Founding a new startup? Amazing! How much effort, time, and money you should put into branding and your startup brand strategy? When forming branding for your startup, you need to keep in mind that the startup’s brand strategy should mirror the important fact of your positioning statement. Your branding strategy will be supported and influenced by your startup’s name, logo, design, and any other form of communication that your company has with the market.
When forming branding for your startup, you need to keep in mind that the startup’s brand strategy should mirror the important fact of your positioning statement. Your branding strategy will be supported and influenced by your startup’s name, logo, design, and any other form of communication that your company has with the market. Since its inception, your brand consists of four parts:
Assurance: What does your product enable your customers with?
Story: What your customers need, and how will you provide it?
Standards: What are the standard others (e.g., consumers, investors) see in your product? What do you deliver that is relevant and different from others?
Name, appearance, and feel: What images and words are associated with your startup?
Startup Brand Strategy: Why it is important
Your startup’s worth and product are vital. But branding for startups becomes more important with time as your company grows. Your startup worth will be familiar to you, your partners, co-workers, your investors, and maybe a few loyal customers.
Your startup brand, however, will not only be recognized and viewed by these people, but also by the many who are yet to purchase your product. Advertising, promotion, your marketing mix, and other marketing activities can surely play an important role in converting these people into customers.
Best 5 Startup Brand Strategy Ideas
Here are a few tips to help you with creating an effective startup brand strategy:
1. Brand product should be separate from the company
Ambitious startup owners want to reach a level where they can sell their company, but they have to give away the only brand they created with it. The pain of giving away the brand is easily understandable. Here, an effective startup brand strategy needs to put in place, the brand gets more supremacy when you lawfully separate the company from the product brand.
Of course, you have to put an investment in accounting to keep everything clear. Also, you need money to register your trademark. This strategy can help you in many ways. For example, you can have patents in the company and “have an agreement” with them for the product brand. In this case, you can have multiple products under the same company, and look at potential byproducts for each product. This also allows you to limit your losses without troubling your core brand. Most significantly and important, the company brand is your personal establishment and it can be with you always and forever.
2. Brand values and standards are more vital than the brand
Instead of putting a lot of effort, money, and time on the logo graphic designing, a good startup brand strategy is to spend extra time on the brand standards and values you want for your company. The company’s brand values should display and highlight your culture, and you should devote time for training so all staffs and employees realize what it means.
The brand values and standards of your product are your identity and assurances to the market. You fail to deliver the assurances, the customers will be displeased, no matter how well you are from competitors. You should have a tag line of not more than five words which explains your brand-ability. Test it to see if the meaning is strong and clear.
3. Focus on the name – the logo design can change anytime
Of course, the brand name is important. But as per effective startup brand strategy, it does not actually matter though- what matters is: “what does it mean?” the gist is important. Customers will assume the identity based on the style, the font, color, and graphics related to the brand. Keep it neat and simple. The next vital thing to ask is how the brand is being accepted and remembered by the customers. The easier it is to recall and speak, the easier it gets for customers to ask for it when they are making a product choice.
In the B2C market, feelings and sentiments matter more than performance. In the B2B market standard, value and reliability are key for connection marketing. The more complex the name, the more money you have to spend educating the customer what it means. You can’t waste money when you are setting up a startup?
4. Future possibility and brand potential
The brand name should have future potential for product growth. If your brand name is precise, for example, XYZ cheese, you are pretty much stuck in the cheese and milk product business. Consider asking questions to yourself like: do you want to be worldwide? What does this name mean to other worldwide customers?
Do you want to go in into other target segments- can it make the transition across other age groups and genders? Who would you like to be in partnerships with- what would be the combined effects? Is there going to be enough physical space on product variations to put your brand name? These are the most significant questions that will help you determine the future potential of a brand name.
5. Brand storytelling is important
As per a great startup brand strategy, your story and your wow-moments do matter, as any other greatest brands have (think Microsoft and Bill Gates). More recently in India, you can look at Byju Raveendran who owns company online business “BYJU’s” (He is among the top 100 Billionaires in India). Brands can take the role of anti-heroes or heroes. Both will work, but you have to understand the mood of the market. Many startups grew big in valuations through over-exposure and then faced a quick public downfall.
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