The fundamentals of branding
The easiest way to think about a brand is to think that the brand you develop and that develops around you, is ultimately how people FEEL about you and your company. You want strangers to associate a feeling with you and your team and what you are doing together. Even though your brand is created by what other people think of you, you have significant control over how your brand develops.
How customers, strangers, competitors, media people, journalists, and former employees talk about you and your enterprise play a role in shaping feelings about you. So do the words, icons, and logos you choose to associate with, which may be perceived differently by different cultures.
Over time, these associations can and will change, and you will want your brand to evolve. But changing your brand image is expensive and risky.
This means you want to be savvy about how brands are created and understand which aspects of branding are formed early in the process of developing a new product or service.
Brands are layers of feelings
A brand ultimately creates an associated set of feelings on four differently levels. People who come in contact with you, your team and your product or service will have unconscious reactions to what you do, how you do it and what you deliver.
They will react to:
The attributes of your product or service.
The benefits they could gain from owning or engaging with your product or service.
The values they—or others they respect—think define you and your team.
The personality and the personality of your enterprise as it is perceived by themselves and their friends.
At the attributes level, your brand is associated with how the world judges the looks, resulting feelings and sounds of whatever it is you deliver and put out into the world. These are certainly the features of your product or service, but they are also the features of where you work, how you deliver, and the marks you and your team leave on the world. Your logo is an attribute, so are the fonts and color palettes you use, as well as the sharpness of the edges in the images you reproduce.
Your brand also develops depending how your customers perceive the benefits of using your product or service. These benefits translate into the essential happiness that you deliver with your products and services. You want everyone to understand what these benefits feels like.
Your brand can also convey the values that you espouse and live by. These would be the values that you insist and diligently ensure are followed throughout your organization as well as by your contractors.
These values could include how you treat people and the environment. They also include what you consider fair and “good.” “Good” can mean many things, but the perceived quality and reliability of the product or service you deliver will be an important factor in how others judge and perceive the values of you and your organization.
Finally, brand can convey a personality. Are you and your enterprise’s products and services creative, nerdy, intuitive, fun, sophisticated, basic, frugal, opulent, active, passive, or do they have other personality traits?
The perceived attributes, benefits, values and personality are conveyed by you, your organization, your team, your contractors, and even your investors. They are also conveyed through the products and services you deliver as well as how you deliver it, where and how you work and what other impacts you have on the world.
All these things generate feelings with your customers, potential customers, employees, contractors, journalists, media personalities as well as strangers.
The feelings you create
What feelings would you like them to have? What type of happiness? Do you want customers to feel powerful, trusted, safe, smart, hopeful, sated, or cared for. There are many other types of positive affects—or forms of happiness—you could deliver.
What feelings do you want to generate from the benefits that you deliver? Are the benefits useful, money saving, time saving, resource saving, convenient? Benefits can also generate positive affect by lowering pain levels, or feelings of anxiety or loneliness.
Your values can make users feel good about themselves by being associated with you, your products and your organization.
Finally, do you and your products make people laugh or be more serious and thoughtful … or perhaps exclusive, opulent or regal?
You want to be able to explain the attributes, benefits, values and personality you want your products and enterprise to have and then explain the feelings you want those things to generate. Think not just about the product or service, think about how you want people to feel when it is delivered, or displayed or enjoyed.
Write down in just one paragraph the most important attributes, benefits, values and personality you want to convey. You will want to refer to this as you progress through designing and testing a prototype with you target personas. You want to keep this in mind as you choose team members, and organize the work and the organization; and even how you choose your investors, if you choose to raise money from strangers.
The tools and actions you can use to craft a brand
Here is a list of the most important tools and actions you can use to implant feelings with you customers, potential customers, and all the other people you care about and who want to care about you.
Your company name and the names of your products and services.
Logos, motos, icons, badges and other images and likenesses you place on or near your materials and products.
Color palettes, fonts, sounds as well as the types and levels of decoration and elaborations you use to describe and deliver what you do.
The criteria and constraints you want to be used in designing your product or service and its user experience. For example, do you want your product or service to be viewed as:
Simple or sophisticated
Intuitive or nerdy
Personal or anonymous
Active or passive
Luxurious or frugal
Proprietary or commodity
Attention grabbing or quiet and sedate?
Design of the product, service and user experiences convey a great deal of emotion and generate very specific feelings among customers and anyone who just watches the product or service being used.
You need to be aware of all these design dimensions in what and how you do things. You need to specify them to everyone you work with and make them part of how work is conducted.
Ultimately, these dimensions of what you deliver need to be embodied in the culture of your organization (as we discussed in sprint 14) and how and when you deliver and parcel out recognition and rewards to everyone you work with. For example, unless your culture is simple and frugal, your products and company image will not generate feelings of simplicity and frugality in your users or the public in general.
What others say matter
Ultimately a brand is what the public perceives it to be and not what you say it is. You have a huge influence and plenty of tools you can use to set people up for feeling what you want them to feel. But you do not have control over their feelings.
The biggest shaper of your brand image and identity is how people talk about it and the words and expressions they use to describe it. People can and will share their feelings by being prompted or unprompted. If somebody asks a person to share their feelings about XYZ product or company they will often get an answer but the prompted answer may be more about what the speaker thinks the listener wants to hear. You care more about how your organization and products are described in unprompted conversations or content created by influential strangers. These unprompted overheard or listened to conversations will often be reported to you by family, friends, employees or others that care about you. They can also be conversations initiated by the media, press and influencers.
You care a great deal about how others describe you, your organization and its products or services. A host of specialists will offer their services to help you, and you can hire them or contract with them as you see fit. Branding firms as well as product designers, public relations professionals, copy writers, user experience designers, will all likely have way more experience and training than you in in how to shape these dimensions we have discussed into a coherent and powerful brand. But they will be expensive and you want to use them strategically, and only as needed. Our next sprint, 20, will help you understand when and how to get branding help.
Not won and done
Your brand is constantly evolving and is never finished. But the seeds that will grow into shaping your brand are planted when you can begin to describe what it is you want to do to make people so happy they gladly give you money in return. These seeds will grow as you take actions—and do experiments—that lead you to figure out exactly what you want to do and how you want to deliver it.
Hopefully you realize your entrepreneurial journey requires more to being successful than just delivering a product or service to some people. While you will want help with your branding at many points along your journey, start by doing our sprint exercise and write out that paragraph that describes the feelings you want your brand to evoke in everyone that comes into contact with you, your company and your product or service. Then do sprint 20, which will help you figure out next steps.