The Brand:
Branding isn't just a logo. A logo or an ad may capture the meaning of a brand, but it can't create it.
A brand's meaning is created by every touch point a person has with a brand. So we have to make sure the people who are responsible for delivering those experiences -- employees -- understand our brand values. They have to believe. We have to believe.
I have found that start ups and their founders have audacious dreams to change the world that can make a great brand ideal.
Google started out to "democratize the world's information." Square wants to "change the way people do business." Kiva wants to "connect people through lending to alleviate poverty." Method wants to "make products that work, for you and for the planet." Pinterest is trying to "connect everyone in the world with the 'things' they find most interesting."
People don't pull all nighters at Square to process payments. They could do that at Paymentech. Square employees want to change the world. They are inspired by a leader who is trying to. You can feel it in everything they do: their design, pricing policy, tweets, plus more. The logo and name are a white square -- very generic -- which makes this point even more powerfully.
Think about the brands you are really passionate about. Is the first thing you think about their logo? Or an experience you had with them? I bet it's the latter.
Simon Sinek gave a fantastic TED talk about starting with the Why. It is 18 minutes on why your company's ideal(s) are so important to your brand.
Another more practical read on this is Jim Stengel's book Grow. The former CMO at P&G (company behind Old Spice which has one if not the most viral brand videos of all time) lays out simple ways to find your brand's ideal, especially if you work in B2B or perhaps something that feels less inspirational.
You are right that a name and a logo are really important as well as using them consistently so that people learn them, remember them and start associating some meaning with them. But even more importantly, what do you want customers to remember? What do you want that logo to stand for that is deeply meaningful to the people who will ultimately make your start up successful?
The Product:
The branding and marketing need to match the stage of your company -- early stage, growing, established, or mature. They will evolve over time.
For an early stage start up, the brand and product are usually the same thing, meaning there isn't a portfolio of products yet which may have different names. Think Google which started as search and only later added email, social, advertising, etc.
The most important thing for the brand of an early stage company is the product and the experience -- not marketing, colors, logos, etc. Find the value and find the vein you can tap in the market first. You are trying to find the people who will love what you are offering, even if that is one person to start (Who is not your mother or your best friend. One random person who doesn't have an incentive to use your product). And you want them to feel like they would miss it if it were gone. Branding won't mean anything without a great product or at least a product on its path to great and a customers awareness of your sincere intent to get it there.
You don't need agencies or brand consultants, etc. I am not trying to diminish the value of experienced marketers and branders. We can do this quickly and compellingly. But you can do it yourself! If you hired an expert this what they would tell you: you need to focus on these basic questions about your product and answering each of them in 10 words or less. Why does this matter? Customer service. If it takes you a long time to answer them and you are closer to your idea than anyone else, then why would you want to make your potential customers work so hard? They are busy. Make it easy for them to discover you and immediately know why they should care.
1. Who is your customer?
2. What is your product?
3. Why does a customer care?
4. Why is it different and better than what they use today?
5. Why are you doing this, your ideal (not what or how, but why)?
1. Who is your customer?
This is really important and not as easy as it seems at first blush. To answer this question, a good place to start is the obvious: consumers or businesses. In your pitch for funding, you must have had a "target market" (meaning the opportunity and how you would grow selling to someone). Who? That is the "target market" (for example, X million US Mobile users or another example, Fortune 500 businesses globally).
Good start. But then you need to be able to envision who that person is in your head. In brand-speak, it is your "design target" -- the person you are designing for. Why does this matter? It is hard to build something and create an amazing experience for something as broad as businesses or consumers. What your mom likes and what you like are really different -- and you are both consumers. What a big company or start up needs is really different --and they are both businesses. You risk trying to design for everyone and then end up appealing to no one. So it is important to imagine: who is your "ideal" customer?
A simple and fast way to hone in on your "ideal" customer is to look at your current user analytics. Who are the power users? Can you find where you have tapped a vein and where there is a group of people or businesses for whom your product is really starting to sing? Get out from behind the office wall and go talk to them. See how they are using your product. Learn voraciously from them, even if it is only a handful of people.
Is it young people who are using your product to connect with their friends? Then use your imagination to flesh out who this person is? Imagine an 18-year old Twitter-crazed California girl named Samantha. Design for Samantha. Is it a CTO at a Fortune 500 business? Imagine David the CTO at Charles Schwab who is trying to cut costs in his organization and update their mainframes (I am entirely making this up right now and randomly picked Charles Schwab for sake of illustration). Design for David -- meaning he is the person in your head as you are making decisions everyday -- what the product can do, trade offs in tech builds, prioritizing what to build first, etc.
If you don’t have enough customers yet, start talking to people to find them. Send an email to everyone you know and ask them to help you find “who would care” about what you are building.
This design target may change over time as you move from early adopters. It may change as the marketplace or your product changes. That’s fine and OK. But start with an ideal customer today, now.
2. What is your product?
Can you define your product in layman's speak in 5 words?
Watch outs: in describing a product, I have seen start-ups who have both business and consumer users straddle between the two customers. That can be confusing. How would you describe your product to the customer you picked above? Analogies are OK and can even be helpful (as much as people make fun of them as Silicon-Valley speak!). But no jargon or acronyms.
3. Why does a customer care?
To start, no need to over analyze this or get into extraordinary detail. Simply, why do they care? It saves them time. It is fun. They can keep a mobile scrapbook.
If you want a bit more sophistication, you can think about this in terms of rational and emotional benefits. Codecademy teaches JavaScript, but is is also fun, confidence-building and empowers everyday people with technology. Wahooly gives influencers a piece of the action, but it also creates a broader community of cheerleaders, supporters and inspiration around a founder's idea. Taskrabbit makes a market between people who need something done and experts who can do it, but it also frees up time for the customer and makes the providers feel like their side jobs or moonlighting is valued and contributing to their families success and well-being with income. Etsy is a crafts market-maker, but it is also empowering craftsmakers and creating an inspirational movement around things that are beautifully, creatively and authentically made rather than mass-produced.
4. Why is your product different and better than what that customer is using today?
This is perhaps the most important question. It has to be different -- and better -- or a start-up won't have a chance against large marketing budgets and entrenched behaviors of existing brands and products. Why it is different / better needs to be clear and compelling. Plus it is a good gut-check. If you are creating a me-too product and don't have anything special and ideally with barriers to entry so someone can't just turn around and copy you, then why are you doing this? It is even better if the thing that makes you different isn't just price. Price competition is a tough place to play and usually not sustainable over time if you are trying to build a long-term company and change the world.
5. What is your vision for this brand, the ideal (as described in my answer above)?
Are you building a wall or building a wall that is part of a cathedral? Make sure you can tell people the cathedral and where this is going, because you are going to spend a lot of time and energy building those walls and they are important. I described how to find this above in The Brand section.
That's it. Here is an example of answering these five questions that I made up to help bring this to life. Please note: I randomly chose codecademy and completely made this up as an extreme illustrative example! I have no relationship with them. This isn't copy-edited even sounds kind of corny. I was just trying to capture the content.
Fictional Example of the 5 Questions:
The Brand Elements:
Very tactically, you need a name, logo, website and a good story about your company for PR and the site. "Story" meaning your founding and what you hope to accomplish. The fundamentals of marketing are telling compelling stories. A marketer can absolutely help you. But if you can write or tell a good story yourself, you can do it yourself. You already have your authentic story. You need to capture it.
The basic tactics you need for a new brand:
(Formal branders will refer to this as part of your Brand Identity)
Name
Logo
Landing page
Story / About Us
If you give a marketer / freelancer / designer the 5 questions above and spend a little bit of time with them sharing your dreams, your genius and why you decided to do this all in the first place -- your personal story -- they can create something great for you (and then cross your fingers the url is available :-).
In time, obviously, you will need more. But start here. I believe in "minimal viable" branding and marketing for an early stage startup.
I have captured some really good examples of early branding and how they have captured the 5 questions as they go to market:
Path.com/about - For clear explanations of the product
Path.com/story - For a good story about their founding
Billguard.com/howitworks - For a clear explanation of the product
Billguard.com/power_to_the_people - For a tight story of why they are different and better
Pinterest.com/about - For a great “what it is”, “why do I care”, “what is their brand ideal”
The Marketing Plan:
Brands tend to go through cycles: new, growth, mature, and revival. Marketing objectives vary by stage of the brand.
For an early stage start-up (new brand) the primary objectives of marketing are:
Customers, investors, employees, and partners will all need to know what your product is. And the more innovative and amazing the potential of what you are doing, the harder it may be for them to understand. That’s OK. As Steve Jobs said, sometimes people have to see something in order to know what it is. That is why being able to answer the 5 questions about about your product and having a prototype are so important. Make it easy, you may just post the answers on your website like the examples above.
I am being pretty simple here about the marketing. It feels a little academic to write about early stage branding and marketing in concept without an actual product or service in mind. Much better when you are tackling this for a specific product. Enough for now...
_______________________________
Update January 30, 2012: @miketrap wrote a great guest-post for OnStartup.com: Startup Branding: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs. He mentions resources for finding logo designers and namers. He also references Path as a re-branding case study from their original launch.
___________________________
Update April 25, 2012: Here is a useful article Before Naming Your Startup, Read This by Julian Shapiro on The Next Web.
Very tactically, you need a name, logo, website and a good story about your company for PR and the site. "Story" meaning your founding and what you hope to accomplish. The fundamentals of marketing are telling compelling stories. A marketer can absolutely help you. But if you can write or tell a good story yourself, you can do it yourself. You already have your authentic story. You need to capture it.
The basic tactics you need for a new brand:
(Formal branders will refer to this as part of your Brand Identity)
Name
Logo
Landing page
Story / About Us
If you give a marketer / freelancer / designer the 5 questions above and spend a little bit of time with them sharing your dreams, your genius and why you decided to do this all in the first place -- your personal story -- they can create something great for you (and then cross your fingers the url is available :-).
In time, obviously, you will need more. But start here. I believe in "minimal viable" branding and marketing for an early stage startup.
I have captured some really good examples of early branding and how they have captured the 5 questions as they go to market:
Path.com/story - For a good story about their founding
Billguard.com/power_to_the_people - For a tight story of why they are different and better
The Marketing Plan:
Brands tend to go through cycles: new, growth, mature, and revival. Marketing objectives vary by stage of the brand.
For an early stage start-up (new brand) the primary objectives of marketing are:
- Getting the word out to early adopters
- Educating on what the product is (the answers to 1-5 above)
- Creating immediate feedback loops to learn and improve the product / experience
Customers, investors, employees, and partners will all need to know what your product is. And the more innovative and amazing the potential of what you are doing, the harder it may be for them to understand. That’s OK. As Steve Jobs said, sometimes people have to see something in order to know what it is. That is why being able to answer the 5 questions about about your product and having a prototype are so important. Make it easy, you may just post the answers on your website like the examples above.
I am being pretty simple here about the marketing. It feels a little academic to write about early stage branding and marketing in concept without an actual product or service in mind. Much better when you are tackling this for a specific product. Enough for now...
_______________________________
Update January 30, 2012: @miketrap wrote a great guest-post for OnStartup.com: Startup Branding: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs. He mentions resources for finding logo designers and namers. He also references Path as a re-branding case study from their original launch.
___________________________
Update April 25, 2012: Here is a useful article Before Naming Your Startup, Read This by Julian Shapiro on The Next Web.
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