How We Created a Lean Brand Strategy for StashAway’s Marketing Website Relaunch
We’ve just refreshed our brand’s look and feel, and relaunched our new marketing site last month following a few months of in-house design and development work. While you can read more on the rationale behind the rebranding and website relaunch on StashAway Insights, in this post I’ll share some thoughts on creating a lean brand strategy at the initial stage of a startup to start building brand equity as early as possible, and maintain brand consistency as the company grows.
Identify the goals of your branding efforts
We started the project by identifying the main goals for the rebranding project. Three major goals were prioritised for our branding project:
- Define a coherent brand strategy by uncovering our brand values and attributes
- Create a flexible brand visual system to keep marketing materials fresh
- Differentiating ourselves from our competitors and traditional players
As you can see, the second and third goal is dependent on the first goal. And therefore it is the most important goal for us to achieve first. Given this, we decided to get all stakeholders involved early to collaboratively define our brand strategy.
The brand strategy workshop
Working on a branding project can feel like moving a thousand pieces at once — from visual identity, the tone of voice, illustrations, photography to colours, just to name a few. However, the most important piece in the branding project is to create the brand strategy within your team. A branding project should always start with “why”. Often, many early-stage startups don’t understand the importance of having a well-articulated brand strategy. This can leads to inconsistent touch points down the road when the team can’t align on a coherent brand strategy, causing confusion and broken experiences for your customers.
To start the brand strategy discussion and help everyone to get on the same page, it is useful to hold brand strategy workshops to kick-off the process. As not every stakeholder is familiar with the domain of brand strategy and management, the session should start with a general introduction in branding and background, and best followed by a couple examples to provide context and familiarity. When the initial confusion and discussions are cleared, the team can then start brainstorming answers and ideas related to different aspects of the brand. Below are a few important questions that should be thoroughly discussed and addressed in the brand strategy workshop:
Business objectives
- What are the company’s financial goals (KPIs)?
- What is our plan to achieve these goals?
- Who are our target customers?
- What is our target market?
Brand positioning
- What are the benefits of using the products or services?
- What are the customer’s needs when it comes to using the product or services?
- Who is our High-Expectation Customer?
- What should the brand communicate to generate Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction and Relationship?
- Who are our direct and indirect competitors? And how does our product offering differ from our competitors?
Brand messaging
- What are the key benefits we want our potential customers to understand?
- What are the key emotions or values we want our customers to feel?
Finally, as an outcome of the brand strategy workshop, the team should align on the DNA and values that define the essence of the brand. The brand DNA is a one-sentence statement that captures the core positioning of the brand. And the brand values are a set of adjectives that describes the attributes and personalities of the brand. For StashAway, our mission is to empower people to build meaningful, long-term wealth, and our brand values are:
- Intelligent
- Convenient
- Professional
- Trustworthy
- Empowering
- Thoughtful
See our brand strategy workshop slides here:
We are constantly on the lookout for great talents to join our team . Visit our website to learn more and feel free to reach out to us!
