Develop Brand BasicsVishnu Gopal

Why?

Your brand is what most customers encounter first.

& first impressions matter.

It helps to put a little bit of thought into designing your

brand.

So, first: what do you need at this stage?

Two things:1) A Product Name2) A Product Logo

But: before jumping into deciding name & logo, let’s do

some prep-work.

Build 3 things to get more clarity:1) List down brand words

2) Create a moodboard3) Pick a colour swatch

Let’s go over those one by one.

1)List down brand words

List down a set of words that customer should feel/think about

when they see your brand.

e.g. what should a customer think of when he sees the Amazon brand?

A: “A-Z”, “reliable”, “fast”, “quality customer care”, “wide selection”, etc.

So write down that answer first, and then work backwards to create a

brand that satisfies all those answers.

More examples:Uber: “professional”, “slick”, “fast”, “good service”,

“reliable cars”Freshdesk: “fresh”, “new”, “different”, “the opposite of

boring”, “not business as usual”

Note: you can only do this after you’ve decided the 1 customer segment you should

focus on for the Alpha launch.See “Identify Customer Segment for Alpha”

2)Create a mood board

What’s a moodboard?It’s a list of images & graphics from the

internet that best represent your brand.

Pinterest is a good tool to use to collect & display these images.

Example mood board for a meetings app:

This is about evoking in the customer a certain “mood”. The same mood that you

want him to be in when using the product.

Products can be serious & business-like. Or they can be fun and playful. It depends on the problem space & customer needs.

3) Create a color swatch

Every brand uses a limited set of colours.

Let’s take SV.CO’s colours:

These colours are intended to evoke a certain mood:

“Friendly”, “Young”, “Cool”, “Bright”

As an exercise, look at the primary colours of other brands you use. For

e.g. why does Uber primarily use Black?

So this is what you have to do:1) List down brand words2) Create a mood board3) Pick a colour swatch

Submit attachments with all this information. 1) A list of brand words

2) A link to the mood board (on Pinterest or somewhere else)

3) A colour swatch