Startup Branding: How to Create a Brand that Attracts Customers, Investors & Partners

High-level Takeaways

• It’s helpful to think of your startup brand as “An idea or promise that calls to mind certain traits and stirs up certain feelings”
• To start your startup branding work, first define the feelings you want to stir up in your customers and the traits you want to bring to their minds
• Then figure out what idea or promise would likely stir up these feelings and traits
• To build a startup brand, you must:
• Deliberately make emotional connections with people, earn their trust and then deliver on your promise
• Consistently make decisions according to (aka live by) your core values
• Remember, you’re going to build a reputation either way, good or bad. This is true with brands as well. If you aren’t doing it deliberately, you probably aren’t building the brand (or reputation) you want to build.
• Brands are built through consistency.
• What problem does your brand solve for people? (if it disappeared tomorrow, would there be a hole in people’s lives?)
• People want to stand with brands because of what those brands stand for
• You brand is strengthened when the company and its leaders make hard decisions based on the brand
• If you don’t live out of your core values, you won’t have the brand you want to have.
• In product messaging, one mistake we make is focusing on the differentiators WE care about, instead of focusing on the differentiators that our target customers care about.

Exercises for Startup Branding

Think of brand purpose as why your brand deserves to exist.

• Gather your core team, ask the following questions, gather the answers and synthesize into a statement of your startup’s brand purpose:
  • What problem does our brand (not our product, but our brand) solve for people? 
  • How does our brand solve that problem for them? How is our brand the answer?
  • What’s missing from the lives of people who will love our brand?
  • Why are we focused on solving this problem with our brand?
  • Why should people care about that?
  • What big idea do we stand for?
  • What’s the “beating heart”? 

“People want to stand with brands because of what those brands stand for.”

Your brand purpose is like a compass. Use your brand purpose as a lens when making decisions. Ask yourself, “Does this align with our brand purpose?” This helps you keep the “right bearing on your compass.”

2. Core Values

Think of your startup’s core values as operating principles, the non-negotiable ways you approach the world. 

• Gather your core team, ask the following questions, gather the answers and synthesize into a statement of your startup’s core values. Pick 5 or 6 values at most.
  
  • What are our non-negotiable ways of treating people and doing business?
  • What can we not imagine NOT still being true 10 years from now?
  • How do we want the brand to show up in the world?
  • What principles will guide our decisions?
• Bring your values to life! To help your team use the values as operating principles, a secondary exercise that’s helpful is to map your values against all of the moments when customers touch your brand. You can use a table like the one below (and here’s a link to the Gsheet template). List your values down the left side, all of the instances where a customer will encounter your brand across the top. For each cell, write how you could convey that particular value at that particular touchpoint.