(re)Branding for startups
7 lessons learnt and applied at papernest
Foreword : this is the translation of a recent article I posted about our rebranding. papernest (prev. Souscritoo) is a French startup founded in 2015 to help people move homes without the headache and hassle of the paperwork involved.
8.02am, Tuesday, October 17th, 2017. We’ve been biting our nails waiting for this moment— it’s now official and live on the Journal du Net : Souscritoo is no more, long live papernest!
After 6 months of hard work, creative briefs, moodboards, pixel-perfect obsessions and weekends spent on Slack, the seeds sown in April 2015 could finally shot out and bloom in a glorious #5A52FF.
Undeniably, this was a moment of intense pride, but equally one of relief, after all the delays we’d experienced and the doubts and frustrations that had been putting us on edge.
Because for an early-stage startup, branding is no easy endeavour: you know it’s important, but you know it’s a long-term effort and that you’re going to have a hard time accurately measuring results. You know it’s critical to the very foundations of your business, but that should you pivot, it could have you stuck. You want to keep it lean, but you know that a brand platform can’t be AB-tested like a landing page. You’re used to tidy metrics in Excel, and trusting your sole intuition is quite a leap.
With all of that in mind, figuring out when to start, how much time, energy and money to invest, or just how to get things done in the first place can be a serious challenge.
We’ve been through all of that at papernest, so we thought we might as well share what we’ve learnt, hoping it can be of use to the community 😇
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📆 First things first, let’s start by running you through the events :
- April 2017: brief preparation phase with the CEO to make crystal clear both our expectations and the reasons behind our rebranding, to pass along to the agencies we’ll be working with.
- May: kickoff with the naming agency. Intense brainstorming and whirlwind of post-it notes to churn out a first batch of ideas… ranging from French-cheese-based puns like “Rockform”, to “Paperoni”, to “Karate Click” (I kid you not).
- June: semantic buds are nipped, conceptual branches are pruned, and eventually out of the thick of it all emerges a shortlist. Roaming the corridors, out in the streets, we interview both the team and 100 or so strangers, and put together one convoluted scoring system after the other in an attempt to rationalise our choices. In the end, it’s behind closed doors, eyes set on the horizon, that a winner arises: papernest it shall be!
-July: kickoff with the creative agency that’ll be working on our identity, brand platform and website. A pinnacle of enthusiasm and ambition is reached at this point.
- August: briefs, debriefs, moodboards, manifestos, ideation and iterations. Concepts emerge, others are shut down, we explore, we doubt, we stress, we worry…clearly, the whole exercise is nowhere near as easy as we’d anticipated.
- September: the PR deal is negotiated and the launch date set, but on the creative side, we’re really not there yet… design and copywriting iterations fly through our inboxes, and despite the hardship, our dev teams take their places in the starting blocks.
- October: we’re getting there…! Green light on the new identity, the UI of papernest.com is ready, and now furiously, against the clock, our coders are coding to ship on time a website that we hope will elevate the result of six months’ work to something truly special.
Angst and fists raised to the sky on the 16th at 8pm, as publishing the website has broken a whole lot of other stuff, but heroically, our lead developer offers up his night’s sleep on the altar of respected deadlines.
- 8.02am, Tuesday, October 17th, 2017: you know the story…
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And now, what we’ve learnt from this adventure:
1. Above all else, your brand is a promise
There is no single definition of the term “brand”.
There’s the Elon Musk version: “Brand is simply a perception [people] have about a product”.
There’s the Seth Godin version: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”.
There’s the Jeff Bezos version: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
A tad less glamorous, there’s the Merriam-Webster version: “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer”
To list but a few.
And a lot of them assume your users/customers already care enough about what you do to project themselves into the universe of your product, and build mental models of the relationship that exists between them and it. As an early-stage startup, better remain modest: few and far between will be the users who find what we do so immersive already that they’ll spontaneously engage in such metaphysics.
It’s thus with our young age and product maturity in mind that we’ve defined the term “brand” at papernest: our brand is the promise we make to our (future) users.
A taste of the experience they can expect should they choose to give our service a try. Both an appetizer, and the words to describe what they’ll experience.
If we’ve done our job correctly, the promise is inviting enough for future users to project themselves into the problem we’re trying to solve, and convincing enough to get them to sign up. It’s also clear enough for the exercise of describing what we do to be effortless “when we’re not in the room”.
In defining brand that way, there’s a fundamental error to avoid, however. That of offering a promise the product and/or the experience can’t live up to. Or, to paraphrase Limp Bizkit : “don’t write checks with your mouth that your ass can’t cash”.
papernest is a promise of simplification. If you were to peruse our homepage (all in French for the moment, our sincerest apologies) you’d find highlighted there its UX facet: (translated) “From sign-up through to cancellation, we transfer your subscriptions and utilities in a couple clicks, for free.”
So what happens, then, if our forms don’t load, if we display incorrect prices, if we don’t follow-up correctly on the contracts we’ve signed our users up for, or if for some reason or other we lose their personal information? Our users would be prompt to let us know, and would also make sure to let their friends, family and online communities know with an ire exponentially amplified by the dissonance between the promise and the experience.
Which leads to one of the rules of the Internet we learnt quite quickly: it is now a quasi-genetic reflex to go up in arms on social media whenever we go through an unpleasant experience (think delayed trains, airlines misplacing luggage, or unresponsive cable companies). The opposite reflex however, is nowhere near as easy to trigger: lauding a service provider online rarely ever comes naturally, however excellent the service provided.
Nonetheless, those reflexes are what your brand’s livelihood will depend on.
Which helps us move forward with the question: when and how should a startup’s branding efforts be prioritised?
This is how we see things :
Think Maslow’s pyramid: the three levels are complementary, but must be built in that order.
Customer Experience: if you’ve never read Paul Graham, do! As a startup, you’ve still got quite a way to go before your product is truly and functionally a revolution — your customer service, however, can and should be amazing from day 1.
Product: for a startup to become a scale-up, the requirement is for product improvements to cause the number of support tickets to grow much slower than the number of users. Any other scenario will see your promise evaporate as the user experience lags behind.
Brand: defined here as the translation of your promise for all possible contexts, across all possible touchpoints. A compelling promise delivered by a customer experience and a product that match and exceed the bar that was set is the magic recipe for virality and explosive growth.
In conclusion: pouring significant time and money into your brand should only be done once you are functionally capable of holding the promise you’ve defined for your startup.
This doesn’t mean, however, that while your customer experience and product feed into the definition of your brand, the reverse shouldn’t happen. We’ll dig further into this a couple paragraphs down.
2. There will be no “eureka moment”
It’s hard not to dream of Hollywood-grade scenarii when first working on a creative project as ambitious as a rebranding. Crowds going wild, mesmerised by a theatrical unveiling for your new identity worthy of “you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984”…
Reality, however, inevitably brings you back down to earth. Nothing worst than having your dreams shot down, so spare your creative ego and assume no single choice will ever be unanimous.
Example: despite our best efforts to keep the creative cycles under control, the number of logo iterations for papernest probably hit the 100 mark. And not once during the 4–5 week process was there either, individually, love at first sight, or, collectively, a grand exclamation of “yes, that, is absolutely and unequivocally us”.
And it’s all pretty normal, actually.
On one hand, despite the desire to emotionally invest yourself in a given idea, there’s a natural tendency to hold back, for fear of being the only one to defend it. You proceed with caution and force yourself to find reasons to not like a concept you’d found pretty cool in the first place.
On the other, there’s the fact that a concept of an identity for a project with no history is nothing more than a possibility, it could very well be or not be, and will never be self-evident.
When you look today at the logos of FedEx, Apple or Nike, what enter your subconscious are the decades of ad campaigns they’ve run, added to the actual experiences you’ve had with their products. Their story is already told and is what your mind projects onto the simple shapes of their logos. Instantly, logo and company become inseparable, and from there comes their self-evidence.
Not so for an early stage startup. Nevertheless, there is no choice: its story isn’t (yet) written, but it needs an identity.
The birth and adoption of the “papernest” name illustrate this lack of self-evidence quite well.
The month is May 2017, and the naming agency has just provided us with a list of 25 proposals, among which papernest. We are only mildly convinced, and ask for 25 more. Ensues a week dedicated to shortlisting, which brings the tally down to 10, with no radical preference for any one name. We submit the list to the team for feedback — certain concepts strike a chord, certain sounds seem pleasant, but never to more than 60% of the population. Armed with patience and perseverance, we narrow the shortlist down to three finalists. In the specific case of papernest, we quite like the idea of “nest” but find “paper” to evoke the problem, not the solution. We rattle our brains to produce some 50 variations around “nest”, none of which convince quite enough. “So be it”, we’ll stick with papernest.
We field-test our three finalists. Yet again, one stands out for the sound, another for the meaning, another for the concept. I go for a pint with three friends: each one of them passionately defends a different option…
And it’s mired in this absolute lack of unanimity that we had to make up our mind. No eurekas, no crowds going wild. With a sigh, looking into the setting sun: “OK, it’ll be papernest”.
But that sigh was uncalled for. There’s a simple reality behind the emotional anti-climax of a process that seemed led more by elimination than by choice.
A choice of name, logo, typeface, colour, must produce a harmonious construct before all else. Their meaning and what they evoke both internally and externally are the result of what will happen next.
Nike could have been called “Light” and have had a feather for a logo, after 54 years of products, athletes and storytelling, the result would have been the same.
Under no circumstance today would we have the slightest inclination to trade papernest for something else.
3. “The answer to this problem, when found, will be simple.”
Allow me, if you will, to quote Bob Hoffman quoting Albert Einstein:
“Near the end of his life he was being interviewed. The interviewer asked Einstein if he thought a grand unified theory would ever be found. He said, “The answer to this problem, when found, will be simple.”
No matter how complex a marketing or advertising problem seems to be; no matter how much convoluted research has been done; no matter how many conflicting opinions there are; no matter how many “decks” have been written and Powerpoint presentations have been made, the correct answer, when found, is always simple.”
The Ad Contrarian, “Einstein on Advertising”
In other words: good branding is like a good pun (or a good UX), if it needs explaining, it isn’t.
To put this idea into practice, let me walk you through the details of our choice of name. As mentioned, there were three finalists : papernest, but also Ernesto, and Galapago.
Ernesto :
From the start, I had two metaphors in mind to describe our project:
- We’d want our users to think of us as something like what Alfred is to Batman: a discreet and continuous presence that discharges him of all the trivialities of modern life so he can focus on the one thing that matters: saving Gotham.
If Batman had his tax returns on his mind during his nightly escapades, his crime-fighting efficiency would surely be the victim.
Bringing it back to us: we want to rid our users of their daily administrivia, along with all the procrastination it causes, to give them back the time to do far greater things. - If our project was an animal, it would be a sloth, clad in a superhero cape (yes, I like superheroes). A sloth that would have transcended its own nature and vanquished procrastination, thanks to our service.
In essence, Ernesto was a personified brand, with a universe that was immediately defined and compelling. And, obviously, our offices would have been packed with superhero sloth plush toys.
Note that at this stage, the name could have been Ernesto or Slothy McSlothface, it wasn’t what mattered most.
Galapago :
Among the proposals we got from the naming agency, there were a couple iterations around the concept of tropical islands, notions of escape and serenity. The idea that we’d be offering a way out of administrative obligations, feet up, cocktail in hand. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Galapago stood out for several reasons.
1. Sound-wise, it had a pleasant ring to it
2. By devising a clever way of highlighting the “go” in Galapago, we immediately had a strong element of the brand identity: “go” would be our CTA, all the time, everywhere. Not to mention that managing to own the word “go” in our prospects’ minds would have been quite the achievement.
3. The Galapagos archipelago is home to an extremely rich fauna and flora. And that would have given us an instant and distinctive lexical field to name our app releases, our meeting rooms, our events…
4. There was a slightly “nerdy” second layer of meaning to it: the Galapagos islands were famously fertile to Charles Darwins’ musings about the origin of species. Tempting, therefore, to adopt an evolutionary metaphor for our project: Galapago, the herald of administrative darwinism.
papernest :
A single, cosy, welcoming place for important things of your life that would always and otherwise have been sources of anxiety and procrastination. A nest, in its ability to make you feel protected and untroubled. With papernest, the desire to create a feeling of serenity where it would have been thought impossible.
Focus on a single layer of meaning
Why go for the name with the most restrictive creative universe?
Galapago was an evocative idea, Ernesto an aspirational one. And the fact is that in both cases there are two layers of meaning: first, the implied metaphor, and second, how and why it makes sense with our business.
papernest was a functional choice, with a single layer of meaning. A bit like AirBnB, Dropbox, Pinterest, Facebook, the function is contained in the name.
Our greatest challenge in the Souscritoo era was fitting a comprehensive explanation of our service and business into a single sentence. The notion of a web-app for administrative simplification is in no way self-explanatory, the idea of it does not preexist in the minds of our prospects, and with no further detail, there’s an infinity of possible interpretations. On the contrary, if I were to pitch you Rover, the AirBnB for dogs, there’s only a slim chance of you imagining something other than a peer-to-peer platform for pet-sitting of domesticated canines. Today, AirBnB’s identity is aspirational and experiential, but in its early days, out of necessity, it was functional. Which paved the way to it becoming the generic term for an entire category of services (and that, above all else, is branding jackpot).
You’ll never have more than of few seconds’ worth of your audience’s attention online. To make an impact: a potent idea, a single layer of meaning, both easy to reconstruct with the language and design elements you provide. You can never make it too simple.
4. Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t
The title of a fundamental book by Steven Pressfield.
His message is simple: do not live under the illusion that because you’ve put your heart and soul into what you’ve written, it becomes a given that the world will want to read you.
Being read is something you earn, not something you deserve.
“You begin to understand writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you. When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy.”
Steven Pressfield, “Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t”
And in the world of startups, as far as communication goes, over-zealousness is often just a keystroke away…
We’ve been breast-fed Steve Jobs’ keynotes, the idea that a good brand is a cult brand, and that a good startup is a startup whose hypergrowth will revolutionise the metaphysical paradigm of the universe. The result is often communication that contains a lot of 🚀 and 🔥. And grandiose visions that end up staggeringly transcending the object they were meant to sell.
As startup marketing guys / gals, we must be extremely honest with ourselves: a car, a perfume, a watch, is a declarative purchase (my purchase says something about who I am). A signup to a SaaS platform, or to an online marketplace, isn’t. And that’s something to keep in mind when putting together any form of client-facing communications.
If we take Soundcloud as an example, for sure, early adopters probably had on their mind during sign-up the cultural revolution of the direct-to-fan model that cuts out the “evil” major label publishers. However, the 100-millionth download was likely rather driven by a thinking along the lines of “I’ve been told about this rad tune, and I can only find it on Soundcloud”.
Ergo: the faster a user-base grows (and there is no other objective in a hyper-growth paradigm), the more your incremental download / signup will be driven not by storytelling but by function.
Which you can illustrate as follows:
Example of aspirational copywriting (and I purposefully exaggerate):
“papernest is the choice of freedom. The epicurean expression of life free of shackles, for people who want to look to the future with peace of mind.”
Example of functional copywriting
“with papernest, you’ll find all your paperwork in one place, free from the jargon and tidily organised. And all of that comes for free.”
The growth of your budding Web product requires a communication that makes crystal clear both the problem you’re addressing and how you’re solving it, augmented by a solid injection of reassurance. The pain point you’ve identified is very specific, and you’ve only a few dearly acquired seconds of your audience’s attention; vague, verbose aspirational copywriting will unfortunately see them go to waste.
And if you can convince using fewer words, do it. To quote an illustrious aviator:
“Perfection is reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Should you thus ban any form of aspirational copywriting?
Great question, and, as far as I can see it, no.
There’s a significant difference between your internal and external communication, especially in the first years of your adventure.
Your external communication is made up of your client pitches, the copywriting of your app, your homepage — the convincing illustration of the problem you’ve identified and the promise to your prospects that you’re going to solve it. Your average user does not care much for your visions of grandeur. What he/she wants is something that works, end of story.
Internally, however, it’s quite a different one. Especially in the first few years, your product is an embryo of the bigger picture. The outstanding people you hired didn’t join you for the product as is, but for the compelling picture of what it could be. The present isn’t enough for them, they joined the adventure for its future. And because the life of a startup has its ups and downs, in times of hardship, it’s by rekindling the flame of the team’s shared aspirations that focus and hope are revived.
Conclusion : what your prospects want is a convincing pitch that is respectful of their time. What your employees want is to be inspired. And those are two sides of a same brand.
5. Making choices of which the opposite is defensible
Some choices are simply unassailable. Light blue verging on pastel, the picture of a couple being happy on their couch against a setting sun, the Open Sans font, cat gifs to communicate on Facebook
Blue, for example, is the favorite colour of both men and women. Just count the number of blue app icons you have on your smartphone.
Choosing the colour palette of your new brand identity is not a serene moment. Tortured by the anxiety of committing an egregious faux pas, sleep depravation kicks in pretty quickly. And, fear leading to consensus, you end up opting for a nice, plain, risk-free blue. Which was exactly what we had with Souscritoo.
Much in the same way, iconography can quickly turn into moodboards full of young, handsome, happy, relaxed and slightly naive smartphone-wielding twenty-somethings.
In our mind, pleasant to the eye though these visual elements may be, they are nothing more than a non-choice. They do not create identity, because there are very few startups for which you could say: “no, this definitely doesn’t apply to you”.
Let’s illustrate with the change in colour palette between Souscritoo and papernest:
According to www.htmlcsscolor.com, papernest’s primary colour is called “Neon Blue”. It is a deliberate identity-shaping choice: we wanted a colour sufficiently strong and unusual to be able to make it ours, for the simple view of it without our logo to instantly bring papernest to mind. Immediate result: internally, some love it, some hate it, but everyone has an opinion, and everyone, without the slightest exception, has the #5A52FF hexcode printed in their mind like a gimmick.
And this brings us to the subject of polarisation. Making choices of which the opposite is defensible means opening up several universes that are each compelling constructs, but are mutually incompatible, then choosing one of them.
Example: part of papernest’s identity is the idea of simplicity, as opposed to sophistication. French luxury brands are the epitome of sophistication, Craigslist is a brilliant example of simplicity. You couldn’t be both.
Your choice will have some people raving, others bitterly disappointed. But choices that minimise indifference are those that become foundational for your identity — your brand’s codes will be memorised all the more if they generate strong emotional reactions.
Second illustration: how to write papernest. The rule is simple: always in small caps, always bolded, even at the beginning of a sentence. Which left some people perplexed:
Translation
- I need to know: why the small “p” to papernest? It stresses me out at the beginning of sentences.
- In large part, specifically for that reason :)
The more it stresses you out, the more you’ll remember. Also, because a capital “p” really didn’t work with our logo. And, our core competency being simplification, it’s one of those small things that help convey the message even more
- Amen
There’s a very scientific advantage to generating strong emotional reactions. Your memory of facts is tightly correlated to the intensity of the associated emotions. You remember your first time infinitely better than your hundredth, you remember your last salary negotiation infinitely better than your last Excel training.
Does this mean that crass sensationalism and emotional debauchery are what you need to create a strong brand? I think it won’t be hard to convince you that no, they’re not. The polarising choices you will make will define your startup for years to come, so I’m pretty confident you’ll be comfortable enough finding your own limits. 😉
Let’s conclude with a quote by Guy Kawasaki:
“The worst case is to incite no passionate reactions at all, and that happens when companies try to make everyone happy.”
6. Decisions won’t be democratic
A pretty logical corollary of what precedes.
Democracy leads to consensus. Pretty interesting when trying to make a society coexist. Pretty terrible as a modus operandi when it comes to (re)building your brand.
Pretty much everyone on the team will quite naturally want to be involved in the process in some way or other. It won’t be a popular one, but the right decision is to have as few people as possible at the table. Which does not mean your teams will never be consulted, quite the opposite, but for it to be efficient, it will have to be at very precise moments, regarding very specific elements, with a mode of consultation that will produce exploitable data (both quantitative and qualitative).
Creating a strong identity simply cannot happen when everyone has his say. Think Alfred Duler, 99F.
I’ll leave the francophone book/movie reference here, as the Guardian’s comments on the English translation in 2002 were that “geographical and cultural translations are by no means consistent or necessarily successful”. Sorry!
7. New name, new site, new brand book: it’s just the beginning
The deliverables you end up with at the end of a rebranding are pretty standard: new logo, new brand platform detailed in a shiny new Brand Book, new website, maybe a couple video elements, display banner templates, etc…
So what happens next?
If the creative work was well done, you now have in your hands a strong identity and message. Next is making them come to life.
Two keywords here: consistency, repetition.
Consistency
If the founders, the Marketing team, the HR team, the Sales team and the PR team each work on their own comms behind closed doors, by picking and choosing just the elements they like out of your Brand Book, the months you sunk into the whole project will have been for naught. The project lead / brand owner therefore has a crucial mission of handholding.
Organising onboarding sessions so every single person on the team can start behaving like they own the Brand Book. Investing significant energy into proving that going the extra mile to make sure whatever comms leave the four walls of your startup are on-brand is worth it. Being the incarnation of the brand and a daily source of inspiration for your colleagues (granted, definitely not the easiest thing in the world, but vital nonetheless).
What you want as an end result is that, by navigating between your website, your app, your social profiles, customer support, the transition is always perfectly smooth. The more consistent your brand’s ecosystem, the more trust points you’ll win with your users.
Should your brand’s consistency be ignored, there’s a real risk of accumulating brand debt that will be extremely difficult to pay back. Not to mention the impact on your users and prospects.
Repetition
Let’s play a game:
Nespresso, …
Just…
Have a…
Because you’re…
For everything else,…
Are these the most brilliant punchlines of all time? Maybe. Is it their sole intrinsic quality that had you remember them all? No. You’ve heard, seen, read each one of them at least 500 times in your life.
In a world submerged with messages, you need something strong and unique to stand out. But you also (and above all) need to repeat it, again, and again, and again, internally, externally, with an obsession for consistency.
Let’s conclude…
(Re)branding your startup is not just a great opportunity to freshen up your corporate looks. It’s long and challenging, but also the best chance you’ll get to refocus on the core of what constitutes the identity of your project, and how you want to express it to your team and to the world. In no way is it the guarantee you’ll quadruple your acquisition metrics overnight, but it is of vital importance to guarantee the long term economic and HR growth of your startup.
Do you whole-heartedly agree / passionately disagree with this handful of ideas? Cool! Let’s talk about it 😉
Free bonus
For a peak at papernest’s shiny new Brand Book, head over here. We haven’t yet expanded to English-speaking countries, so I’m afraid it’s only in French for the moment, though…
