Branding your Startup: A Two-week, Collaborative, Low Effort Approach
I’ve seen a spectrum of founders and their perceptions on branding:
I need a logo for my business! I’ve got a fully crafted press release! Mission, mission mission!
Logo doesn’t matter! Early adopters care about brand! If it takes more than 10 minutes, I’m not doing it!
I think an approach to early stage branding lies somewhere in between. Even the most minimally branded company conveys at least the following: The promise (Unique Value Proposition), a look, a feeling, and a tone.
The company that I work at, Bra Theory, lives in an industry saturated with competitors. We’re trying to change the conversation, but it’s a bit nuanced — instead of relying on the Industry Standard bra measuring system, we measure our customers based on an algorithm that takes into account their breast shape, width, size, body posture and more. We promise a luxury product that should make you and your boobs feel amazing.
We needed to validate that this promise not only resonated with users, but was understood by them. Quickly. So we decided to run a branding experiment.
What is a “low effort, high impact” approach?
No one wants to waste time, right? Treating your brand as an experiment prevents endless iteration cycles and fear of failure. Style guides at this stage are too much. I consider a branded landing page design low effort: it shoves your proposed brand directly into the spotlight. I also consider the branding process low effort: we're scrappy and globally distributed, so nearly everything has to take place in highly efficient, remote workshops.
I define high impact as validation from your actual customer base. Nothing beats real, qualitative feedback.
Here’s the approach. It should take about two weeks. Try it with your team on video chat and see how it goes!
Define your hypotheses.
It doesn’t need to be super-scientific, but it does need to be concrete. Here are two that we defined:
Target Clients will comment that the look, feel and tone of the company will match up with the brand values.
Target clients will comprehend Bra Theory’s UVP in under five seconds.
Put together a swatch of brands.
This part is adapted from Cooper’s Brand and Experience Workshop. Gather images from a wide breadth of company brands. The point is to get the whole team drawing relationships between what they see and how it relates to the company. Do throw in a few competitor brands, as that helps anchor the discussion around how you wish to differentiate from them.
Encourage your whole team to give their take on the images. Have them comment “like” or “dislike” on them. In writing, guide their opinions about how effective the image is for the company, not their personal taste. For remote teams, having concisely written instructions are important. Here’s a copy of our agenda.
Facilitate a discussion.
Get the team together and have a conversation about the dislikes and likes. While folks are talking, jot down words. Affinitize by the following categories:
Look: What are appropriate/inappropriate visuals and images the brand displays?
Feel: What are positive/negative emotions the brand elicits?
Tone: What are good/bad words the brand uses and says?
Create moodboards.
Make sure you can do this quickly. This is to ensure your internal team is aligned with the initial approach. In this case, we had at least a few ideas of where the brand could go, so I created three directions.
Design a landing page.
There’s a whole process baked in here. Here’s the short story: personas, customer journey, sketch, decide. This all took place over the span of 4–5 video meetings where we individually sketched on pieces of paper and presented them to each other.
Run your experiment.
Amongst other things we wanted to validate, we recruited 5 users that fit our customer target to comment on the look and feel of the landing page.
Analyze your results. I like using Reframer as a way to organize and quickly draw patterns in your notes.
Take a look at your original hypothesis and draw your conclusions.
That’s all there is to it!
For now. Branding is not a “one-and-done” — you’ll continue to refine, validate and iterate as you gain a stronger customer base and have more insightful conversations.
Hope this helps you get out of the building!
