Six Branding and Design Tips for Startup Businesses

Branding and design — the two go side-by-side as the two things most important to the success of a startup. In a consumption-based society in which the shelves are stacked with products and the infosphere packed with competing voices all trying to win your attention, how do you get eyes on YOUR business? The answers, of course, are branding and design.

The two must be thought of as one unit. Designing without your brand in mind is a waste, and branding without taking your logo, tagline, company name, and custom package design into account is, in the strictest sense of the term, meaningless. It is essential that your design tells the story of your brand, and your brand backs up the claims your designs make. Here are some tips that will help you make sure that your startup is communicating clearly with it’s potential customers.

Position Yourself Against Your Competition. That means, essentially, figuring out what makes you different from them, and then telling the customer how you’re different, why you’re different, and how those differences make you better.

Branding Strategies For The New Decade: Virality

Once upon a time, back in the dawn of human commerce, there were only two branding strategies available to merchants: telling folks face-to-face about your brand, and having other people tell folks face-to-face about your brand. Fast forward a thousand years, and branding strategies are so varied that full-time brand consultancy is a very lucrative field — and they’re still evolving every day.

Take, for example, the Internet’s effects on branding. Just a few years ago, the Internet was a great place to get what amounts to word-of-mouth advertising in the form of testimonials and reviews — but today, a whole new species of branding strategy is hard at work online. It’s generally referred to as ‘virality’, or ‘going viral’.

Have you ever heard of Soulja Boy Tell’em? How about Justin Bieber? Both are recording artists, and both have unique backgrounds in that they both got their starts on YouTube. Their first videos were essentially home-made, and went viral — viral enough that they were able to leverage their popularity on the video portal into contracts with major companies.

Your company may not ever reach the fame of a Beiber, who is one of the most widely-recognized faces in America today — or the infamy of a Soulja Boy Tell’em, of whom Ice-T said “[He] killed rap” — but you can still take advantage of the viral powers of the Internet to establish your brand effectively. The essence of virality is creating a branding element that Internet users love to share with one another.

As an example, if you haven’t already seen it, look up the Honda car commercial colloquially known as “Cog”. It’s a two-minute long commerical which Snopes.com has verified was created without any computer graphics at all — and when you see it, you’ll see why that’s an amazing thing. When the commercial first aired, people thought it was nifty — but as the story got out that it was done “for realz”, videos of the UK-based commercial went viral, and sales of Hondas jumped world-wide.

The most difficult part about virality is that it’s hard to predict what exactly will go viral — but most branding strategies include some element that’s intended to tell your unique story in a memorable way…make it memorable enough, put it on the Internet, and it just might do a whole lot of free advertising for you!

Coherent Brand Strategy Is Critical To Claiming Your Share of the Marketplace

A company’s brand strategy is simply the collection of actions taken by that company in order to establish their brand’s unique position in the minds of their customers — actual or potential. Every company, from a freelance writer to a multinational corporation, benefits when the marketplace knows who they are and what they do well — but communicating your product’s or service’s unique value to the marketplace isn’t easy.

Branding, however, can instantly add reputation and value to any product. Imagine, for example, that you were in the market for a can of soup and you saw a generic-looking can that said “Pizza Soup”. Most people would assume that it was probably not something they would enjoy, even if they enjoyed pizza and enjoyed soup. It just doesn’t immediately sound like two things that would go together. But if it was a can of Campbell’s Pizza Soup with Sausages, complete with the red-and-white label and associated Mmm-mmm goodness, suddenly you’d be much more likely to give it a shot.

A coherent brand strategy is much more, however, than having a recognizable label, logo, and tagline. All of those things collectively are like the façade on a building. The brand itself is about the customer’s actual experience with your products. It’s about promising and delivering a particular value (or values), whether it’s quality, low price, convenience, ‘green’-ness, or virtually anything else that people hold in esteem.

For a smaller company, a niche is the key to their brand. A company that delivers generic soups, to extend the previous example, isn’t going to see much of a market share in the face of Campbell’s. But companies that provide distinctly different products — Chunky for ‘heartiness’, Progresso for ‘quality’, Amy’s for ‘organic/vegan’, etc. — all have decent market shares, because they each have their own niche. The smaller a company gets, the more specialized of a niche it will need to center it’s brand around in order to compete with the giants.

These specialized niches practically bring their own brand development with them. Look up, for example, butchbakery.com — they centered their niche on the seemingly nonexistant “cupcakes for men” market, and nearly every aspect of their brand strategy was developed around that simple idea. It’s hard to get more coherent than that — and their 99.9% share of the ‘New York City men who love cupcakes’ market backs that up.

Brand Development Should Never Be A One Man Show

Brand development is nothing less than the creation of your company’s heart and soul. Your brand is your way of communicating with your customers — of telling your unique value through a compelling story. Ideally, thinking of one of your brand’s ‘front elements’ — your company name, logo, tagline, or label — will immediately call to mind the entire story, setting you apart from your competition in a way that means something to your customer.

By telling a powerful and meaningful story to your customer, you create an emotional pull toward your product. By creating a distinction between your product or service and your competitor’s product or service, you give that customer a logical ‘excuse’ to follow that emotional pull all the way up to the cash register. Of course, both the story and the distinction you create need to be authentic — if you don’t live your brand, your customer will instantly identify that fact, and you’ll be back to square one in no time.

The need for plural perspectives and many minds on the task of brand development has never been more apparent than in the last two years. To put it straightforwardly, there are simply too many parts to a solid branding strategy than one person can handle alone. During the current worldwide economic slump, it’s essentially impossible for an American company to compete on price — products created overseas will always be cheaper. That means that developing a brand and communicating it to your customers is your only route to success.

One uncommon but very successful route is to invest in hiring a branding agency to handle your brand development. With a clear strategy created by professionals, your managers can make coordinated, informed, and appropriate decisions regarding everything from marketing to recruitment to customer service.

That ability — to start reflecting the brand’s story in the decisions made every day by the people who run your company — is the key to authenticating your brand. It makes your story more real, which in turn makes your products more valuable in the eyes of your customers — which means more sales.

Save Money on Package Design With Merchandising That Sells

Package design is one of those areas that many startup companies don’t pay much attention to. The thought is that good advertising will get the customers, and when they walk in with your brand in mind, they don’t really care about what the package looks like. Unfortunately, that’s a failed paradigm — a generic or off-message package can turn a customer away in a heartbeat. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend a mountain of money on package design if you keep a few basic principles in mind — principles of merchandising.

The key to merchandising is to catch your customers’ eyes without being tacky or garish about it. Of course, the way to do this varies widely depending on what your product is. If it’s a box of powdered laundry detergent, your tactics are going to be dramatically different than if you’re selling jewelry. When you’re designing a new package for your product, however, you can always take the core precepts of merchandising into account.

One of those precepts is to always have the appearance of plenty. Customers assume if they see a lot of stock that you must be moving a lot of that product (or else why would you need all that stock?) If your product is of the kind that can be stacked X-deep, like laundry soap, you can take advantage of this phenomenon by designing packaging that is opaque and rectangular — so that the first item in any given row always gives the impression that the row is full, even when it’s the ONLY item in that row. If your product is jewelry, you can still use this technique — by using basic visual tricks like putting each piece of jewelry on a piece of oversized material of opposite brightness so that it takes up more space than necessary and stands out strongly against it’s background.

Another merchandising ‘trick’ you can utilize way back at the package design stage is to create a unique visual effect with your packaging — something that powerfully catches the eye when properly arranged. For example, when packaging jewelry, use almost exclusively either black or taupe backdrops — but have one in every 20 or 50 items come in the package with a hot pink backdrop. Instant attention. With something that gets stacked en masse like laundry soap, put some packaging graphics on the sides of the box that, when they’re placed side-by-side, creates arrows that point at the name of the product.

By using these simple, eye-directing merchandising tricks on basic packaging, you can save your company a good chunk of your package design budget. Rather than get something complex and expensive, stick with the basics, and use merchandising as part of your package design rather than something that comes later.

Developing New Products Requires Many Eyes For Many Details

Developing new products is a many-faceted process that can go awry very quickly if your company doesn’t pay attention to several layers of detail, not the least of which is customer research. You need to know how your customer sees your product, what your customer wants from products like yours, and what values your customer holds dear in general.

Domino’s Pizza a year or two ago released a new ad campaign that showed them listening to real focus groups talking about the problems with their pizza. Then, they showed exactly how they changed their product to overcome the complaints of the focus group without losing their attention to the details that made Domino’s Pizza Domino’s Pizza.

The message was unambiguous: “We’re sorry we stopped listening to you. We’re listening again.” The effect was immediate: a significant gain in market share as the “new products” — the redesigned pizzas and sides — were immediately respected by the customer base. It might be odd to think of an established company like Dominos engaging in serious new product development, but the branding strategies they displayed in that maneuver offer a powerful lesson for other companies to learn from.

The lesson is so simple that Sun Tzu pointed it out thousands of years ago: Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster. In the battlefield that is modern marketing, knowing your enemy means knowing how your competitors are seen by your customers — in order to find an angle that they’re not exploiting. Knowing yourself, in marketing as in battle, is much more difficult. That’s where customer research comes in.

Your company needs both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative (like surveys) to establish what the problems are and how much of an impact a specific proposed maneuver will have on the public’s perception of the brand. Qualitative (like focus groups) to establish how your brand is seen and who (as in which market sectors) appreciates the brand as-given and as-proposed.

Combine solid research — knowing yourself — with a good understanding of your competitors and your market environment, and the process of developing new products can be undertaken in an informed and effective manner, with positive results for the brand as a whole.

Innovative Package Design Helps New Products Achieve Positioning

Positioning is a marketing concept that’s been around since the ’80s, but it’s still relevant if not mission-critical to a new business — and among many other elements, package design is one often-overlooked way to achieve proper positioning. Packaging has always played a key role in developing shelf appeal, providing information about a product, and reminding consumers of your brand. But all of that is somewhat meaningless if your customer doesn’t know what your brand means.

Positioning refers to the position your brand has within the minds of the consumers. For example, if you hear the word “Allstate”, you know without even thinking that you’re talking about insurance — and you’re probably already thinking, “Am I in good hands?” That’s because Allstate has done an excellent job of positioning it’s name and it’s tagline in your mind. Now, quick — what does the Allstate logo look like?

Most people can’t tell you, because the company hasn’t done that good of a job of positioning it’s logo. If you guessed “some hands”, you’re right, but most people asked to sketch the Allstate logo (two hands held out, cupped, as if protecting a small defenseless thing) end up drawing something more like the Boys and Girls Club’s logo (two hands grasped as though one is helping the other to it’s feet). So, Allstate has excellently positioned some elements of its brand, and failed to adequately position others.

So how does innovative package design help you position your brand? There are actually a few different ways: by conveying value, by displaying selling points, and by wearing the brand. More importantly, the fusion of all three of these purposes is the key to positioning. If a consumer sees your product, and it immediately conveys value in the form of “high-quality product for consumers with refinement and wealth”, some will ignore it because they value inexpensiveness over quality — but others will go straight for it and look carefully at it.

That’s when the selling points kick in. Let’s say your product is olive oil, and your quality-and-refinement package points out (gracefully, of course) that your olive oil is grown organically on an Earth-friendly farm in southern Italy, packaged in a dark bottle to prevent sun damage to the precious oil, and that it retains the unique flavor of your specific olives much more deeply than a mass-produced olive oil. You’ve just given your consumer logical justification to back up the emotional impact of the quality-and-refinement image.

Then, your brand sits plainly on the label. Your customer sees the name, the logo, and the tagline. (“If only olive your oils were grown with this much love.”) You have just achieved a permanent position in this customer’s mind as the height of high-quality market-buyable olive oils, and so long as that customer holds the values you convey dear, they will continue to buy your olive oil — provided, of course, the product backs up the claims the package design made.

New Product Development Should Keep Branding In Mind

New product development often starts on the wrong principles. The product creator comes up with a bunch of cool ideas, works them in, and then tries to figure out how the end product fits into his existing business or brand. That’s exactly the wrong way to approach the idea. Taking the existing brand into account starting at the conceptual stage of development and going all the way through to designing the prototype will result in a final product that fits much more coherently into your brand and won’t require you to change the way your customers think of you.

Let’s look at a classic bad example from American history. How many of you are old enough to remember the McLean Deluxe? This is a classic example of a very powerful company investing millions of dollars in a complete failure — because they didn’t take their own brand into account when they created the product.

The McLean Deluxe was a vegetarian burger made from processed kelp proteins. It actually tasted pretty decent, and it had something like 90% less fat that a typical McDonalds burger of the era. McDonalds didn’t understand their own brand identity, however, and the McLean Deluxe was a product with no market. Vegetarians and health-conscious eaters certainly didn’t flock to McDonalds because of the McLean, and typical fast-food families were revolted by the very notion of a ‘seaweed burger’.

In contrast, today’s health-food options at McDonalds focus on the brand’s identity: fast food that families eat when they don’t have time to make dinner. Salads with bacon and grilled chicken appeal strongly to the carb-conscious moms that don’t want to eat a starchy bun, Snack Wraps offer a low-carb but still portable snack that a businessman can eat in the car on the way to work, and so on. These products are much more successful, because the product was obviously developed with their brand strategy in mind.

Learn from the example of the McLean Deluxe, and immerse every new product your business develops in the essence of your brand. You can diversify, of course, but do so with a powerful understanding of how your customers — not your employees or your management — see your brand. Only with that focus will new product development strengthen your brand and your company as it should.