Startup Branding knows that in order to build a powerful brand you must always follow the base psychological principals which many business owners unknowingly fight. For example, we have heard several business owners utter this deplorable phrase: “When people think of my business I want them to think of quality.” or “good customer service” or whatever other generic adjective you like. The mind does not operate in this way when making decisions. The mind first thinks of a category and then reaches into it’s brand databank and pulls out a brand that is closest to its needs. To illustrate this, we like to use the example of a natural conversation you might have when selecting a restaurant:
“What sounds good tonight?”
“How about Mexican?”
“Nah, I had Mexican for lunch. How about Chinese?”
“Hey, let’s do Thai.”
“OK, do you want to go to LuLu’s or that new place downtown?”
The mind thinks category first, brand second. In this example the category is Thai food and the brand decision follows the category decision. The same scenario can be had when you have friends over and you go to the fridge. You might ask if anyone would like a beer and if someone replies in the affirmative you list of the brands in the fridge. It is not natural to go to the fridge and list off all the brands in your fridge first.
If you can create a category that is truly unique you can create a brand that will never be overtaken (With one exception: Google overtook Yahoo as the largest brand for online search). This is a scary place to be for most business owners because to create a category means that there is exactly $0.00 worth of revenue in your pie. Keep in mind that every leading brand in existence has done this very thing so although it is scary you are in good company.
Startup Branding has, to date, worked with over 200 brands, helping each to create its own category in which it can specialize and grow. Our work over that time period has allowed us to specialize in providing owners of start-ups with the tools that they need to effectively build their business. Over time, we’ve narrowed in on exactly what that set of tools looks like. Most business owners think that they need flashy, brilliant creative. We feel that successful brands are built on research-based creation of a singular, powerful brand concept. What we’ve created from a product standpoint, is a mixture of both: our “Brand-in-a-Box” concept. Outlined below, our product is one that provides tools that a start-up company owner wants with the road map for success that he/she will need.
Services
Our Brand-In-a-Box - $2,800
Logo
It’s how people identify your brand. A logo creates familiarity and personality for your brand. We’ll provide a series of options for potential logos and help you choose the one that best fits with your brand’s essence.
Business Cards
It’s a tool every business owner needs, a way of creating a brand impression with any potential contacts you meet. And when you meet these new contacts, your handshake or your business card shouldn’t be flimsy. We’ll create a custom business card design for your brand and provide you with 500 high quality business cards as a way to help you make a good first impression and start spreading the word.
Market Snapshot
Even though we have worked with over 400 startups over the years in darn near every industry imaginable, we still can’t know everything. This is why it is critical to understand your specific market and your competitors. We identify potential market segments, your competitors, their size, their advantages, psychological position, and a whole lot of other dizzying aspects of your competition to identify the gaps that exist in the marketplace. Once we’ve found the consumer’s unmet needs, we can build your brand to fit those needs.
Positioning Line
It’s not a tag line. Tag lines are flashy, meaningless and always change. Marketing people love tag lines because it gives them something to do and to charge you for regardless of whether or not it benefits your brand. We are branding people. Branding people create positioning lines. A positioning line is a long-term, single statement that describes your brand, and only your brand. We use our market snapshot and our knowledge of your brand to create the right positioning line for your business.
How will you know difference between a tag line and a positioning line? If it can be slapped on somebody else’s logo and still make sense, it’s a tag line.
8 Words Analysis
First impressions can be everything to a brand. Elevator pitches are outdated. Who has time to listen to a 30 second spiel anymore? It’s 2014. Attention spans are shorter (we are looking at you, internet). Any effective brand can be communicated in 8 words or less – and if you can’t you don’t have a good brand. Your 8 words are simple, memorable, powerful, and tactful.
Critical Brand Elements
This is how you “walk the walk”. You’ve gotten good at the talking by now, but it’s the details that drive that talk home. This part is most often overlooked by business owners. Your critical brand elements are your brand’s reinforcement. This is who you are and this is how you do things. It’s why people choose you and not the guys with the highest advertising budget.
Extra: Website
It’s estimated that 47% of consumers look to a brand’s website for pre-purchase research. The internet isn’t going away any time soon, and it’s important for you to have a presence on it. We’ll build you an informative website, perform the search engine optimization (SEO), and ready it for a mobile platform. You’ll be searchable and accessible on the go, something that is becoming increasing more important as mobile searches continue to rise.
Are we crazy enough to only charge $2,800 for all of this? Well, we know you are a startup and you aren’t exactly swimming in cash so charging far below market and giving you flexible payment options seems logical, right?
We get it. Sometimes an informative site isn’t enough. You’ve got a product and you need a way to sell it. The internet happens to be a pretty great marketplace. It’s convenient and best of all, it’s self sufficient. We’ll build you an e-commerce site instead, database your current inventory, and teach you how to use it. That way you can actualize the revenue and update your inventory as it changes. It’s win-win.
Extra: E-Commerce Site
If you still think smartphones are the “new and hip thing” we would tell you to turn down your 8-track and listen hard. Smartphones are quickly becoming the standard for how people search for information. It’s estimated that by 2015, mobile browsing will surpass computer browsing. If you’re going to capture the mobile audience, you’re going to need an app. We can build it to your business’ reasonable needs and launch it on Android and Apple’s app stores.
Extra: Mobile App
Examples
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