How to create a brand from scratch: branding allygator shuttle
door2door is a startup based in Berlin tackling public transport issues. In Spring of this year, we launched a brand new product. For those looking for inspiration on how to launch a new brand, I have put together an overview of the steps we took to develop our allygator brand. If you’re looking for a shorter read, check out my post on the door2door blog!
Stage 1: Identify your audience. Identify your value proposition. Then brainstorm!
One of my favourite tasks within my role as a visual designer is brand design. I love telling a story through colour, type and visuals. As soon as we learned about our new product, Demand Responsive Transport (DRT), I had a million little story ideas floating through my mind and couldn’t wait to get started. But we took a step back, as the most essential part of brand design is the beginning; you need a strong foundation to build a successful brand.
We are a small design and marketing team and so we work well interdepartmentally. During our pre-launch this meant our design and marketing team worked closely together. Almost weekly, we would escape to our founder’s house and identify what role we might play in the market. During our first sessions we developed user personas. Then we moved on to competitive analysis, positioning and developing a value proposition. Only after these steps did we come up with a brand name and begin developing visuals for the brand.
Take away: Before you start designing, know who you are designing for and what you are designing. Work with your marketing team to develop user personas and a value propositions before you start designing.
Stage 2: Identify what your audience wants to see, feel, and how they want to appear to inspire creativity. Identify what brands they might already be following.
Once we had identified our users and value proposition, I began to develop visuals for the brand. I asked what our two user personas: the urbanists (think hipsters drinking pour-over coffees) and early adopters (think Tech crunch readers and product hunt users) would want to see, feel, and how they would want to appear .
When I develop brand applications, I find it useful to refer to other companies with strong brands. While developing the product brand, I drew a lot of inspiration from Casper, Apple and Squarespace. Each of these brands represent a part of the market we were in targeting.
Channeling the urbanist: Casper has mastered the art of selling a hip luxurious lifestyle while still keeping themselves cheeky and fun. We wanted to integrate both their approachability and fun into our own brand.
Channeling the early adopter: Apple for most people is synonymous with innovation. Apple is minimalist, smart and always trendy. We bring innovation to the mobility sector and we wanted our brand to reflect innovativeness and ingenuity.
Appealing to a little bit of both: Squarespace has done a wonderful job of appearing both chic and smart without losing its carefree feel. It empowers anyone to make their own website whether they have any coding skills or not.
Stage 3: Collaboration with marketing and company stakeholders (CEO, COO)
Only after this research and some extensive brainstorming, was I able to develop several potential brands moods:
Our start of something new theme focused was how DRT would change the city and how they could be a part of it. As a “revolutionary product” our brand would feel cheeky and youthful. The brand should feel like they were bringing something new to their cities.
Our simple rides for busy lives theme was built with the early adopter in mind. Technology inspires these people. They believe that technology can solve any problem with which they are presented. Drawing inspiration from apple’s minimalist design, our approach here was clean and simple. Two words we wanted others to associate with DRT.
Ultimately, however, the city is a jungle theme is what appealed most to us, because of how closely it represented our vision (more on that below!). From our brand mood, we were able to move forward with the chosen name: allygator shuttle.
Take away: When developing a brand, put yourself into the user’s shoes and use brands they might already be following as inspiration.
Remember your company’s vision and mission when developing a brand
After initial ideation, our design team and marketing team retreated to our founder’s apartment. Together, we worked through the different concepts.
During the launch of our allygator shuttle, we worked closely with our CEO. Working closely with our CEO, Maxim Nohroudi, meant we had a clear understanding of the company’s mission.
At door2door, we partner with public transport operators to improve transit in the city. New travel patterns are affecting how people move around the city. This is also changing people’s relationship to car-ownership. As people become less dependent on personal vehicles, Public Transit Operators have a great opportunity to better serve a higher demand by modernising their transit system. You can read more about our vision here.
We believe that improved Public Transit infrastructure will mean the the cities of tomorrow could exist without privately owned vehicles. Because we worked so closely with our founder, we knew that this too had to be an essential part of our brand as well.
Take away: Having a few sessions with a higher-up in the company during early ideation stages will allow you to develop a brand that aligns with the company’s goals and vision.
Stage 4: Brand development
allygator shuttle: the vision of a smarter, greener city represented in a cheeky fun brand
It was only after these brainstorms that we were able to arrive at the brand mood we liked the best. The city is a jungle — the brand is fresh and new, but also really fun. And we were the refreshing way to travel around the city. No more smelly U-Bahns for us!
Since we came back to the vision of a city without personal cars again and again it became clear that this was best represented through “the city is a jungle” theme and it didn’t take long to convince our marketing team and CEO to go with this fresh and cheeky theme.
Only then were we able to create a complete brand. When developing a brand here are various components we considered and what we ultimately decided for allygator shuttle.
Brand Tone: Colours, typefaces and graphic style needed to match the cheeky, bold and fun tone.
Brand Colours:
- The jungle theme gave us a general palette: greens and blues.
- We tweaked the colours to find the most balanced option. The palette would need to be designed in an app as well so we needed to make it work for digital design.
- We centred on a cool but current palette. A bright, cool green acts as the primary ‘pop!’ colour while a darker, warmer green supports it. A dark blue acts as a tertiary colour, to be used for backgrounds as well as for extended text.
Brand Graphics:
- Picking a graphic style was tricky — do we go with line drawings, or a flat colourful style? What would work best for our multiple applications? We thought back to our brand tone, and decided that a flat, simple, abstracted style would be best. We didn’t want to be overly realistic or serious, but rather wanted to keep things fun and interesting for our users.
- We came up with a set of rules for when to use jungle-themed graphics (monkeys and the like) and city-centric graphics with people.
Brand Typography:
- We experimented with a wide variety of typefaces, although from the start knew it would be a sans-serif.
- We developed our graphic style at the same time as our typographic style, and ended up choosing Neutraface, a geometric sans-serif. It had the most in common with our illustration style, and felt like a nice fit with our quirky and friendly brand.
A quick review
Steps taken before developing the brand:
- Developed user personas
- Identified competitor’s branding
- Identified key concepts that needed to be represented in visuals
Where we drew inspiration:
- The cheekiness and coolness of Casper
- The fresh clean lines of Apple
- The accessibility and openness of Squarespace
- Our vision of a city free of privately owned vehicles
Important takeaways:
- Developing a brand takes time and effort. Make sure to play around and make sure that there is good communication between the design and marketing team.
- Working closely with our founder allowed us to align our marketing message and branding with their vision.
Check out the allygator shuttle website to see the brand design in action!
