The affect of brand may be bigger than you think
In the past two years Junction has grown from nothing more than an idea to an international community with events in Helsinki and Tokyo that gather thousands of hackers from around the globe. How big of an affect has brand had on the success of this growth story and what makes a hackathon brand special?
Why brand matters
Firstly, why does a brand and branding matter so much? Why do people pay 1.5–2x premiums for Apple products when they could get Android or Window’s for far less? And why are millenials increasingly accepting of paying such premiums for seemingly less in the specs department? Its quite simple really. A good brand can save people time and energy. And those are precisly the two resources that are becoming increasingly scarce in modern society.
Attention is more precious now than ever
With so many advertisers, applications, news feeds, and other tech constantly demanding our attention it has become harder than ever to actually do just that; capture the attention of a person and especially that of a millennial. It’s no news that with such an overload of stimulus its very difficult to stand out. And furthermore it’s not feasible for a normal person to consume so much stimulus. As a result people tune out everything that they deem as irrelevant and the decision of what’s relevant and what’s not is often made in a split second based off of your brand.
A good brand will save a customer’s time and energy by simplifying their decision making when it comes to choosing a product or service. To keep this customer coming back its then important that the brand that is being conveyed is true to the nature of the actual product or service being offered. In short, if you want to attract more customers and keep more customers coming back, it is worth taking a closer look at your brand.
How to brand a hackathon
There are many things to consider when building a hackathon brand. But perhaps the most important thing to consider is who are you building the event for? Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary target audiences? What do these people value, what is their “culture”? And is it possible to serve all three audiences with the same event or should you focus on a more specific niche? Decide who your event is for and consider if there are any other competing events targeting the same audiences. If there is, its not a problem, you just have to know your audience better and create a better offering!
Junction as a brand
When we started looking at the Junction brand in the beginning of 2016 a fundamental question we asked was; how are we different from other hackathons, what makes our hackathon special? Junction was created in 2015 and by then hackathons were already a fairly old concept. In order to really make waves with Junction something needed to be different. Most hackathons around the world are closely built with cooperation from the local university and typically are lead by computer science departments or guilds. We were an entrepreneurship society and built Junction completely separate from the university, so that already gave us a good starting point. In 2015 we focused on simply proving that a hackathon of that scale could be done in Helsinki whereas 2016 allowed us to double down on our grander vision of inspiring and introducing more people into the world of technology.
Most hackathons are built with computer science students in mind, we built Junction with everyone else in mind. We wanted to “humanize” the hacking scene and make it more easily approachable. We wanted to gather not only CS students, but designers, and even business developers as well. The best way to do that we realized was to create a more emotional brand, one that doesn’t rely just on technical specs but makes people feel something!
Lets take a case example. Check out the video of Junction 2016 below:
From one frame of reference Junction is just an event where lots of people come to a themed venue, mess around with some tech, and then leave. And in that case it would have been very easy to create a video showing people building things, overlay it with some music, and call it done. But from another frame of reference Junction is way way more than that. Junction is a unique experience that allows you to connect with hundreds of bright people from around the globe just like you. Junction inspires and instills in you the power to imagine, create, and bring into the world something that the world has never seen before. By creating a narrative through a carefully scripted voiceover we can paint the Junction weekend as a story that you don’t want to miss. Stories by nature are emotional and emotions move people to take action.
Branding like marketing is a two way street
Ultimately building a good brand isn’t about making pretty promo videos and flashy Facebook cover photos, its about being a good listener and figuring out what things are valuable to the audience that you are trying to cater to. For us, this meant creating visuals, copywriting, and an event that appeals to emotion as well as logic. It’s not rocket science, listen to what people want and then give it to them.
The sign of a good brand
In conclusion, some things to consider and look out for when creating your next brand:
People don’t buy logic, they buy emotion backed by logic. -Capture people with emotion but don’t forget to play to their reasoning as well.
People make quick decisions. -Simplify decision making by being clean, simple, and true to the actual nature of your offering.
Consistency is key. -Consistency builds trust. Never break trust with your customers or audience.
This is a 5 story series about my journey as Recruiting Team Member and later Head of Marketing for Junction, the world’s most exciting hackathon. Read the other stories:
