Using Branding to Power Start Ups

Is built on understanding your company’s unique position in your industry

As a business leader, you understand your company from the inside. Branding looks from both the inside and the outside to provide a 360-degree understanding. The process includes mapping competitors, profiling audiences, and reviewing projections for the future of your market. Working closely with visionaries and leaders, brand strategists position your unique offering within the competition and articulate its benefits.

Articulates your company’s purpose and promise

A brand is a promise, a commitment to deliver a benefit to an audience — a new treatment for a rare disease, a carefully distilled spirit, a unique travel experience, a high-performance wall system. All industries, products, services and entities benefit from clarity of purpose and promise. A well-articulated brand strategy focuses your resources and messaging and helps you understand what you need to do to deliver on your brand promise.

Provides a framework to create consistent messages and campaigns

Consistency is important to build awareness. Key phrases, consistent use of color, fonts and photography, style of writing, landing pages, websites, social media banners — when these assets look professional and consistent, the perception is that your company is as well. Without a clear brand platform, there is no framework for creating assets and the result is often inconsistent. A huge benefit of a strong brand platform is that everyone, from the CEO to the administrative staff, can follow the guidelines to reinforce the brand.

Builds engagement through unique and memorable assets

If your company looks and feels unique, people will remember. A start-up often relies on the power and personality of a visionary. As a start-up grows, the visionary is not able to attend every meeting or talk to every potential client or investor. Translating the founding visionary’s energy into a brand that can be embraced by the entire company provides a strong platform for growth. Consistent, memorable messaging and materials are important for building a unified brand. Done well, a brand allows for freedom within the framework, allowing employees leeway in how they incorporate the brand ideas and assets into their daily work.

Helps you avoid rebranding at the critical moment when you are building market share

In a hurry to get started, new businesses and initiatives sometimes pick a name and launch a simple website without investing in brand strategy or design expertise. This strategy usually works adequately through the initial stages of building a company. Unfortunately, what often happens is that, because the assets are not strong, designers and marketing professionals start an additive process, a new color, a tagline, a specific marketing campaign that morphs into a redesigned website. Eventually, there is no unifying memorable brand experience. While rebranding is always an option, it may be needed most just when the company is reaching a key milestone, forcing it to rebrand with additional constraints at a time when it is building momentum and brand awareness.

Conclusion

It is never too early to brand your company. Use the discipline of branding to help focus your business and build engagement from the very start.

Image: D&CO worked closely with serial entrepreneur Tillman Gerngross to power biotech startup Amagma Therapeutics‘ brand launch.