On branding a startup: decision-making and commitment
Any seasoned brand designer will tell you that, on average, a carefully crafted visual identity of any brand could last you half a decade before a “tweak” is due. Time seems to work differently in startup land. There isn’t much of it, and when you do find some, it runs out quickly. The lifespan of a startup’s visual identity can range from a month to a year. No, I haven’t lost all hope in my designer peers. It usually isn’t anything to do with their ability to create yet another beautiful, unique world. It’s just the nature of the fickle beast they’re trying to dress.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out every brand designer has a love-hate relationship with startups. What brand designers value is commitment and longevity. What startups value is pace and agility. So when a startup needs branding, a little friction is bound to happen. Modern day consumers want a constant stream of shiny, new things and no one, not even brand designers, have an interest in slowing that down. But sometimes that’s just what you need to do to build some solid brand foundations.
After laying those foundations, decisiveness and commitment are two crucial factors that determine how successful a brand will be. You can design an amazing visual identity, set a strong positioning and have all your customer journeys perfectly aligned, but if you never decide when something is done or change your mind each week, you’re basically starting over building brand value each time.
And that is why commitment is so crucial. Ask any designer how best to measure a brand’s value and they will tell you to come back after you’ve consistently ran with it for a few years. People don’t build relationships over night, whether that’s with other people or with brands (although, dogs could be the exception). Relationships need time to mature. But as mentioned before, time is precious in startup land.
So what do you do when you have little to no time, but you do understand the importance of branding? This is how we went about it at Hedgehog.
Bring the brand in-house
When a brand agency takes on a branding job, the point is that they immerse themselves fully into the company they’re working for. They need to become one of the team to understand what is happening on the inside, test the temperature and unearth the so-called ‘core’ to set a positioning that can last the company at least a decade. It’s a big job that costs a ton. And at the end of it, when the brand is ‘done’, they hand over a set of guidelines and they leave. But a brand is never really done. It’s a living, breathing thing that evolves as the company grows. Especially in a startup’s lifecycle, there will be many changes, pivots and turns. And to pay an agency each time to navigate that, would leave any company bankrupt.
So at Hedgehog, it was decided to bring brand design in-house as opposed to hiring an agency to do the job. The upside is that you invest in full dedication for an unlimited time. The downside: it’s just a few of us. No twenty-men-strong powerhouse to get us through all of the branding hurdles. But we manage. Again, it’s about decisiveness and commitment: what’s most important now.
Spend valuable time where it counts
Last year, we spent quite a good chunk of time focussing on getting our own positioning right. With the help of a strategist, we worked our way through quite a few workshops, and got to figure out where we all stood on the matter. Fortunately, we were on the same page for most of it. As a young company, we knew that as long as our purpose was clear to the team and our mission was clear to our audience, it didn’t matter if our visual representation, tone of voice and content strategy would change over time. Since then, we have already seen a visual restyle and restructuring of our key messaging. But we are also starting to see visual elements powerful enough to survive a few years, such as our prominent colour orange and our Hedgehog icon. Most importantly, our entire team stands behind our positioning, because we took the time to carefully formulate it together. It definitely helps knowing that everyone else knows what our positioning is, so we are never in doubt about what we’re working on at Hedgehog.
Get to know your audience
Since the rise of neobanks, financial services brands have hung up their boring old suits for good and are now flashing edgy, colourful outfits. An easy shift in style, if your early adopters are young, tech-savvy Gen Zs. Even though the emoji-laden apps might seem to only provoke impulsive and rash handling of transactions and payments, the digital natives that hold them dear could be building the banks of the future. Because if the cool kids dig it, it must be good, right?
For investing, especially in private markets, it isn’t so straightforward. This industry can’t cast their net as wide as the banking industry, because even though everyone needs to handle their finances, not everyone can invest. So finding an early adopter type is even trickier, when your overall audience is already quite niche. There is no ‘follow the herd’ mentality that can be applied here. We have to be very articulate to an already suspicious, risk-averse audience. Defining an eye-catching, non-traditional brand to suit that is a challenge.
Luckily, the team at Hedgehog understands that communication is another vital part of building a brand. Talking to our potential audience has helped us massively in understanding what they value. We work each day to reflect that in every aspect of our brand, whether that’s our visual identity, our content or the experience of investing on our platform. I’m sure we will see another “tweak” or two in Hedgehog’s lifetime, but our positioning will most likely survive them all. It’s the one truth that never has to shift. Our audience can fully rely on that.
