Salim Virani, entreprenerd. Creator of Leancamp.
Salim Virani, entreprenerd. Creator of Leancamp.
Short version: Think of your brand as two parts: the customers' expectation at the core, and the surface elements that signal that expectation. Usually, it's less wasteful to get the expectation right first (through conversation and low-fi prototypes), then invest in the surface elements once the brand expectation, customer needs and business model are validated.
Let's start with the big picture. Your brand will have value to your business if it gives you advantages in your customer and partner relationships, and sales/marketing channels. These advantages come from an expectation about you.
It's that expectation you need to figure out first, not the surface elements of the brand.
Surface elements are signals. They can be the logo, other graphical signals like typeface and colour, or non-graphical elements like response-time, language, simplicity or wacky customer service personalities. They have value to the brand because they signal what to expect to the customer.
Crystallise those at the later stages, when you've got evidence that their needs are pressing and your business model will make you money. Usually this is when you're getting ready to scale.
At this point, designing the surface elements should be straight-forward because they're based on real customer experience, not guesses. Invest in surface elements too soon, and they're wasted if you discover your brand's core expectation needs to change.
For example, the Leancamp logo took 20 minutes so we could get our first landing pages in front of real customers fast. We didn't nail our core expectation until our second event.
The Leancamp brand isn't about pink logos, it's about a fun, no-bullshit place to learn from other startup types. The logo and name and brand are only worth anything because we learned to set that expectation.
Once we learned this, we knew what to signal and strengthened the DIY, community feel in our graphics, copywriting and at the event itself.
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Hey Sal
As you say, thinking about surface can be distracting and wasteful, creating a brand should be about an ‘essence’. Until the essence is clear, the brand won’t be.
For me, the best way to think about a brand, especially for a startup, is ‘what are people saying and thinking about us’. (This relates nicely to your recent excellent post about understanding how customers would describe your startup.) Thinking about it this way focuses the ‘brand owner’s’ attention on several important points– on how people will probably only understand or repeat the most highly salient points about your company, about how anything you say or try to convey about the brand is interpreted through the lens of WIIFM, about the need for consistency between your business model and your brand (as people won’t believe brand messages that are not in harmony with your business model.)
In technical terms the receiver’s point of view is the ‘brand image’ and the sender/marketer’s take on the brand is the ‘brand identity’. But in the world of getting traction through a tribe’s enthusiasm rather than based on a bunch of one way messages somehow getting an audience’s attention, spending much time thinking about the latter in isolation is just not efficient.
Best
Chris