Wanting to build an amazing brand? Aim for desirable & sticky.
Exceptional brands stay in your mind longer. They simply stick over time and become the customer's favorite neighborhood heroes. That's where our story starts.
We call brands that stay in your mind longer as Spiderman brands. They simply stick over time and become the customer's favorite neighborhood heroes - in spite of the odd slip-up. But there are rules. Brands like superheroes exercise great power. But more importantly, they are built with great responsibility. That's where today's story starts.
The world is flush with startups and mint new businesses. Some go on to become memorable and desired brands, making consumers and fans fall in love and stay in love with them. Many more, many, many more fail. They fail to cross the qualifying line in-spite of having good products, dizzying tech and large teams.
When the span of time needed to pitch, raise capital, boot up a company, make a few quick hires, make an early version product and ship it out quickest becomes a few weeks or months, then two things suffer if attention is not paid adequately. And these two things can make or break a business.
Brand and culture - the twins that eat everything else in your business for breakfast.
And both like Rome can never be built in a day, irrespective of how much of monies you throw at them to jump-grow. Going by each and every example of an enduring, consumer-loved business, these two - Brand & Culture are the double helix for a successful business's or venture's DNA. Be it Nike, Toyota, Netflix, Apple, Samsung, Wipro, Intel, AirBNB, Chobani, Taj, Infosys, Indigo. The list goes on. True they are all about good products and services but first and foremost they are exceptional brands and cultures. They are what they are and do, more than what they say.
If you are having take-off or launch issues, desirability issues with your venture or business, or growing woes with your startup, then it's probably time you gave a good hard think about your brand and its state. Remember, your brand should be always a journey that walks alongside your product, or your business. Not after it. Read on to figure what should be essential kits in your toolbox to create and build enduring brands.
Brands are equal parts Science & Art
The brand stays longer in the mind than the price tag. And it requires extremely skilled hands and incisive minds to build brands. One of the reasons for this being that a brand is made in the minds and not factories as Walter Landor would remind.
A brand is a promise that stays consistent over time, media and channels. The latter two are thanks to today's media driven consumption. And unlike a product that can have a specific recipe, ratio of ingredients and standard production, the brand is very different. Because as a brand owner your task is to take a credible and profitable position in your customer's mind.
Making a brand is often like tailoring - part method and part imagination. It must be something that defines your business, your values and your culture. Your business meets customers dressed as a brand.
Creating and building brands hence is a complex interplay of understanding competitive strategy, decisive research, social science, consumer insights, creative muscle, and design. And then like a living animal the brand grows as per a lifecycle and it then again takes skill and wisdom to manage the life of a brand across its lifecycle.
But where does the brand begin? Getting a systematic build up is as critical for your brand as it is for your product. The right sequence and ingredients for building a brand, brick by brick matters. And while method and imagination varies, there are some things that are are golden constants.
Here are 5 steps that can help create an amazing brand - that is desirable and sticky.
Start with a "clear as glass" proposition. Clear as glass. Not muddled like erm...porridge.
A good proposition is one that is both distinctive and stays relevant for your customers' needs. If you don't have one wipe the glass again and start over. Maruti Udyog had a promise to deliver the common man's car. Aadhar's promise was to deliver last mile authentication. Air BNB's promise is to give you an authentic home-stay experience wherever you go in the world. The list goes on. Every loved brand starts with a clarified, rarefied, credible proposition. For your proposition to be both relevant and differentiated while being the unique you, there are 7 filters. This can save you many misfires if done right.
There are several brand tools and design frameworks that help you create and define your distinctive, winning proposition. This is where a brand journey starts.
Strong note of caution - a bunch of key words or an advertising headline is not your proposition. That's just a scam.
Next, empathize to get the brand-consumer fit right
Focus on your customer's problem. Look at your solution through the customer's eyes. Your product is not the customer's hero. It is what it solves for the customer and how it makes life better for her/him/them, that is critical.
Instagram allows people to tell stories with pictures. As every picture says a thousand words, it makes storytelling simpler. Maggi the "two minute" instant noodles brand became a cult favorite in kitchens and campuses, as it solved for time and dependencies in cooking a quick meal. This was at a time when working couple professionals, quick meal seekers were emerging as key consumer segments. Each of the consumer sets had a specific problem to be solved.
Having clear segments and building personas of your target audience helps in seeing and understanding the problem through their eyes. Getting an understanding of the audience and their problems right is where good brand positioning starts. The sharper this is, the sharper and more impactful is your brand.
We recommend using persona frameworks, segmentation, needs-hierarchy and issue-trees to hone in on the customer's deepest problems. So that your brand promise sits right when communicated.
Plot out your business's moments of truth
Your brand is just not your logo or name. It's not a tagline. Your brand is not your website. It is not its color palette. This is probably a way, lazy brand designers and superficial "experts" confuse founders to eventually stunt brands before they have even grown properly. Your brand is your promise across your brand universe. Every brand has its own universe depending on its nature and stage of business.
Your brand's promise is felt through a stream of touch points and experiences that your business or venture has. Your brand is noticed, communicated, touched, experienced, encountered across many touchpoints or moments of truth - on-ground, on cloud, on channels, on social, in-store, at work and so on. The "moments of truth" represent the points in a customer’s journey with your brand, when a key event occurs and an opinion is formed and shaped around your brand.
The customer experience (CX) journey framework is a gold standard to help you with getting to understand your critical touchpoints. It can be simple if needed for early adopters and can be sophisticated & detailed for larger and mature businesses. This not only ensures that each brand experience stays right and consistent but also many times unearths exceptional outlier ideas.
Customer journeys and experience design make for amazing brands.
Design sharp, relevant. Not clever or pseudo.
Great design makes clarity visible. Good design is about ensuring that the values of the brand are translated into a design system. This includes archetype, identity design, mood-boards, interaction design, unique visual grammar, style language, tone of voice, themed narratives and more.
The brand design and design system become the guiding framework of operation for creative, design and marketing folks. And thereby ensures that over time, channels and spaces, the brand remains distinctive, consistent and clear. In all that it says, does and feels.
Design systems for more mature ventures can cover brand architecture and competitive positioning, brand experiences & guidelines, interfaces, communication, processes and governing standards.
Story-tell through the right channels with authenticity & brand love. Building durable bridges with audiences is critical.
The fifth step is the most decisive. This is the stage where you design and build the narrative and make relevant connections with your markets and customers. Brand storytelling is the cohesive narrative that weaves together the values, differentiators and emotions that your brand represents. It helps build empathy amongst customers. This creates engagement and stickiness with consumers and markets.
Also often the right message can be lost through a wrongly chosen media or channel. Choose your media and channels intelligently. Also do remember to craft and tailor your stories and conversations for your different audiences. Else your brand might just be accused of being tone-deaf.
Storytelling must be curated and created as per brand themes, across channels, communication media, press notes, web-copy, brand boilers, campaigns, native content and so on. The stories could be short, could be long, could be pictures or posts. But always on brand. In short, you never stop telling stories. After all, your brand is a long promise. It has to endure time and competition.
Creating and building brands is organic. It involves giving your value and promise a life, giving it character, growing it, nourishing it and making it incarnate often so that you continue to hold down competitors coming in with sharper products or services. Brand design and development is just not "branding".
More than the less significant peripherals that many devolve branding down to (most often logo or sloganeering or cool copy or a cool ad), it should be about the significant cores. This includes values, culture, the customer proposition, relevant-differentiators, design system, service & experience dimensions, relationships, communication design, conversations, governance rules and more. Remember the brand is more than your business or your products. It sticks longer in the mind.
Not paying attention to your brand and design system is injurious to your venture's health
Don't treat brand design and development as a short and quick sprint. It is dangerous for your business and its lifespan. While business and product cycles could get shorter, it is dangerous if systematic thinking and vision are in short, impatient supply. In the world of business and ventures this could be fatal. In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. Research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year.
Diligent and systematic brand development and design for desirability can be effective and powerful remedies. Branding, design systems and authentic storytelling foster loyalty and trust between you and your customers. Startup brands, brands getting re-invented, not-for-profits should not just revolve around their products or services, but on the intangibles - their purpose, mission statements, their personalities, and their entrepreneurial spirits.
