Branding is no longer about creating a name and a logo, it’s about combining product and magic, according to Marc Lite, CEO and co-founder of Firma, Barcelona’s most famous branding studio.
Marc has helped clients such as PepsiCo, Unilever and Esade, as well as local startups such as Badi and Bandit find their voice.
The following steps are what Marc thinks all companies need to go through, to begin the journey of building a strong, long-lasting brand.
However, before you invest anything in branding, make sure your product or service does three things:
- Works perfectly technically.
- Creating value for your users.
- And that the user interface and experience is very good.
Your brand is not LEAN
The main goal of you creating a brand for your startups is to clearly define a positioning statement that communicates through all the brand touchpoints.
This communication needs to be presented in a coherent and consistent way to your audiences.
Many small startups are used to rapidly changing environments. Being agile and lean means iterating and changing a lot to make your product better, and for working with technology and product development this mindset is great. For brands however, staying the same is better.
Take a look at the strongest brands in the world (Coca Cola, Apple, Orange..), can you remember they ever doing a major change to their logo or color? Of course not, it would be a disaster.
Even though you see your own brand every day, remember that most of your users don’t, and suddenly changing would weaken your brand a lot.
But before you start producing your coherent content, you need to take a sharp look at your company and ask yourself these questions about your brand identity:
Is it ownable? Can we own the segment or the market?
Are we relevant? Does our target audience find us interesting?
Is it different? Do we stand out from our competitors?
Are we durable? Are we positioned to last over time?
If you want to ALL the insights from Marc at Firma, check out the video at the top.
Or read this: