Your Start-Up’s Most Valuable Asset: Your Brand
In the beginning, hardly anyone thinks about creating their brand. Most people do not see the value, yet we all cherish big brands like Coca-Cola, BMW, or Apple. We all know about Steve Jobs’ obsession with details and for quality design — even the font for his hardware company had to be outstanding.
A brand anchors your vision and values and provides everyone with a clear path forward. This is even more important to bring cohesion in decentralized projects like HOPR, where most team members are in Switzerland, but not everyone. Gifted talents are rare, so a company needs to be flexible when looking for the right ones. So we decided to make branding a priority, building it in parallel with our protocol.
But how is a brand created?
As a development-focused — and developer-founded — team, we often give preference to pushing code over aesthetics. (Heck, we at HOPR announced our first testnet one week after our funding announcement and launch!) But, we realize the importance of having the right branding and messaging as we harbor grand ambitions — to bring data privacy to EVERYONE. Recently, we started working with the award-winning branding agency, Jung von Matt/brand identity, who have shaped brands like Ricola, Bank Raiffeisen, Swiss Re, Emmi, Parmigiani...
We began with a deep dive and probing discussion to create the HOPR brand compass, summarizing values, differentiators, tonality, and benefits. The brand compass is used to derive the brand essence ‘out’ of the founders. The brand is already there, in the heads of the entrepreneurs, but a thorough and complex process is needed — working with experts in design, messaging, and user experience — to put this into images and words.
The positioning of the company — including the resulting look and feel of the new brand — creates an experience for everybody and gives them a much better idea of the core mission and mantra. A properly conceived brand creates trust and awareness. This trust is the most important element in conducting business, whether it’s with investors, clients or, most importantly, your team members. Especially in the beginning when you are growing very fast, it is crucial to have a clear vision and mission. You need to implement the right culture, which will attract the best matching talents.
In whiteboarding our values with the JvM/brand identity team, we conveyed that our dream is that digitalization can improve our lives without costing us all of our privacy. We believe that everyone should be able to make decisions in their lives as freely and uninfluenced as possible. Thus, after numerous telephone calls and three intense, live hands-on workshops, our new mantra and tagline was born: Changing Data Privacy For Good.
Too often, data privacy and identity protection have negative connotations. Leaders in this space try and instill fear about what people are doing with your data or they spend an unhealthy amount of time criticizing other projects. We are here to say that data privacy is an important mission with huge future implications. We support all players in the space, while also welcoming everyone to our ecosystem.
With the HOPR protocol, data privacy is solved — and anyone can use it freely. This lets everyone focus on their idea of how digitalization can help people. We are boosting the best and provide the basis for the development of world-changing products.
JvM also helped us translate the main goal of protecting data privacy into the design:
One thing you’ll see in the new branding is a yellow ball, the HOPR. This HOPR takes on a function and becomes a symbol of control over one’s data. It changes the context by hiding or showing elements — showcasing why it is so important to choose what you want to share with whom. Static or animated, it becomes an identity-forming element, which gives the appearance a concise character. It is easy to use and lot of fun to work with.
— Christina Widmann, Design Director, Jung von Matt/brand identity.
Our image and message convey these ideas of privacy. We invite you to check out our new website branding and messaging: https://hoprnet.org/ And don’t forget to check out our tech! https://github.com/hoprnet
People seek clear identities and brands are lived identities. They create identification, enthusiasm, credibility and trust. But only brands that can be experienced make strategies become reality, make them understandable and create added value. At Jung von Matt/brand identity, we build brand identities with you and support you in managing and developing your brand. We aim to inspire people and brands with our work.
— Dr. Thomas Deigendesch, Managing Partner, Jung von Matt/brand identity
Lastly, we invite you to read our manifesto below. Creating the manifesto was one of the most intense but important parts of the branding process. It enshrines what HOPR is, what we stand for, and acts as a beacon for like-minded people who want to join our quest. We hope that includes you!
The HOPR Manifesto
The speed of innovation is increasing every day, and so is the amount of data harvested about us. We have the dream that digitalization can improve our lives without costing us all of our privacy.
We have the dream that everyone should be able to make decisions in their lives as freely and uninfluenced as possible. We know that decentralized technologies aren’t just hype, but powerful solutions to this challenge. That’s why we’ve set out to build the essential foundations that support these solutions, and are constantly looking for ways to improve privacy standards in the digital world.
We know we aren’t alone in this dream. So, in the spirit of Swiss neutrality and respect for privacy, we created HOPR as an association which belongs not to one but to all, making us independent, incorruptible and indestructible.
Everyone can become a part of HOPR. Our community is a vivid organism made up of different people who share the same goal:
Changing data privacy for good.
A very special thank you to Julius Jäger, Christina Widmann and their team for this great partnership and result!
Sincerely,
Rik Krieger, HOPR Co-Founder
