A startup’s guide to branding
As soon as you start a new company, your brand will be somehow exposed to the outside world, and brand management will become a topic. But, as a startup, you might not have the right people in-house to develop a proper brand, the time to do it by yourself, nor the money to hire an agency which takes care of your brand, right? Wrong. In the following passages, I want to show you why you should (and how you can) manage your brand from the very beginning, without having to conduct rocket-science-esque stuff.
Creating a brand identity
New startups are springing up like mushrooms. You’ll surely find another company with at least a similar business idea. That’s why you’ll have to differentiate yourself from the competition by other means. Thereby, a unique and recognizable brand helps. Your brand depicts your company’s identity. Especially when you work in a startup, you’ll tend to identify yourself with your business and might be interested in displaying your startup to the outside world in a good light. I’m pretty sure you care about your company as if it’s an extension of yourself. From the way you talk, through to how you visually display your startup on, let’s say your website, to the writing style you use to communicate, every contact point you have with your customer influences how they perceive your brand. That’s why you want to make sure that these things are taking place as you like. This can be done by setting up a brand framework, or how we call it, Style Guide. Once your Style Guide is in place, every co-worker can look up which logo and colors to use, what your company’s vision and mission is, what your social media posts should look like, and much more. This will simplify the consistent delivery of your brand across all channels.
Would you even remember a new brand when you don’t see the same logo at least twice? I doubt it.
Now, you might think that consistency isn’t that important at an early stage, as changes will come anyway. But ask yourself: would you perceive a startup, with deviating logos, colors, and fonts every time you come into contact with them, as trustworthy, professional, and reliable? Would you even remember a new brand when you don’t see the same logo at least twice? I doubt it. A Style Guide, therefore, helps to determine your identity and express it to the world.
Consistency not rigidity
Having said that, you have to establish consistency, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any adoptions as your business grows. Remember, the only thing you can be sure of when building your own startup is that you cannot be sure of anything — maybe that you’ll drink a lot of beer, but that’s all I promise.
But how can you be consistent and flexible at the same time? Consistency doesn’t equal rigidity.
Changes will come along, especially at an early stage. As time passes by, you’ll get a better picture of the market requirements, and modify your product according to the needs identified. In such a situation, you want your brand to be flexible enough to adapt to the new circumstances. By having a dynamic Style Guide like Frontify in place, you’re able to match these changes easily and communicate them quickly and comprehensively. But how can you be consistent and flexible at the same time? Consistency doesn’t equal rigidity. By knowing what elements of your Style Guide should be defined in a narrow sense and which not, you can ensure both, consistency and flexibility. Let me explain. Visual, linguistic and writing definitions in your Style Guide have the largest impact on customer perception, if they are kept constant.
At the same time, you want to have a rather abstract definition of your vision to enable your startup to keep up with the time. Take the vision of Amazon as an example: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Even though they started as an online bookstore, they didn’t include the term books into their vision and, hence, they were able to revolutionize their own business by introducing e-books and other consumer goods. At the same time, they stayed loyal to their customer-centric vision.
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Setting up brand guidelines further helps to organize and coordinate your work. In an early stage, you won’t have any clear-cut roles defined. Instead, working together on issues will be the norm. Something you’ll have to do from the very beginning, irrespective of whether or not you have the required skills within the team, is to communicate your brand to the customers, be it in an email, a social media post, or via your website. Especially in such a situation, it makes sense to bundle your resources and create a Style Guide for your company. It’s definitely within the realms of possibility, even for a padawan. Actually, we have set up a walk through Style Guide for this very purpose — check it out.
The tipping point is that not doing any branding is still doing some branding.
Back to topic, you have to take into account the scenario that you, hopefully, will grow bigger. Already having a functioning Style Guide, then, brings along several advantages. First, a Style Guide enables you to share your brand guidelines with everyone, be it with your existing team, new coworkers, or external designers, and embed them into an existing brand strategy framework. This is great. Recall that your brand quality is determined by every touch point your business has with your customers. Second, you can save time by reusing stored patterns you’ve created previous websites, or apps with. This, again, results in customers getting familiar with your systems and products.
Lastly, by creating a Style Guide right from the start, you avoid cleaning up the mess you made during your non-branding time. The tipping point is that not doing any branding is still doing some branding. Your brand is determined by how people perceive it, and people make a picture of your brand, independently of whether or not you invest in branding. By actively nurturing your brand work, you can take your brand into the wished direction.
About Frontify
Frontify makes building design guidelines and code patterns an easy and collaborative experience. With designers, developers, and clients all on the same page, we save you valuable development time by cutting down the cross-team confusion.
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