Week 3B: Developing a Brand

 My business is Palomar College Athletics. While a lot of information was provided to me by the school and department, I had to develop quite a few things when I stepped into the role a year ago. Even though the school already had a well established social media presence, my department did not. I immediately began researching what went into establishing a cohesive brand. We needed to have a personality and voice. We needed to maintain a color palette and pick a logo. I knew I needed to pay attention to fonts for graphics. 

I sat down and wrote out a branding guide to help myself, and allow the department to see the goal, maintain our brand identity. While writing the guide I looked at other schools to see what they were doing, how they were doing, and what they did that was successful, and what wasn't. Because our department didn't have any social platforms, the first time around needed to be right. Our style guide contains style guide purpose, active accounts, social media voice, ownership of posts, general style guidelines, cadence, visual guidelines for graphics, post examples, engagement style, appropriate hashtags, and how to handle competitor interactions. 

Working in sports, things happen quickly and things are often light-hearted. We decided to keep our voice young, like me, fun, and slightly sarcastic. In our department we have two logos, so we chose one to use for our social media platforms. Our color scheme is mainly our school colors, red and scarlet. I have also used black and white as well. Specifically our colors are #FF3300, #FF422E, #000000, #C0C0C0, and #FFFFFF. For fonts, I use Futura, the Adobe font Bebas Neue. I stick to sans serif fonts because of the ease on the eyes and they look sleek in graphics. 

In addition to our main accounts, some of the sports have individual pages the coaches manage. We have monthly meetings to discuss content we're posting and I always remind them to use the same voice and writing style mentioned in our branding guide. When people search our stuff we want it to look cohesive. In addition to looking cohesive as a department, we also need to be cohesive with the school's main accounts. I am constantly looking at their posts to make sure they are similar so people can look at both and know the posts are both Palomar related. 

As much as I would like my branding guide to be set in stone, I know things have to change because customers, viewers, fans, people, they all change, and our content and platforms need to reflect that. What may have looked good when I sat down to write the guide, may not look good now. An area we are working on moving forward is increasing our engagements organically.