How to Grow Your Brand Through Trust and Continuity

Our partners often ask us the best way to build a stronger relationship with their audience. And while many expect us to suggest proven tactics like advertisements, websites, or animated videos, the real answer is always trust.

That’s because it’s the core of every good relationship, especially business relationships. Trust can instill confidence and even excitement in a brand, but it can’t be built overnight. Which is where a strong brand strategy comes into play.

Strong brand strategy is driven in part by consistency and familiarity. This ensures that every time someone interacts with a brand, they have a familiar, but not identical, experience. Over time, these experiences can add up to create trust and buy-in for a brand.

Origo has been helping organizations do this for over 35 years. This important process can be very exciting for a brand, but can also be overwhelming. Which is why we recommend starting with a brand guide: a tool that helps curate a brand’s portrayal across all forms of media. 

To help, we’ve compiled a list of successful brand guides that we helped create for some of our partners over the years.

Creating recognition by defining a brand

Trust cannot be built without clear parameters. And when it comes to branding, that parameter takes the form of a brand guide.

A brand guide is a universal document that defines how an organization represents itself visually and verbally. It provides rules that clearly explain how the brand should be conveyed, often including how to write copy, display a logo, or generate brand colors.

Brand guides ensure that all internal and external communications maintain a level of consistency, no matter who utilizes it. This is especially important when organizations need to replicate their brand to countless partners across the country. 

Our partners at Mortar Board National College Honor Society recently came to us for help in developing a strong and consistent style guide for their organization. 

That’s because there are 233 Mortar Board chapters on campuses nationwide, each with its own marketing chair. Without strong brand guidelines and a high rate of new members, many were misconstruing the Society’s brand representation.

With the help of Origo, Mortar Board’s new style guide better protects their brand, makes it recognizable and ensures trust that all chapters’ marketing materials have a consistent look and feel.

Gaining trust through continuity

A relationship can’t function without consistently showing up. In branding, continuity must be portrayed in both visuals and verbiage. The depth of that continuity can be created with brand guides and the many details that can accompany them.

We worked together with Columbia Gas to help them create continuity among their many communications pieces.

To make each segment of their business identifiable, we assigned them a unique primary color and kept the main Columbia Gas blue throughout. Layout templates were created with universal brand elements to provide clarity for their audiences and recognition for their brand. 

As a result, their audience now immediately knows these pieces are from Columbia Gas without a second thought.

Generating confidence with an ownable story 

Strong style guides don’t just focus on visual consistency. They also create an ownable story for an organization through its mission, vision, and values. These core pieces of a brand guide internal team members and drive trust.

We recently helped our long-time partner ABB Optical Group create a new brand story addressing the changing needs of their customers. Fresh insights from our combined research on ABB’s offerings and services served as a guide to craft renewed branding materials, including a new tagline, storyline, and mission statement. 

In addition to crafting a new story, ABB’s style guide includes visual rules and styles to help their outside partners create consistent marketing assets.

As a result of this brand reevaluation, it is now easier for their account managers and sales teams to be confident in ABB’s new universal message and use it to connect and build trust with customers.