BRANDING FOR STARTUPSABHISHEK DESAI

DIGICORP

WHAT IS A BRAND?

What adjectives come to mind when you think of the following companies?

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Apple - Innovative, Stylish?

Thums Up - Aggressive, Masculine?

Flipkart - Books?

Subway - Healthy?

Whatever words you came up with, think about why they came to mind.

THAT’S A BRAND.

GENERAL PERCEPTION

Logos, color schemes, and website design

What should my logo be?

What colors represent my business best?

How do I go about with my web design?

Brand mentions, links, and social popularity

I have to be as visible online as possible, because this promotes brand recall

SERPs visibility, ad campaigns, and other promotional efforts

BUT, IN REALITY BRANDING IS...

...the collective emotional response to entrepreneur’s product or service.

It is not a logo, and it's certainly not a URL. Those things are the stimulus, while the brand is the response.

It's something out there, in the hearts and minds of the people you hope to sell to.

“Your brand is what other people say about you when

you’re not in the room.”

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com

MARKETING vs BRANDING

Marketing is the set of processes and tools promoting your business. For e.g. SEO, social media, PPC, local search, mobile, and traditional promotional methods and tools.

Branding, on the other hand, is the culture itself, the message that permeates and rules all the process of your business.

MARKETING vs BRANDING

WHY IT IS REQUIRED?

“If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.”

- David Brier

ESPECIALLY FOR STARTUPS

“Perception is reality for an early-stage startup.”

Customers and VCs invest in the companies that win over their hearts and their minds, usually in that order.

If you're trying to sell or raise money it's important to remember this.

ESPECIALLY FOR STARTUPS

As barriers to entry continue to fall driven by cloud technologies, competition among startups will increase and the startups that reach their target customer bases with the best messaging, building the most effective brands, will win.

ELEMENTS OF BRANDBrand purpose

Why did I build this business? Why do I want to help out this specific group of people? Why does it matter to me that these things get done?

Brand definition

How do I define the business I am in? What’s my line of work and how would I describe it? What do I do for a living?

Brand positioning

Who is my target audience? How do I differentiate from the competition?

Brand voice

Aggressive? Care giving? Community? Competitive? Happy?

EXAMPLE - THUMS UP

It was introduced in 1977 to offset the withdrawal of The Coca-Cola Company from India.

Thums Up is in the beverage business, that’s how the company “defined” the brand.

The Thums Up brand, is all about making people feel confident, adventurous, and victorious.

The brand’s voice is aggressive, personifies victory, achievement and celebration.

EXERCISE

Let’s do a small exercise of identifying various brand elements for a startup amongst ourselves.

BRANDING STRATEGY

1. Do your research

2. Develop your message and differentiate

3. Invent your visual identitya. Mission/core message

b. Logos and appropriate uses of your logos (including examples of what not to do)

c. Colors (CMYK, Pantones, RGB, etc.) and fonts

d. Associated images or icons

e. Writing style/voice

f. Association

4. Be consistent

BOOKS

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