Brand Guidelines, By Industry
Most brand guidelines templates are written for nobody in particular. The version your team will actually use looks different depending on what you do. Pick your industry below, or skip the reading and generate yours in minutes.
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What every brand guidelines document should contain
The minimum viable brand book, regardless of industry. Each section below should answer one question for your team and your AI tools without anyone asking again.
Positioning statement
Who you serve, the category you compete in, and the one dimension that makes you different.
Brand archetype & voice
Personality framework with three tonal attributes and concrete do/don't pairs.
Ideal Customer Profile
The one paragraph that keeps every hire, agency and AI prompt aimed at the same person.
Colour system
Primary, neutral, accent in HEX/RGB/OKLCH, with explicit usage rules, not just swatches.
Typography
Type families, weights, scale and pairing rules, with web-safe fallbacks.
Logo system
Lockups, clear-space, minimum sizes, monochrome variations and don'ts.
Messaging pillars
Three to five themes every campaign reinforces. Headlines and sample copy your team and LLMs can quote.
Application & implementation
How the rest of the team uses the guidelines week-to-week. The chapter most brand books skip.
Brand guidelines by industry
Each guide is written for the specific surfaces, mistakes and priorities of that industry, not a word-swapped template. Pick the closest fit.
Brand Guidelines for Startups
You don't need a 47-page brand book — you need the 5 pages that stop your team from re-explaining the brand on every Slack thread. Here's what brand guidelines for a pre-PMF startup should contain, what to skip, and how to ship one this afternoon.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for SaaS
In SaaS, your product is your brand. That means your brand guidelines have to do a job most templates never imagined — feeding design tokens to v0, component patterns to Cursor, and voice rules to the AI generating your release notes.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for Small Business
You don't need an agency-grade brand book. You need a one-page reference card that keeps your Google Business Profile, Instagram, signage and email all sounding like the same business — so the next customer who Googles you actually trusts what they find.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for Agencies
You're not just writing brand guidelines — you're writing them again, every project, for a different client. The agencies that win on margin have a repeatable system, a white-label deliverable, and a clean handoff to whoever builds the website. Here's how to put one together.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for Ecommerce
Half your customers find you on Amazon, Etsy, TikTok or someone else's shelf. Your brand guidelines have to ride those surfaces without you in the room — which means product photography rules, packaging systems, and a marketplace presence playbook matter more than your website hero section.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for Nonprofits
A nonprofit brand book is a different document. It has to do everything a corporate brand book does — and protect beneficiary dignity, hold donor trust, and keep three different audiences (donors, volunteers, the people you serve) hearing the same mission. Here's how to ship one without a corporate budget.
Read the guideBrand Guidelines for Real Estate
Real estate brand guidelines do something most templates never address: balance the brokerage's brand with the agent's personal brand, ship every surface with Fair Housing compliance baked in, and lock down the photography and listing rules that decide whether a buyer scrolls past or schedules a showing.
Read the guideSkip the reading. Generate yours.
Branding5 builds your complete brand guidelines (strategy, voice, visual identity) from a single URL. Exports as a polished PDF, an interactive web report, and a brand-guidelines.md for AI agents. Free to start.
Brand Guidelines Generator
The full PDF + web + Markdown brand book, generated from a URL in minutes. Skip the templates, get a real brand book.
Open the generatorAI-readyAI Brand Guidelines (brand-guidelines.md)
Generate a brand-guidelines.md that Cursor, Claude, v0 and Stitch read natively. On-brand AI output from prompt one.
Read moreBrand guidelines are one output. Branding5 builds the whole brand system.
Every Branding5 report includes positioning, archetype with peer brand examples, ICPs, SWOT, per-competitor SWOTs, marketing copy, content strategy, AIDA campaigns and a landing page + Lighthouse audit, alongside your brand-guidelines.md. One generation, one source of truth, every artefact in sync.
Brand Positioning
Positioning statement, archetype with peer brand examples, brand narrative, mission, vision, USP and values: the strategic spine your guidelines are built on.
ExploreCompetitor Analysis
Per-competitor SWOTs, competitive landscape summary, differentiation notes and actionable insights, not just your own SWOT.
ExploreMarketing Strategy
Marketing copy (headlines, CTAs, landing page copy), Hero/Hub/Hygiene content strategy and full-funnel AIDA campaign ideas.
ExploreIdeal Customer Profile
Named personas with demographics, psychographics, pain points, goals and preferred communication channels.
ExploreLanding Page & SEO Audit
Landing page UX assessment, keyword analysis and Lighthouse Core Web Vitals audit (desktop and mobile), included in the PDF report.
ExploreFree Brand Check
Upload any image, copy or PDF and get a 0–100 brand-alignment score across 7 dimensions, in seconds.
ExploreAll of this ships in every Branding5 report, not as an add-on, not as a separate product. Your brand-guidelines.md is the team-facing summary; the full PDF report adds executive summary, competitor SWOTs, landing page analysis and Lighthouse Core Web Vitals.
FAQ - Brand guidelines FAQ
The questions teams ask before they ship their first brand book.