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By Yvonne Meacham
Public relations is all about identity: creating one, improving one and sustaining one. The best way to establish a company's identity is through repetition and consistency of its key messages. But if your company relies on many individuals or departments to produce its materials, often the message is not consistency but confusion.
One department might place the company's logo at the top centered, another at the bottom right. One department might spell e-mail with a hyphen, another without. One department might, on referring to a person for the second time, use their first name: "John," another a title and their last name, "Mr. Jones." These may seem like trivial points, but if a potential customer, media representative or key influencer (a trade analyst, for instance) receives documents from several departments within your company and they all appear to be coming from different sources, it does not reflect a cohesive organization.
The way to "homogenize" your company's documents is through a corporate style guide. Think of a corporate style guide as a hopper into which all of your company's documents are placed. When they emerge, they are all transformed into a family of documents. They may not contain the same information. Some may have graphics, others not. Each may serve different purposes. But a person looking at the two documents should see reflected in them a consistent personality. That personality comes through when a given convention for handling word choice, typeface, logo treatment and corporate colors is adhered to. That's where a style guide comes in.
The content of a company's style guide is highly individualized, and depends on the image the company wishes to convey, and the peculiarities of the company's jargon, formality or lack thereof, and many other factors. However, all style guides should contain two sections: a graphical style guide and a word-choice style guide.
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