Establishing the right Brand Identity for your Startup

Establishing brand identity is like dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. It’s about persuading people — customers, VCs, your parents — that you’re serious about what you’re doing and mean to succeed.

Thanks to the glorious internet every company, however small, now has a shopfront which they can use to publicize this intent. In consequence we, the discerning public, have come to expect great things from these shop fronts and a major industry has grown up to provide us with what we want.

However, freshly launched startups run largely on ideas and hope so don’t necessarily have anything to sell in their shopfronts. From a marketing point of view this is difficult. On the one hand you want to show how cool and slick your startup is with a fancy website, but on the other hand you don’t have any data on which to base your brand identity hypotheses. What do you do?

Copy or invert the competition

Some people cheat. They look around for a company with a (hopefully) similar clientele and get as close as they can to copying the images on their website and the stylings of their logo. Theses companies are usually in B2C marketplaces and take heavy inspiration from the San Fran/Berlin hipster scene.

Other people try inversion. Rather than trying to fit in and give customers what they expect from someone in your industry, you do the opposite. Easyjet saw that in their target marketplace no one else was using orange, so they adopted it as their signature colour and put it everywhere. Airline branding previously focussed on blue; orange being the opposite of blue was a neat way to get customers to realise that Easyjet was a different kind of company.

If this method is to be successful it can only be done by one or two players in each market — you’ve got to get in first.

Both of these methods can be successful, especially inversion, and may help to convince potential investors that you understand what branding is and give them faith in your business skills. However, to build a really strong brand identity you need to show that your company is unique.

Technology innovation startups are the hardest to brand

There are startups and startups. Any new small business may be called a startup under some definitions, but those who have the most difficulty in generating a brand identity are those trying to capitalise on innovative technology.

If you’re in this category, you begin with the premise that you have a technology which you think others may want to pay for, but you don’t yet know exactly who, when, or how much. Often you don’t even know what part of your innovation is the bit that will sell. Building a brand identity early on is a way of giving your customers something to hold on to, it should also help you establish both your product and your marketplace.

Tip: Be different

Bold colours, hand-drawn effect graphics, sans-serif typeface, fancy infographics with rocket ships — this might be a list of items from a 2010 ‘how to brand your startup’ kit, but they’re not enough anymore.

Consumers these days expect more, they expect personalisation and they expect humour — especially in the B2C marketplace. This excellent instructional video gives the example of how adding a whimsical dinosaur roar to the login link increased customer loyalty. Although this might seem like a quirky UI feature, it is really just another part of the company branding package, projecting the image of a friendly, light-hearted company.

Keep your eye on the ball

Startups are constantly evolving in the first few years, which means that the company branding has to evolve too. It is important to continually reassess the message that your logo, colour-scheme and graphic stylings project to your customers. If you started out hoping to sell your software to international banks, but have ended up selling it to small businesses, you’ll need to rethink how your branding will be seen by your customers.

For this reason, it doesn’t matter too much if you get the branding a bit wrong in the beginning. It’s much better to work with a freelance or in-house designer who will keep your branding fresh and pertinent to your marketplace, than to pay an external company a lump sum to provide a fancy branding package which you outgrow within six months.