Companies value their branding because it's the public face of a company. It's very visible, and if not everywhere, then certainly in a lot of places. And there are a lot of people across any large organization who might wind up having to put together printed materials that include branding elements: it can range from an assistant ordering business cards for a new hire, to a random staffer wanting to put an ad in a local high school musical's program booklet, to the team working on the organization's website.
Brand guidelines tend to seem expansive because they have to break things down in a way that's very easy for all sorts of people to adopt with minimal hassle. From what I've seen, the moment that process gets anywhere within a thousand miles of difficult, people will say "forget it" and do what they want.
Despite all that, branding doesn't really require much in the way of ongoing resource commitments from an organization. They get put together when the brand is updated, and more often than not, the entire process is often outsourced to agencies. Either way, once it's done, it's done for a while.
It's also often publicly available. You can find brand guides for all sorts of companies and organizations available online. Technical documentation is almost always internal, unless we're talking about stuff that's been open-sourced, API documentation, etc. It's also ongoing and is in constant need of updating as code gets updated. As a result, there's no need to pretty it up beyond whatever makes it accessible to your developers. The priority is on keeping it updated as best you can, within the limits of available resources. That doesn't always happen, of course.
Different audiences merit different approaches, and because one is more visible, it may give the false impression that it's of higher importance to an organization.
Brand guidelines tend to seem expansive because they have to break things down in a way that's very easy for all sorts of people to adopt with minimal hassle. From what I've seen, the moment that process gets anywhere within a thousand miles of difficult, people will say "forget it" and do what they want.
Despite all that, branding doesn't really require much in the way of ongoing resource commitments from an organization. They get put together when the brand is updated, and more often than not, the entire process is often outsourced to agencies. Either way, once it's done, it's done for a while.
It's also often publicly available. You can find brand guides for all sorts of companies and organizations available online. Technical documentation is almost always internal, unless we're talking about stuff that's been open-sourced, API documentation, etc. It's also ongoing and is in constant need of updating as code gets updated. As a result, there's no need to pretty it up beyond whatever makes it accessible to your developers. The priority is on keeping it updated as best you can, within the limits of available resources. That doesn't always happen, of course.
Different audiences merit different approaches, and because one is more visible, it may give the false impression that it's of higher importance to an organization.