What’s in a brand? It’s fundamentally so intangible but yet might just be the single most vital thing that draws loyalty and success for a business.
According to Steve Forbes, “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business”. What does that mean for startups and how can founders start thinking about this when building a company?
We’ve been building Delegate for more than five years now and distinctly, it seems we have a brand. At the very basic, we have a brand identity — logo, colours, typography and the things that look great on paper.
We got many compliments on this and somehow have made it through the past few years with some consistency. Truth be told, I have no one else to thank but my Co-Founder for this — she has a great eye for detail and design.
As much as I loved our early days of picking colours and typography out of a catalogue, there comes a time in every startup’s lifecycle to connect the dots on what this all means. How does everything connect — our genesis, our values and where we want to be?
This is where we sought advice and guidance from the ecosystem. We had our core team sit through a half a day session with Peggy Wu from Monk’s Hill Ventures to understand how we can tie in branding with our growth.
Peggy has amassed years of experience consulting financial institutions and MNCs on their branding strategy. Since joining Monk’s Hill in 2019, she has shifted her attention to technology businesses and startups in Southeast Asia.
In my view, she’s bringing a wealth of professional strategy experience to the scrappy world of startups and doing us a huge favour!
Also read: From Kopi to a cool mil: Event marketplace Delegate raises US$1 million
The session, which is an adaptation of GV’s branding guide, has been tested and tried in Silicon Valley for startups. I found the session hugely impactful, which got me inspired to share some of our experiences and takeaways below.
20-year road map
Although we had the foresight to map out our vision from day one, it was ironically an exercise done in reverse. This means we came up with our product before we came up with the mission — no surprise, this is common in many other startups too.
As founders, we often need to do storytelling to stakeholders. We’ve always had a five to 10-year roadmap but never in my wildest dreams did I think we had to do this for 20 years. Let’s be real, the average lifespan of a tech startup is usually 3 to 5 years and 98% of startups are predicted to fail.
Hence, I never thought to even do this five years ago but since we’ve survived thus far, we decided it was time to start thinking further.
Think about Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and all the great companies had their own stories and have shifted focus on products. While understanding that the roadmap might change for the near and very far future (because all startups pivot at some point), what was interesting was not only about how our core team saw the future but also about how they saw the NOW.
The golden circle — Why, What and How?
We’ve all heard about Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” and how it should impact one’s purpose in life. I recently did an exercise on this during Founder’s Coaching Pause (FCP) on a personal basis and it was impactful. And yes, why not think about this from a company perspective?
A great example Peggy cited was Nike and how they wanted to inspire others through successful athletes — it made a lot of sense from all the ads they were putting out. But, how does that apply for a tech startup? How does that apply for Delegate?
Truthfully, many companies grow their businesses without the why — the why should be the purpose, cause and belief. It should be the reason why the company exists.
Then why should help convey a company’s passions that help drive emotions, trust and loyalty i.e. Why would someone want to work with your company? Why would investors want to be a part of this? Why would your customers be loyal to you?
The typical why any founder would put out would typically be a very specific problem statement and often falls in line with the start of their investor pitch. There’s nothing wrong with a specific problem statement but once you’ve done a 20-year plan, the why naturally becomes way bigger and a lot more visionary.
Within less than an hour, we came up with Delegate’s why. Our why is “To experience life better through connecting and celebrating memorable experiences”. The HOW and WHAT are naturally become things that are fairly obvious for a company but for definition sake, here goes:
HOW — The value proposition on what sets the company apart from its competitors
WHAT — The product
Truth be told, building a startup is tough work and sometimes, the regular notion of pivoting can allow you to lose track of the why. This is a great framework to get reminded of even if you’re pivoting. Don’t ever forget the WHY.
Cultural values
Being more data-driven in most of my decision making, cultural values are similarly intangible to me as to what branding is. We understand the culture and why it’s important especially for a startup. A loosely defined term I had in mind was this — we needed every one in our team to live and breathe these values in all aspects of operations and decision-making.
Here’s the caveat — I had no idea how it tied in with branding until Peggy connected the dots for me. Our 20-year plan and Golden Circle should in fact highlight our cultural values pretty evidently if we’re doing a good job at being authentic.
As our why tends to be the emotional connection to why the company exists, our culture values need to be how we live by this existence.
Top three audience
From a branding perspective, it’s pretty clear why we need to know our audience well. What the exercise helped us most with was aligning our core team’s perspective on our audience based on priority. It was exceptionally refreshing for me as a founder to hear how different team members trashed out discussions on why their priorities were different.
Also read: 6 tried-and-tested branding tips for your startup
As a company scales, more revenue channels come to surface and naturally, there’s a larger varied audience. The key takeaway here was to make sure everyone on the team was on the same page in terms of priorities.
What’s our personality?
As with what attracts us to friendships and relationships, we’re often drawn to brands of traits we can relate to. What’s in a brand? This is where all the tangible stuff is defined. Some things to think about:
- Why is Chanel seen as a luxury and elite brand? Is it just purely because of the cost?
- Google is seen to be a fun and playful company — their brand colours are vibrant.
- Why is Bloomberg seen as high authority as a financial resource above everyone else?
This was the most fun exercise for me especially because it was tangible and actual definitions could take place. Peggy made it fun by creating a personality slider for us to think about. Here are some examples. Whilst attempting to define this, think about the trait you are at now and where you’d like to to see yourself become as a company then, put a number to it.
- Elite Vs. Mass Appeal?
- Serious Vs. Playful?
- Conventional Vs. Rebel?
- Friend Vs. Authority?
- Mature/Classic Vs. Young/Innovative?
Thinking about these traits allow us to think of reasons related to our identity especially in design, marketing and communications. Think about why you would choose this font compared to another and why these colours make sense. Another level to think about things is to understand how you can use your traits to distinctly differentiate your brand.
The fun part is also having your core team deciding on this together.
Brand competition
There is much context around this that can be quite customised per every industry thus, with the interest to make this as generic as possible, a good way to think about this is brand positioning. Is your competitive landscape diluting or increasing your brand awareness? How can you leverage this as a brand and company?
Next steps
This is my favourite part — thinking deeper about how this could impact the company within each business unit especially in how we work and make decisions. This is a list I came up with — feel free to comment if you have more ideas on how branding the above might impact a startup effectively.
- Hiring decisions on who joins the company
- Product decisions on why we build and improve products
- Who we want to bring on board as an investor, advisor and board of directors
- Marketing decisions on who to market to and what we’re planning to convey
- Design decisions to convey the right brand identity
- General operations on how we make decisions as a team and how we work with each other internally and externally
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