marketing, brandYou can often see startups spending massive amounts of time on branding, or conversely no time at all. Clearly, some aspects to the development of a brand depend on the nature of the startup, but it seems like there should be a way to manage the timing and development of a brand relative to the demands of a venture. When does a startup need a brand?
I’ll take a completely contradictory opinion. With reasons. If you’re following lean startup, you’ll have discovered how to get repeat engagements with people who want to buy, using the Customer Development process.
This will tell you what the salient components of your offering are. If you service a sufficiently important need, you don’t need a snazzy logo, fancy name and slick stuff. If your audience values, above all, what your website looks like, and not what you do… You should be looking at being in the publishing industry and give up on the product or service you’re selling.
In the end, what counts, is conversions. If you don’t sell, then whatever animal you’re like, whatever colour represents you, whatever sounds emphasise your intrinsic qualities, whichever swoosh you’ve used, the font you’ve selected… is just wasted time, effort and money.
Branding follows the audience, in a startup. Find your customer. Build what they need. Be identifiable because of what you do for them, not because you have a sweepier swoosh in a distinctive Pantone colour using an unreadable custom font. :)
Your brand is your promise to deliver value. You’re not big enough, important enough, yet, to be family. That may come. And at that point you’ll have the need and the money to re-brand, get a snaky logo, put up unreadable font websites in pale grey on silver, and survive the experience.
Brand is an experience, not a colour, not a font, not a look. Give good experience.
To some extent, it’s going to depend on the startup itself.
But as a general rule, I would say the brand should be in mind from the outset. Each decision made should at least partially be evaluated on the basis of how it will effect the brand that is being built.
That’s internal though, and I suspect has little to do with the heart of your question about building a brand. I assume you’re referring primarily to public efforts to build up your brand recognition.
In an ideal world, I would say building brand awareness should be done as early as possible too. But in reality, a lot of small bootstrapped startups end up trying to match the marketing efforts of some of the well-funded startups… and like you observed, it doesn’t work. Often it comes at a detriment to the product or service itself.
So in reality, a good rule of thumb I’ve used and seen others use is to spend at least 3 months prior to launch building brand recognition. And even then, be careful to focus on efforts that are most effective for your niche rather than simply doing something for the sake of getting your name out there. An article in the NYTimes seems like great exposure, but if your target demographic is teenage girls (and not their parents), it may not do you enough good to be worth the precious time invested… (though I have to admit it would be hard to turn down given the opportunity)
Also, the more developed and defined your brand is before you start publicizing the easier it will be to publicize.
Ultimately, a large portion of running a startup (or any business) is time management an learning to prioritize. Branding is one of the MANY things that will need to be juggled and prioritized along the way. And it will continue to need to be prioritized as long as you own the business, not just at the beginning.
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