Do You Still Need Brand Guidelines In 2025?

The Nike swoosh, McDonald’s golden arches and Apple’s crisp, all-white packaging: three fantastic examples of iconic branding. But before the stunning visuals come the rules and regulations that govern these identities. Or as they’re commonly known in the branding world, brand guidelines.

Recently, there’s been a few people asking why do you need brand guidelines and if they are still required in 2025. In this blog post, we will aim to outline why brand guidelines are as important as ever in 2025.

What Are Brand Guidelines?

Before answering “Why do you need brand guidelines”, it’s important to understand what they are. As mentioned above, brand guidelines can be considered as a set of rules that dictate how a brand should appear.

Branding is made up of many different visual elements known as brand visuals, which come together to form a brand’s identity. Brand visuals include a brand’s logo, typography, colour, packaging and any other visual aspect of a company. Brand guidelines ensure these elements appear consistently wherever they are displayed and often act as a ‘dos and don’ts’ guide for how the brand should be represented.

Sections may include logo usage which offers guidance on how to display the company logo and the brand’s colour palette with hex codes to make sure the exact same colour is used no matter where or when a brand’s visuals are displayed.

Brand guidelines were originally displayed in a physical book format. While they may still appear in physical format today, it’s more common for brand guidelines to be stored in a digital document such as a PDF.

What Are The Benefits Of Brand Guidelines?

Consistency across channels

The biggest benefit of brand guidelines is consistency. They ensure that everyone sees your brand the same, whether that’s out on the streets, on social media or in a physical store. It can be hard to make your brand stick in the minds of customers if they see something different every time they come across your brand. Brand guidelines eliminate this concern and ensure your brand can be rolled out consistently to the finest of details.

Change consumer perceptions

Inconsistent branding can cause a brand to come across as cheap or unprofessional. On the other hand, eliminating inconsistencies can help your brand appear luxurious. You’ll notice that brands which compete on luxury treat their visuals like sacred symbols and very rarely, if ever, do they appear altered or modified.

Saves time and improves efficiency

Having clear brand guidelines can save time especially when rolling your brand out on new platforms. Imagine brands trying to set up social media profiles in the late 2000s without any clear guidance on how a logo should appear. Even now, when a new platform emerges, businesses don’t need to consider how their brand should appear and instead simply need to follow their brand guidelines which saves time and improves efficiency.

Improves employee communication

When considering why you need brand guidelines, it can be easy to focus on the benefits to your customers and ultimately, your profits. But what about your employees?

Having clear brand guidelines for your design or marketing team to follow is a great way to improve efficiency and communication as new team members will have a reference point from day one. Brand guidelines also ensure a brand’s identity isn’t impacted when there are managerial changes.

Do You Need Brand Guidelines In 2025?

While the importance of brand guidelines may differ from one business to the next, businesses of all sizes should have brand guidelines in some capacity, even now. You could also argue that brand guidelines are even more important today due to the number of places where branding is displayed.

It’s also important to have clear guidelines if you are a new brand trying to stick in people’s minds. This is likely to be a priority as a new brand but can be much harder to achieve without a set of clear brand guidelines.

For larger brands, updating brand guidelines can be a great way to keep your brand current and fresh. Failing to update your brand guidelines could easily lead to your brand becoming outdated leading to negative connotations in the minds of your consumers.

Hopefully, that clears things up on why you need brand guidelines in 2025. If working with BGN on a new or refreshed brand identity, you can expect to receive a set of brand guidelines as one of the final steps of the process once all visual elements have been agreed upon and perfected. Whether you need branding from scratch for a new business or you’re looking for a rebrand for an existing company, feel free to drop us an email and one of our team will get back to you.