The power of branding
A strong competitive advantage you maybe missing out on
This is the fourth article of our Monday session series where we share our intern’s experience from Red Brick Accelerator’s weekly coaching sessions.
Find the previous articles here:
- What I learned about startups in just one evening
- The mindset of an entrepreneur and methods of experimentation
- Why do we want to hack growth?
This week the Red Brick team and I met with a formidably talented designer Arta Citko who held a workshop about branding and gave us all the tips a startup founder needs to know about building a brand. Arta loves branding and applies a precise, almost scientific approach to it. I find this attitude highly inspiring and calling for action because it convinces me of the real significance of brand building.
The art of branding
Arta points out that it is important to make a distinction between the extent of branding activities in B2B and B2C startups. Branding plays a more prominent role in B2C processes where it is difficult to get a distinction and attract the attention of customers. Branding requires both imagination and systematic approach.
Arta offered us a framework where there are three groups of branding activities: visuals, voice and actions. I think that depending on the individual startup, you can always choose how much effort you put into each activity. Another framework we were given contains the three layers of branding: first impression, interaction and the unconscious. This framework is more focused on the different stages of the branding process.
Whatever approach one applies, everything stems from the impression a brand is meant to produce. Startups are different and so are their brands. Brands can be associated with different emotions. Therefore, startups have power to evoke certain emotions, too! I have seen many websites that were nice, it looked to me that something actually took time to see whether the buttons and drop-down menus are the right form, but the overall impression did not fit the nature of the business. It may seem unimportant, but It takes away a chunk of the objective value of a business.
By objective value, I mean the competitive advantage of the product or service. However, we could safely say that in many cases today’s market is becoming oversaturated. Over the years, we have been, quite rightly, fostering the culture of entrepreneurship. It has done us a tremendous favour, but it has produced so many products and services that creating a unique selling proposition nowadays is extremely difficult. In many instances, branding is the only way of making a startup or a business competitively different from others.
Good news for me
Brand building comprises tasks that I generally enjoy doing. I never studied professional design, but I enjoy creating beautiful slides, planning presentations, creating slogans, researching the psychological aspects of shapes and colours, etc. None of this means that I could make a perfect brand builder, but I think I have a certain predisposition to it.
Since I started my studies, I have been deliberately shunning these activities. I decided to focus on what I thought were the matters of substance, for example finance. The notion was that thinking too much of branding was superficial.
However, Arta’s workshop convinced me that not only is brand building important, but maybe it can actually be more important in some cases than the product itself, let alone financial management. This is how I came to the conclusions that a good brand can trump the objective value of a startup. This means that I can do things I have always enjoyed doing without thinking that I am losing my time. What a relief. The oversaturation of the market created a situation where a good brand is more of a competitive advantage than ever.
My takeaways:
The core notion of Arta’s workshop is that brand building is not superficial and that it can add enormous value to a startup. Also, I realised that brand building is by no means easy, and it requires a systematic approach. In some cases, it also requires a good intuition since a brand builder has to work with the unconscious. It takes the knowledge of the likes and dislikes of customers, and that can be exceedingly tricky.
- A good brand adds values to the startup by creating the right set of emotions associated with it
- Branding is set to play a more prominent role in today’s oversaturated market
- Branding is not easy, but it is versatile
Red Brick Accelerator offers intense coaching and mentoring for your idea and early-stage startup. Go see here when the next application period starts!
