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“A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” Marty Neumeier
Aside from common assumptions on branding and strong brand identities, a brand is more than a logo, more than a product, and even more than a reputation. Marty Neumeier has defined it as “a person's gut feeling.” It is what people experience when they encounter your business.
If we are talking about a gut feeling, then it is formed the moment your startup idea leaves the soft cradle of your brain's convolutions and inhabits someone else's mind.
While you cannot fully control how people's perceptions, shaping it can bear fruit.
Imagine finding a gentle way to improve human life through your research. For example, you have figured out a way to remove an absurd bottleneck in a drug development process with the help of AI. Or you are striving to utilize machine learning techniques to build an elegant and seamless NLP model.
Whatever your ambition is, you will need two things to reach long-term success:
Searching for resources to develop technology means attracting top talent, finding investors, and forming partnerships.
Adopting new technology means you have successfully built a customer base that repeatedly purchases your offer.
Both depend on developing relationships between your tech company and your audience (clients, talent, investors, and partners). To succeed, the association has to be based on trust. With the help of branding, you can build that trust.
People are more willing to participate in the endeavor if they share values and beliefs. To do so, a brand manifests its vision and a reason to exist so the audience can emotionally connect to the company.
Your product or your technology is the main hero and it should meet the highest standards. But if managed well, a brand can be a mechanism to transform your product from another tool to a valuable partner, a partner that will be disappointing to lose.
Write three simple statements that define who you are: your vision, mission, and purpose. These form the foundation of all your branding efforts. They are your key branding elements.
What do you want your startup to become? What would the ideal world look like? What would the perfect outcome look like if time and money were not an objective?
How does your technology or scientific research provide value? How are you going to live the purpose?
What is the motivation and drive behind your venture? What causes keep you up at night? Why should people care?
You can apply vision, mission, and purpose statements:
These statements provide a direction for identity design or any visual design for marketing purposes. It can even serve as a filter when brainstorming names and choosing domain names.
Thanks to Daniel Kahneman's multiple reiterations in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, we now know that people believe coherent stories quicker than validated facts and rigid statistics.
Your vision, mission, and purpose are the proxy of your story. This story clearly outlines your goal and offer while stitching those together with a reason why the actual product matters.
People care when their purpose of enhancing the world is in agreement with the purpose to provide tools for enhancement. For example, scientists' desire to improve human lives is aligned with a desire to equip them with an AI-powered assistant. They are akin in their purpose: to ameliorate humanity with science.
A similar nexus through purpose is built with any audience group: investors, partners, employees, or commentators, for example.
Through the mission, you can reach a segment of the audience who would have ignored your offer otherwise.
For example, a pharma enterprise could ignore a voice-powered assistant, thinking of it as another ELN. But they would be interested in exploring new ways of seamlessly maximizing data capture with the help of the same assistant.
A mission statement serves as a principle to evaluate if a decision outlines the path to a startup success. Specifically, it can serve as an actionable guideline for both a startup founder (asses a potential partnership) and an investor (check if the venture is on track).
If you are a founder, a vision and a purpose statement assist you in finding a like-minded co-founder, evaluating future investors, or hiring people who will stay long-term.
If an offer is what you produce and how (in other words, your vision and mission), then use your foundation and data on the target audience to ensure the offer is aligned with the need or demand. It keeps the brand focused on the target market it serves, improving the product based on people's needs.
Moreover, rooting in creativity, inclusion, equality, and diversity produces a more robust internal company culture. This culture can be nourished with a common purpose which provides a ground for people to grow and self-actualize.
A well-managed brand also has a higher ROI and lower chances of failed IPO. If an ROI is connected to the number of loyal customers who continually make purchases for a slightly higher price, then its value augments with time.
Your purpose is the beginning of your differentiation. It is easy to copy or steal the technology. However, it is a lot harder to live up to the purpose. Being unique and competent gives you an advantage in this noisy world full of big promises. Therefore, your price and value are protected on the market.
A strategy is an action plan to help your business connect to its audience. It can be imagined as a bridge between the startup and its audience. It gives a brand a soul, provides it with a personality, surfaces its competitive advantage, and positions it in the market. All will help you to exceed the competition, grow sustainably and build a community of like-minded people.
As with any strategy, it is rooted in this foundation.
Having a strong brand doesn't release one from the obligation of delivering a high-quality product. But if used well, it can be a powerful mechanism to build an emotional connection with potential customers, investors, partners, and talent. This relationship is harder to disrupt by a lower price or a louder marketing campaign or even chic marketing materials by a competitor. Moreover, the same connection often becomes a reason for people to continue using software despite the bugs and inconveniences.
A long-term success requires building a relationship between your startup and your audience.
A connection rooted in trust can become the reason why people wouldn't want to abandon your endeavor. Trust is essential for startups in science and should be used responsibly.
The key branding elements are vision, your mission, and your purpose. These statements serve as a foundation and can be used as a communication toolkit for startups. It is also a base to help you build a consistent brand.
Consistent branding makes you unique and secure. It protects a startup from the competition and serves as a model for decision-making process.
