You’ve embarked on a journey to realise your dreams. You’re committed to building a mini empire, a legacy that you will be remembered by. You’re on your way to making millions. You’re starting a business.
While you feel that you’re the evangelist of change, you may be the only one to believe it initially. You take on the multi-headed role of CEO, brand manager, financer and any other immediate gap you can fill. The reason: you may have an insight into an area where you think you could add great value, it maybe an invention or discovery, a diversification of your business portfolio, or just a bite from the entrepreneurial bug.
Whatever be the impetus, you’ve obviously done your homework on the market, competition and your target consumer, as people often do. Your business plan is in place, consumer base identified and product/service sourced, it’s time to take your offering to the market.
Next, you find an office space and get the interiors done before the rent starts ticking!
In the midst of this quagmire, you’ve brainstormed with a few friends and close relatives on what to name your company, and a distant cousin who has a vague interest in photoshop, volunteers to help with the logo. One out of four names gets lucky enough to be registered, you book the domain name, and voila! You’re in business.
You keep a low profile and your overheads even lower, until you break-even in the first year itself. You’re now laughing all the way to the bank, at the marketing and branding fluff that consultants were trying to slow you down with.
The inevitable question however, is for how long?
Reality bites back
A scathingly real international statistic states that:
‘The failure rate for new businesses seems to be around 70% to 80% in the first year and only about half of those who survive the first year will remain in business the next five years.’
So, what makes success so elusive when product, price, people and promotion are seemingly in place?
It’s safe to lay a majority of the onus on brand creation. Or the lack of it. For there is something about the word (branding) that almost elicits a distasteful response from small to medium business owners, who superficially accept its potential but don’t necessarily believe its for them.
Buried deep under heaps of complex jargon and misconceptions of prohibitive costs, this simple formula for long term success rarely manifests itself as critical as any other criteria while setting up a business. In reality, it is as pertinent and elementary as any other core business activity.
Like renting a new office space, hiring the right people or developing your product / service, creating a consistent identity for your brand too comes at a cost, but not at the cost of your credibility and quality. What could be a simple process when done at inception, could turn into a complicated and expensive affair later on.
Do you know who your brand is?
How well do you know your company? Do you know where it lives, what it likes, who it likes to hang with? Do your employees know?
Your business has a name like everybody else. For all you know it even has a personality, emotions and a moral fibre. While it will take some amount of soul searching and digging to unearth the core essence of your brand, it is every second worth the effort.
Today, a brand has gone beyond being associated with merely a product, a service or a logo. Naomi Klein’s No Logo interprets a brand as ‘the core meaning of the modern corporation’. Your brand is much more than a visual logo. It is the identity of your company, its core essence, the big idea. It’s what you and your staff collectively stand for.
Defined by the culture of the organisation, the colour and form of its visual representation, the internal and external communication, mind-sets, attitudes, history, rituals and people, a brand connects with the target audience at an emotional level, earning their trust and confidence, helping them decide in its favour.
While your logo will proudly take its place as the physical appearance and symbol that your company will come to be recognised and known by, developing an identity for your brand encompasses far more.
We know you’re in a hurry to get down to the market and make that historic first sale, but that being said, there is an identity to be created, logo to be designed, products/services to be packaged.
You now have some understanding of the identity and values you want to project, making it easier for you to communicate your objectives to a third party if needed, possibly a firm that specialises in the creation and design of consumer or corporate brand identities. Most importantly, enjoy the process.
Building a start-up business into a trusted brand is possibly one of the most challenging, exhilarating and fulfilling experiences that you as an entrepreneur and everyone else who is associated with your business can ask for, as it’s all about creating from scratch. Thinking from a clean slate and getting creative.
‘A narrow interpretation of design ignores the strategic value of design in the corporation. Design is only secondary about pretty objects and primarily about a whole approach to doing business, serving customers, and providing value.’ – Tom Peters
Commission a firm that reflects the same urgency and passion as you do about your business. Thought partners who will grow to be custodians of your identity. People who will stand and fight you for the good of your brand and also understand the nuances of your business so that they can engineer your big idea to better reach the consumer.Combined, you will set out to extricate the positive attributes and core values of your brand, the physical, cognitive and emotional profile of the audience it will reach out to and the promise it will make to its consumers. This will help all involved clearly establish the look and feel for your brand and align it with the specific demographics of your consumer, their wants and needs.
Now we all know that your brand is like a person. With character and emotions. All you and your design firm have to do is infuse that character with traits that make a very good friend, possibly the best there is. A friend that gets along with your consumer like a house on fire. A friend that earns your consumer’s trust, respect, loyalty and affection. A friend that will give more than expected always and make your consumer feel good about himself and the association with your brand. Once you have the personality of your brand figured out, the next step is to help it finds its unique place in the mind of your consumer. Your brand needs to clearly communicate why your potential consumer should choose you over competition. That becomes simple when you decide to create a completely new playing field for yourself. New rules, new packaging, new outlook. Position your brand apart from the competition, not against it. It’s the easiest way to get noticed and the quickest way to become a category leader.With the core brand essence and positioning in place, it is no time to get a design savvy.
It is this strategic branding approach to building a business that helps establish a clear understanding about the brand, ensuring its success. Its simple articulation communicates critical brand imagery to the target audience, thus positively impacting the decision to buy into, not just a product or service, but an emotion and a lifestyle that is more long lasting.Even internal communication with and within your employees will become clearer, helping staff and vendors articulate your USPs more effectively. They will be more motivated and passionate about what they do and how they go about doing it, and be governed by a unified philosophy.
When the look is not just skin-deep Once you’ve set down the tenets of your brand and what it promises to deliver on, it’s time to walk the talk. Your brand needs to look the part and communicate likewise.Don’t hold back on going the whole nine yards, when you have only a few steps left. Work closely with your designers to create a robust and high impact identity platform, ensuring a high level of consistency, recognition and effective communication.“Design-conscious” firms have better results in terms of sales growth and profit rate, as per a study conducted by The design Innovation Group. You will see true value in your brand communication, only when all facets of your brand integrate well and speak in unison.
A consistent brand image doesn’t stop with just your corporate stationery or website and brochure design. It needs to reflect uniformity across your office environment, your presentation formats, direct mailers, signage systems, retail spaces, exhibition stands, uniforms, packaging, advertising and every other external and internal communication that your brand undertakes.As a start-up business your objective is to build an image that lends itself to being perceived as professional, credible and trustworthy. Right down to the selection of font styles, colours and graphic forms, your visual identity says much about your brand. It defines how you want to project your brand in the market – be it young, dynamic, stable, grounded, reliable, fast, friendly, exclusive et al.
With creative and effective design, you can even look at innovative marketing avenues, treating every bit of communication as a messenger i.e., a tweak to your visiting card that acts as an instant ice-breaker, a brochure that the recipient will retain for its uniqueness, a direct-mailer that will make its way onto a table for its functionality.
Delving into this level of detail is the only way to come off not looking like a new entity without experience. It’s the only way to stand your own and command respect and a premium in emerging free trade markets that are hunting grounds for the MNCs.
It’s the only way you’ll feel confident and proud while handing out your business card in a room full of discerning, cool and savvy buyers.
