Inside the ‘haus: How we applied Design Thinking to clarify and strengthen our Brand Identity.
betahaus is one of the pioneers of coworking in Europe and has been leading the market for more than a decade now. Over the past 10 years, we’ve evolved from a small collaborative space to a coworking community with 2 locations in Berlin, more than 70 partner spaces around the globe, and a 1,000+ member community of freelancers, startups, teams, and creatives in Berlin.
2019 has been a big year for betahaus — we’ve moved out of our original space and opened two new locations in Berlin. And since we’re continuously growing and changing, it was time to rethink our branding and remind ourselves where we started, where we’re at now, what we stand for, and what makes us different now that there are 100+ coworking spaces in Berlin.
By definition, branding means ‘’the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.’’ To us, a brand identity is a sum of how our services look, feel, and speak to people and what we’re promising to our customers.
In order to update and upgrade our brand identity, we jumped into a Design Thinking sprint. Design Thinking is a methodology for innovation which is based on playful brainstorming, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Our session was guided by Christian Nowatzky and was based on reflection, brainstorm games and synthesis.
Step 1: Competition & Market Research
To start with, we examined the general coworking market in Berlin, taking a look at our competitors by evaluating their online presence, messaging and focuses. We concentrated on the 6 spaces closest to our business size and values and tried to find to what extent our services are similar or different to their vision.
It was easy to distinguish two types of spaces on the market — those who were more focused on the space itself (architecture, interior design, and facilities) and those who were relying more on community and overall experience (atmosphere, spirit, people connections).
We created a chart with two variables. The horizontal one representing the company’s focus (physical space vs. community) and the vertical axis marking its personality (performance vs. alternative). We placed betahaus next to our competitors to better understand our niche in the market.
This was an important exercise not only to understand the current situation on the coworking market but also to recognize opportunity points for our business and focus at a space or directions not yet developed.
Step 2: Awareness Brand Development: A Positive Inquiry
Moving out of our original building into two new locations in 2019 was a big step for betahaus and a serious challenge for the brand. Since we sell space as a service, interior design, architecture, and even the location of a space are crucial parts of our member’s experience and our brand as a whole.
That’s why the second step of our process was to review the feel and the look of betahaus before and after our move. We took a look at how our space and membership had changed, but chose to focus on the positive.
We asked ourselves 3 questions:
- When was the brand identity of betahaus most clear?
- What was good about it?
- What was ‘’typical betahaus’’ back then?
For comparison, we referenced the current look and atmosphere of our houses to find points for improvements. In our second round of evaluation, we described the feel of betahaus after the move in the new locations using different color codes.
This exercise helped us remember where we came from and what made the atmosphere at our place unique in comparison to other spaces. Opening two new spaces in 2019 and building their interior and atmosphere from scratch, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t move too far from where we started and what made betahaus special.
Step 3: The Golden Circle — Our What, How and Why?
The model of the Golden Circle, presented at a TEDTalk in 2009 by Simon Synek, explains how a business can stand out from similar competitors by communicating its differences. The Golden Circle suggest finding the answers to these three questions:
- What do we do?
- How do we do it?
- Why do we do it?
The answers to these questions give greater clarity to the product or services a business provides. According to Sinek, if a company wants to be successful, it should focus on the core question in the Golden Circle: the Why (read more in his book Starting With Why for a good read!). Sinek explains that the ‘Why’ is probably the most important message that an organization or individual can communicate. It is what inspires others to action. It communicates your purpose and the reason you exist. Gives an explanation as to why you behave the way that you do.
Filling in the circles and arranging our services turned out to be much harder than we thought. However, once we started from the center and clarified our purpose, the rest fell easily into place.
The Result:
- What we do: We create spaces that inspire ideas and foster collaboration. Spaces for purpose-driven individuals on their entrepreneurial journey
- How we do it: By providing Coworking Spaces, Event Spaces and Team Spaces and generating a Supportive Network of creative, innovative and open-minded people
- Why we do it (Mission): Because we believe that work is much more than just a job and should bring fulfillment and joy on a daily basis. We believe that the future workspace should foster innovation and sustainable growth for its members.
Step 4: Clarifying The betahaus Persona
Once we were clear on how and why we do what we do, it was time to reconnect with our target audience. Building a brand persona is a great exercise to get a better understanding of your key audience and create reliable and realistic representations of it.
A brand persona is a collection of personality traits, attitudes, and values that your brand showcases on a regular basis to help connect with a certain audience segment.
Points that need to be clarified for your brand persona are, for example:
- Describing the persona’s interests and daily life.
- Describing how your persona would speak, providing examples of what they would say about work.
- Describing how the persona engages with others.
- Expectations of what makes a great coworking space.
A good persona helps establish a valuable connection between customers and your brand and plays a crucial role in the company’s messaging. In this exercise, we came away with 3 separate personas for our different types of coworkers that gave greater detail to their different profiles, motivations, and frustrations.
Step 5: Brand Personality (Spectrum) — Setting Tone of Voice
The last step we took was to clarify our personality and tone of voice. We started with a list of opposing qualities with a spectrum between them. Everyone participating in the workshop had the chance to place a dot between the qualities, placing it closer to the one more aligned with our brand. The key here was not to overthink it!
This has been a topic of conversation since the move, and we were both surprised and excited to see that all 10 participants came up with similar answers. The values we came away with were that we are young rather than traditional, playful rather than serious, cheeky rather than nerdy… you get the idea.
Conclusion
This Design Thinking session turned out to be incredibly useful for both our sales and marketing teams. It helped offer clarity and direction for future work. The best thing about it, however, was that it managed it felt more like playing than doing work. We were brainstorming out loud, coming up with ideas, and sharing thoughts and memories, while our coach Christian worked as a facilitator making sense of all the input.
To check out some of the many changes this workshop brought, you can go to Our Story!
If you want to learn more about betahaus, check out our website or follow our updates on Instagram. For other insightful blog posts on coworking and community building, go to our Medium profile.
