.

Who is the company, in character terms? Not what it sells, but how it behaves: what it does when something goes wrong, what it would never do, and which three traits it holds, each one checking the other two.

Who will the guidelines guide, and where will the logo live? Name the people who’ll use them, and list the real places the logo will appear: a card, a sign, a site, a deck. If most of those places are still ideas, the guidelines should wait until they aren’t.

What will you promise, and how will you check it? This is the one most often skipped, so it gets the next part to itself.

Every brand makes a promise, whether it means to or not, and the manual will repeat it everywhere. So it’s worth knowing whether it can be kept.

Our startup’s platform gave people in care facilities basic comforts through automation, at a time when there are fewer staff to go around. That’s a real problem, and a platform that solves it is a staffing tool. Its marketing, though, made a quality promise: that people in care would be better off. In medical branding, a quality promise needs a test before a brand can make it honestly, so I asked how they were measuring patients’ outcomes.

A claim you can’t measure is a liability the brand carries into every channel it appears in.

If you can’t check your promise yet, promise something smaller that you can. It’s less exciting on a slide, and it holds up much better on a sign.

None of this is new. Scott Lerman’s Building Better Brands builds a brand from its character out and sets the identity last. He spent seventeen years at Siegel+Gale, including a stretch as its president, with Pfizer among his clients; the brand book the firm wrote for Pfizer in 2009, after he had gone, is set in the same order. We didn’t invent the order. We just stopped skipping it.

Guidelines are governance. Written before the strategy, they govern nothing.

It has limits we already know. Some businesses need a mark next week, for a sign or a storefront or a permit, and they should have one. Draw a working logo, call it a draft, and write the guidelines once you know who they’re for. And if companies that start with a logo and fill in their character later end up with manuals people use just as well, then the order matters less than we think, and we’d want to hear about it.

If you’re holding a quote like this one, start with the first question. The character interview is free: its game takes a few minutes, and its workshop takes about an hour with the people who make the decisions.