Branding for startups starts before developing the product. By long, deep, individual interviews. To create a sticky brand in people’s minds, you have to start finding out their wishes, dreams and concerns. Most entrepreneurs who will do this are in for a surprise. When you have these insights, you can really start inventing the product and the brand. You have three essential reasons for a start-ups to do branding at this early stage. Here are three areas in which branding can be the difference between failure and success.
Growth Branding
A lot of successful business people have at least once in their lives experienced how everything seems to be fine in the company, except the growth. And of course that is always alarming. If a business doesn’t grow and being in a moving surrounding market, it in fact going backwards. The problem is how to handle such a situation. Innovation can be one way. But it’s expensive, not that easy and time consuming, the clock is ticking. Looking for new markets is another solution. But usually easier said than done. If new markets are at hand why haven’t we tried them before? Again how long will it take and how much will cost to be up in speed on new markets? Here Branding can be extreamely helpful. Basically the strategy is: to do better what you are already doing. Increasing the Customer Experience including User Experience. Taking more business from competitors, keeping new competitors off. Using Branding and refreshing your outer and inner identity, motivating the outer change in design and identity. Activating the inner-power and motivation of all people inside the company by adjusting the Brand philosophy and ideas. If this is done well, and if the brand is well-activated internally and externally, leading to an increased user experience among your customers, this is anexcellent way to make more money and create more value. A branding activity almost always has an very positive effect on the sales (expect +10-15%) and the value of the company (expect +10-20%) and usually the result is improved because of more efficiency thanks to the fact that people are motivated and know why they are doing things.
Value Proposition Branding
A Value Proposition is key to the Customer Experience. Value= Benefits – Cost (including risks and pain). And value is always a perception. That’s why Branding is so important when you decide the Value Proposition for your business. The Value Proposition is what you tangibly and emotionally deliver. It’s the basis for the relationship with your customer. Sometimes it happens for all businesses, that you loose sense of what really is your Value Proposition. Here is how you then create a Value Proposition using Branding and how you make it travel all the way into to the minds of all your important stakeholders, including of course your customers, or potential customers.
Branded User Experience
In almost everything we do offline or online we get a relation with a brand through user experience. We all experienced ourselves cursing the brand (or occasionally praising the brand) as we are using the interface between ourselves and the brand (enterprise, start-up, public organization, etc.) The User Experience has become the “new window†for branding. The “window†of the brand used to be the product package, then the advertising and in this generation it is the digital interface or User Experience, that either humiliate us, or makes us feel good. But a user experience is actually not something new; it is a part of the Customer Experience and has existed a long time in the off-line world. Only, now online it feels fresh and important. Together with world leading user experience specialists IDEAN in Silicon Valley and in Helsinki, BRANDFLIGHT have a partnership we call BUX – Brand-driven User Experience and we have also created a process integrating branding and user experience.