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Brand building includes formulating hypotheses, gathering data, validating the assumptions, and adopting the necessary changes.
Many think that the brand is developed the moment a designer or an agency hands over the brand identity. But the truth is that building a brand, including in Biotech and Life Sciences, takes time. The real work only begins with the launch of the corporate identity. This is where the growth-driven design steps in to fine-tune the brand over time to support marketing campaigns and reach your marketing goals.
What do I mean by that? As a startup, you develop a product or a service for a certain customer. Your hypothesis is the way you decide to communicate that idea to your audience.
In practice and to start with, it's your:
When a designer is working on a visual brand identity, they are making a bet that this logo, this website, these assets will resonate with the target audience based on their research. Whether it will or not is the question to your target market. To learn if it does, you will need some insights.
Once your brand is launched, it's time to put your assumptions to the test, which involves acquiring information. In this phase, the spotlight shifts to the website. The website's role extends beyond offering information about your product; it collects valuable insights about the industry. It is a data collection hub that can shed some light on how your audience perceives your offer. Later, it will be helpful for your search engine optimization.
With the data collected through surveys, forms, heat maps, A/B testing, landing pages as well as qualitative research from customer interviews and observations you acquire insights that either validate or invalidate the hypothesis. Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful channel, but hard to track. And when it's hard to track, it's hard to improve. With the insights and validation in place, you will know what works for your brand, what needs some changes, and what tools you will need to do so.
By optimizing the website copy, refining the imagery, streamlining the onboarding process, and incorporating feedback into product development, you can now adjust your product and brand identity to better align with the needs of your potential customers and the expectations of your target audience in general. Let's not forget that solving customers' problems extends customer lifetime.
As an example, experimentation and testing played a pivotal role in positioning LabTwin as the leading lab assistant for scientists.
From the first assumption to the proven concept, with time, testing, and iteration, you will craft a brand that effectively communicates your business and science in a manner that deeply resonates with your audience segments.
“To design something is to make a claim about what we think is good design, and to ask others whether they agree. That’s the role of designers and creative teams in biotechnology,” - says Christina Agapakis, SVP of Creative and Marketing at Ginkgo Bioworks for Clot.
If I were to summarize the method in one sentence, it would be: “Better done than perfect, then make it perfect.”
I like defining the growth approach as a design approach that tailors your brand. It's the step that you take after you have developed your initial brand identity and design.
Its goal is to find a way to satisfy both the company's and the customer's needs to drive business activity. This marketing tactic focuses on developing experiences that solve problems for people while also meeting the company's key metrics.
“Growth design involves crafting meaningful experiences at scale so that an organization can exceed its business goals while delighting their customers,” - a definition by growth.design.
Growth-driven design usually takes place in three stages:
This is the “better done than perfect” stage. In a nutshell, it includes conceptualizing the most needed assets for launch and executing them fast and well.
The kick-off package usually includes a logo, basic website pages (home, about, and blog), and a lead generator. The website is a very important one to launch as it will be the marketer, the salesperson, and the researcher working 24/7 for your startup. The majority of your insights and contacts will come through it.
The goals of this phase are to:
Overall, the objective is to establish a profound and empathetic understanding of the various target audience groups: their problems, their needs, their motivation, their behavior, and their feelings about the product. The sooner you dive into these aspects, the more finely-tuned your product can become. The more attuned it is to the people you serve, the more happy customers you'll get in return.
You might ask why bother with this launch pad instead of dedicating time to developing a fully executed brand identity and website.
To kickstart your growth activities without delays.
To help you filter out the most necessary assets, create an initial customer journey map: the before, during, and after of the user experience. It will serve as the foundation of your hypotheses and will help identify the pivotal touchpoints and opportunities for engagement.
Simultaneously, define clear business goals and success metrics to help you prioritize essential objectives for your launch. Use SMART goals framework - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound - for that. And consider what marketing KPIs are you trying to meet?
With the hypotheses in place, business goals in mind, customer journey on hand, website online, and lead generator up, you can start building your audience early by engaging with early adopters and connecting with your people across various channels.
Now that we've done it, we can make it perfect.
You already have the primary set of assets that are working for your brand. The next step is to experiment and improve. Choose the high-impact items to improve so they can support your marketing and sales funnels.
“When interpretation is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to look at more than one right answer,” - Peter Wilken, branding expert, author of “Dim Sum Strategy.”
The ambitions for this stage are to:
This stage rotates around an agile methodology: plan the changes, develop them, test, review, and repeat. Through experimentation, look for the following answers: what is working for your brand? What needs adjustments? Where does communication become confusing? Is there anything that will enhance its performance? Brand building is all about the details, especially, when it comes to novel solutions created by Biotechnology and Life Sciences.
Needless to mention the spotlight in this phase falls on your website design, your primary channel for data collection and audience engagement. The point is to design a site that effectively captures information, ensuring that your interactions are both meaningful and insightful. Exploring a solution and understanding it is part of your customer experience. After all, it's a powerful tool for providing information on the product or service and gathering customer data.
To generate insights, you will be looking for three types of data:
Now that you have an idea of how your audience perceives your brand, how it stands in the industry, ask yourself: is it the way you want them to think of it? If not, make the necessary changes. Barely any startup has retained its brand identity, going as far as changing the color schemes or even a logo. Their success is the result of iteration done over time. Take a look at the examples below.
Once perfected, share the learnings.
The expansion phase is about cross-pollinating findings with other teams and building assets to support them while ensuring brand consistency. It's a critical phase in which all your brand assets should align, as they might have evolved separately in the previous stages.
During this phase, the primary objectives are:
While the earlier stages may have concentrated on high-impact touchpoints, this phase allows for some creativity and exploration. Consider adding new elements, testing fresh assumptions, or venturing into uncharted territory. This could involve branching out your value proposition, encouraging referral marketing, tailoring messages for new target audience segments, introducing new tech products or services, creating ambassador programs, fostering a community of users, trying new social channels, and more.
In addition, use the relevant content already created for your social media marketing or any other digital channel of your digital marketing strategy.
“In the survey, after 6 months agencies that used Growth-Driven Design reported seeing: 16.9% more leads and 11.2% more revenue,” - Growth-Driven Design certificate program by Hubspot.
When a design agency or a designer develops a brand identity and website, their work typically stems from audience research. However, research alone can't ensure how your "ideal customers" will perceive the brand in reality. To foster a more precise alignment between the target audience and the business, the growth design approach actively “listens” to audience feedback through data analysis and molds your brand accordingly.
Brand and website design demands a significant initial investment, dollar-wise and in time, with uncertain outcomes. In contrast, growth-driven design promotes incremental investments with ongoing result monitoring, avoiding heavy upfront costs and waiting for a grand reveal. Smaller incremental investments tend to be friendlier for the marketing budget. It focuses on iterative development, integrating broader audience and team feedback for prompt, precise adjustments.
Conventional website design involves a full-scale launch, necessitating a halt in the growth activities of your startup until the website is up and running. Alternatively, you can launch key pages and assets, allowing your website to start its work of audience building and data collection, all while you progressively enhance the remaining components. With the website, you can also start generating leads and drive conversion rates.
It's worth reiterating that the growth-driven design method's strength lies in its early data utilization. This data enables a deeper understanding of your prospective customers and facilitates the refinement of your brand's messaging for precise communication at the most effective touchpoints. It will help you develop valuable content for your startup marketing strategy. It will help you further down with your marketing efforts such as blog posts, campaigns, advertising, email marketing, and content creation for social media platforms.
Brand assets, like the website, are vital components that support multiple departments within the company. Better customer service lies in providing support and syncing various teams.The growth-driven approach places a strong emphasis on fulfilling the needs of various teams, including marketing team, sales, product, and HR. It creates assets and generates insights that can be effectively leveraged across all departments, fostering a unified and collaborative environment.
“GINKGO BIOWORKS, engineering biology by design”, interview with Christina Agapakis for Clot
“What is growth design?” by growth.design
“Dim Sum Strategy: Bite-Sized Tools to build Stronger Brands” by Peter Wilken
What is Agile methodology? (A beginner’s guide) by Asana
Growth-Driven Design Certification Course by Hubspot Academy
Archives on corporate and brand identity by Brand New
