Origins #47 — Struggling to tell the world who we are

The long and difficult branding game

This is going to be a series of posts dedicated to our thoughts around the brand we are building. This is part 1. Part 2 will be coming next week.

You come up with an idea. Next, you validate it. Then, you start prototyping it. You witness how the idea becomes a reality. How it evolves. Eventually, you end up with a product you strongly believe in. Confidence is high. What’s next?

Telling the world about it. Over the past half a year I have convinced myself that this is probably the hardest thing in the whole process.

Even though I have a bachelors in communication, worked for years in marketing for both big and medium-sized companies, I wasn’t prepared for the job that is figuring out what the DULO brand is and how to talk about our product.

It turns out there are so many ways and approaches that it is really hard to decide and commit to one thing. Depending on who you talk to someone would advise you to start building a brand from the get-go and aim to have something bigger than the product, the company or the founders. Others will tell you to use your personal brand, grow it and let it become synonymous with your company. There are those who say that you should keep it simple and focus on the product and its unique selling points (USPs).

I believe there is merit in all of these approaches. We have considered them all for DULO over the past 15 or so months.

We started brainstorming about our branding immediately after we chose the name. We had a clear vision of what the product will be, and we had a clear idea of the type of company we want to build. From that point on, we have constantly been juggling between two directions:

• Building the brand around a grand vision and ambition, eliciting a more emotional reaction
• Focussing on the product and its properties, a more practical and pragmatic approach.

Over the past few months, we tried both. Initially, we focussed on the broader concept of “creating time”. That one is something we both like very much and most of all, believe deeply in. Time, being the most precious resource we all have, comes in finite amounts, and how we use it is of utmost importance.

We spent a couple of weeks with that focus in mind.

Then, some new information and ideas came into the equation and we shifted the focus more on the product and the properties. Our thinking being: “let’s tell people directly what we are making” and if they are interested they will dig deeper and find out about the bigger ambition we have around time.

After multiple discussion with more experienced people, we decided that having the focus directly on the practical appeal of our message might position DULO in the same category as other players operating in the “convenience” category, respectively driving more prospective customers who are oriented into value purchases and those with preference on price over product quality. A group we are not appropriately positioned to serve at this moment, which would make our offering irrelevant.

So, we shifted more into the direction of talking about our grand ambition, this time also stressing the importance of taking control of the time that DULO creates. For a young brand like ours, this approach can be too vague, because we are not yet established in the minds of people. We cannot afford to have our messaging to be predominantly focussed on a strong emotional note.

Right now, we are about to adjust our messaging again.

In my opinion, we are on the right track both when we talk about the larger concept of “creating time”, and when we put the product front and center. There’s just context missing. In other words, we haven’t framed our messaging in a relevant way for our audience to relate to. I think we now have a way to fix that.

Over the weekend, I read an article about the gap innovative products create between old and new behaviors. The short version of it is that if you build something new that didn’t exist until now, you will experience a barrier because you are ultimately trying to change human behavior. This is very hard. It is a concept known as “the chasm”, and it turns out, it has been quite well described and known in the tech world. It is a problem software companies sometimes face.

We are facing the same challenge. We are offering people a product that has to break with their existing behaviors and expectations. We are solving a problem that until recently, has been considered unavoidable. You simply had to iron your shirts. You had to take them to the dry cleaners. You had to feel uncomfortable. There was no other way — you had to compromise between comfort and style. Our dress shirts solve all of that. But with our products comes a new way of looking at the status quo.

With that in mind, I started thinking more about how to best frame the message we want to tell. First, we need to set the stage and introduce the problem — compromising between comfort and style. Second, we need to introduce a familiar concept that people will recognize — using technology widely adopted in sports apparel. Third, we have to state what we are making — DULO dress shirts. Fourth, we need to clearly state the value proposition, without going into details — comfort, confidence, and convenience. Finally, we have to deliver our “why” — creating time, so you can take control of it.

Putting all the pieces together, we come to the following statement:

“Until now you had to compromise between comfort and style. Not anymore. Inspired by the latest technology, pioneered by sports apparel companies, we used premium performance materials, sourced from top European suppliers, to engineer a new breed of a dress shirt. One that brings comfort, confidence, and convenience. One that doesn’t stand in your way. A DULO shirt stands for creating time. We stand for taking control of it.”

There is context, explanation, a definition of our value proposition, and our ambition.

Once I started thinking in these terms I immediately remembered that we have actually applied a similar approach before in one of our communication materials — our “About” page. There we start by stating the problem (although it might be a bit too one-sided and specific). Then we move to alternatives people might be familiar with (but it is more of a comparison and swings to the negative side — “there are inferior solutions”). Finally, we present the solution (our dress shirts and their USPs).

One thing is certain, we are just learning how hard building a brand is. I believe it is a constant process of iteration. I am confident that we know what we want to say. It just takes a lot of effort and time to figure out how to translate these thoughts into a form that makes it easy for others to understand quickly. We don’t want to steal time from people by placing vague or irrelevant words in front of them. Attention is scarce anyway, plus information overload is a real thing.

What we want to deliver is a clear enough message that speaks to those, interested in what we do.

Wearing a dress shirt today? You probably spent a lot of time getting the wrinkles out this morning. Unfortunately, that sharp look is already gone. You will forget about ironing with DULO — the dress shirt that stands for time!