Branding for Startups
CRUSH your brand where it matters. Forget the rest.
It’s easy for new companies to burn resources on branding and miss the mark all together. There’s a lot of outdated advice out there and outdated people to give it. I’d like to show you the old, inefficient way, and a new, emerging practice, so you may navigate this shifting territory.
Brand is a weird thing.
Let’s break it down.
Brand is not a logo. It’s not a name. Branding is a big fat complicated thing because of how our brains work. A brand is nothing less than the space your company occupies in someone’s brain. The look, feel, voice, smell, sound. So much of what a brand is is qualitative.
Consider this analogy. If a company is a person, the brand is what they wear, how they sound, how they behave, whether or not they look like they belong at the party. For instance, if someone appears well-to-do, yet they always turn the conversation to the topic of their success, they come off as desperate. If someone stands too close to you in an elevator, you notice it and you think less of them for it. Admit it!
The same social factors I just described are at play when we deal with brands. That explains why traditionally it’s been a long, thoughtful process to cook up a brand from scratch.
There are a few brand components (logo, voice, vibe, mood, color, and typography) that can be expressed across a huge multi-verse of potential experiences. But for new companies and products looking to establish a brand, not all of those experiences are important to consider right now. This runs counter to aging best practices.
First, let’s look at the old way: The Big Agency Branding Exercise
Agency branding exercises are designed to make brands that scale — to cover off on the entire universe of brand experience, however large it may grow in the future.
Here is a typical brand ecosystem that an agency might cover:
It’s not unusual for this to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The exercise is politically charged because of all the money being spent. The process becomes about stakeholder consensus building more than anything else.
When launching a product or company, we know that it must appear legit, polished and consistent if anyone is to give it the time of day. In short, you need a solid brand experience. But how can you invest so much capital into something you aren’t sure will survive? What’s a startup to do? Here’s what…
There is a new, better way to do branding.
There is a slice of the larger brand experience that you must crush.
Narrow your effort to your most important points of contact.
Isolate the slice of the larger branding ecosystem that your venture really needs. Then CRUSH THAT SLICE. Articulating this slice is the mechanism through which you control your branding timeline and cost.
Here’s how you determine your slice. All ventures need to have the following to be minimally viable: Acquisitions, Activations, Retentions, Referrals, Revenue. For our purposes we will consider the first four.
These four stages have brand artifacts your customer will interact with. For instance, Acquisitions might happen with Google Adwords and a landing page. Activation with the landing page, sign up flow and a thank you email. Retention with exceeding your brand promise. You’re only concerned with certain customer touch-points early in the game.
Here are the brand components we mentioned earlier:
The things that apply to all points of customer / brand contact; logo, voice, vibe, mood, color, and typography.
(The stickies with blue underlines)
Here are some likely acquisition points for a startup or validation team:
(The stickies with pink dots)
You will be expressing your brand (logo, color, mood, vibe etc) in the context of a few key areas (landing page, website, SEM, biz dev etc).
Find the Right Touch-Points for Your Early Brand
Become familiar with Innovation Accounting to find the necessary touch-points in your acquisition channel. THAT is where you should focus your brand expression. Then turn your focus on Activation, Retention and Referral touch-points.
There are many places on which you risk wasting your precious resources. Anything that is not a completely necessary point of customer contact for your near term goals is a waste of resources.
(The stickies with red Xs)
Don’t let anyone freak you out about your brand not scaling. They are parroting best practices from a bygone era. (← tweet it.)
You want your brand to scale only in your key touch-points and be flexible enough to allow you to reach your near-term goals.
Now, once you’ve found your slice, you still need to crush it. You’ll need seasoned creatives who can bring their talents and instincts to bear on the problem. Like I said, brand is qualitative and complex. It’s like a relationship with a person. That’s why we must narrow the scope to interactions that matter most. If your company is like a person, then be mindful of who your chatting with at the party. Don’t blow your immediated interaction by being distracted by future interactions that may or may not happen.
There are teams that have a solid understanding of these emerging best practices. Talk to them for help.
The resources you save in not considering a full scale brand can be applied to getting your entire team focused on your customers’ needs and your near-term goals.
Love,
Andi
More about Andi:
Andi Plantenberg is an innovation consultant who builds entrepreneurial capabilities in the enterprise. She's also a long-time mentor for startups in the Bay Area (500 startups, IndieBio, Singularity University).The large companies that work with Andi are foreseeing disruption. They are looking to stand up innovation in their org to prepare for it. The smaller companies are seeking product / market fit through experimentation and validated learning.
Prior, Andi co-founded Singlebound Creative in 2000. The Product Studio / Digital Agency had an eleven year run and served Fortune 500 clients and visionary startups. In its later years, Singlebound partnered with VC firms to spin up new pilot ventures.
