The Startup Guide to High-Speed Brand Building
One thing all startups have in common is the need to build a brand, at high-speed, while shipping a new product or service to customers for the first time. If it is true that you never get the chance to make a second impression, then how should founders think strategically about where to put their limited brand-building energy?
I have been lucky to have a front-row seat at the start of a few new businesses, both my own and in collaboration with other founding teams. Inevitably, new startup teams with loosely defined roles often stumble into pre-launch conversations about branding, and opinions can vary a lot about what is important. The crushing urgency to get to market can add heat to these debates. Unwieldy branding discussions can disorient new teams and rattle fledgling friendships.
One way to pull teams together is by sketching a map of a generic company / brand-building journey, and then prompting a fresh discussion with a “we are here” flag (see example below).
While the diagram does not serve as a comprehensive brand or company launch plan, it can be used to put branding expectations within a broader context, and ultimately build alignment for present and future priorities. Knowing where you are on the brand building journey can speed up decision-making without discounting valid concerns or questions.
Alignment around branding expectations is especially essential for startups that outsource some brand work to external agencies. Pinwheel, a San Francisco-based content branding agency, collaborated with me to bring The Startup Guide to High-Speed Brand Building image to life and interviewed me (see here). We invite you to bring this graphic into your team’s branding discussions and let us know if it is helpful.
The Start-up Guide to High-Speed Brand Building
Founding teams generally progress through the following five phases of building their brands while shipping new products at high-speed. Where are you on the map?
Phase 0: Founder Vision & Early Concept. These weeks or months represent the precious time period when founders are sitting around a (virtual?) dining room table developing their ideas, both the big vision and some thrilling small details, over rapid-fire, expansive conversations. Feedback from potential customers, close friends, experts and first-hand research gets lobbed into the melting pot of ideas. Often the new brand name and URL bounce out of this phase.
Phase 1: Point Solutions for Go-To-Market. The initial product launch forces a crude birthing of the brand. The visual design essentials for the launch, such as a logo, a product/app design, packaging, transaction emails, photography, etc., require the founding team to make some fast calls on tight resources about brand identity. Ideally, the brand gets a quick brand guide including a logo, color palette, font, maybe an icon or a few basic visual design elements. The assumed key customer benefits and product features get their first wordsmithing for the public stage. The must-haves for launch dictate what parts of the brand get developed first and everything else is lower priority. Many brand elements get developed by non-experts, like graphics designed by a sales leader, copy written by an engineer, or photography by an intern. The founding team strives to manually thread consistency from one deliverable to the next. There are often too many moving parts spread across a small team, so the brand can look like a hack job when judged against industry greats, but if customers are buying and the product is shipping, for many businesses (and their investors) the brand successfully hit a critical milestone.
Phase 2: Informed Positioning. Following launch, the reality of what functionality actually shipped or can ship with near-term resources, combined with some legit market feedback, enables the founding team to more finely tune the branding. They can more clearly identify target customer segments, conduct tests on messaging, transact with customers, analyze engagement of shared content and more deeply study competitors to help define what they are not. Whether deliberately or not, the founding team makes decisions about what social media channels to embrace, and the brand begins to come to life via an accumulation of the first catchy posts, imagery, blog copy, audio, video, employee tweets or public comments. The data about what resonates (or not) with customers, prospective hires, and press piles up with each release and the founding team starts to feel the bonds of building a brand in the public eye.
Phase 3: Brand Story. Over the following months, enough brand touchpoints are conceived and executed that the scaffolding is there for the brand team to sculpt an authentic narrative for the business. Typically the first comprehensive brand and digital style guides are developed to drive consistency among creative teams executing daily work, and a brand story or brand vision document is produced to capture the brand positioning and benefits that together foster a shared understanding of the brand for a broader audience of internal stakeholders. Each week deliverables are released into the market reinforcing the brand identity and personality. New deliverable types, like adding a podcast or paid advertising or new social media channel, are derived against the backdrop of the historical ones and the speed of identifying what is or is not on brand begins to accelerate.
Phase 4: Brand Strategy. As a new business and brand matures, results matter. Efficacy, research, traction, customer satisfaction, returns, growth… whatever the industry or product type, data will eventually catch-up with the brand and inform the strategy. The brand team works hard to understand and exploit the current brand equity and stay ahead of where the market is going. Big new efforts, like a total website relaunch, a new retail channel, a national campaign or a strategic partnership often serve as catalysts for a brand refresh and leveling-up across the board. New brand guides, new team members, new timelines and new metrics emerge to take the brand a step-up and a big step closer to the founding team’s vision. This is when the brand team must lead and measure a 360 degree view on the customer’s brand experience. Holes are less tolerable.
Needless to say, launching a business and a brand does not actually follow a linear process. At each phase, and for a variety of reasons, the founding team might over-develop one element or under-develop another, and continuous market feedback drives iterations. Misallocating limited resources, time and emotional energy on brand decisions at the wrong phase can inadvertently thwart the next stage of growth.
The Startup Guide to Brand-Building at High-Speed is intended to help teams build consensus about where they are on the brand-building journey and what is important today versus tomorrow. We hope you use this guide so your teams can make faster decisions and continue building your brand.
Join us on Clubhouse to discuss this topic on Friday, 3/12 at 12 PM PST.