As a startup entrepreneur, you’ll know that your brand image is most important when it’s hiding the fact that you’re a small, new company. You want your brand to advance the values you wish to represent: qualities like trustworthiness, professionalism, and timeliness. Without the backing of years of experience to increase consumer trust in your company, your brand fills that gap – and as such, getting it off the ground is of pivotal importance for the success of your startup. This article looks at how you can go about formulating your unique and charismatic brand.
Brainstorm Symbols
You are likely to have a brand name – you are less likely to have fleshed that out into the symbols that you feel best represent you and your business operations. You should gather your core creative talent and brainstorm on the following brand characteristics:
- What will be your dominant colors?
- What will be your tone of voice?
- Which shapes and symbols can you use in your logo?
- How would you like your brand to be seen?
- How can you make your brand stick in the mind of customers?
By answering all of these questions, and brainstorming around them for brand ideas, you’ll soon narrow down your brand to a set of slick, communicative characteristics to play with.
Concentrate on the Logo
Your brand logo is going to be prominent throughout all of your business operations, from the paper that you write on to the billboard advertisements of online promotions you run. As such, it’s something you should concentrate a great deal of your energy on. A hashed, half-baked logo will only communicate the same kind of message about your whole business to curious consumers.
It’s easy to play with some initial logo ideas by using online logo tools to help visualize the sketches and verbalized ideas you’ve been tossing around. Once you have the basics drawn up, you’ll be able to take them to a professional designer with experience designing brands, who’ll be able to hone it to perfection.
Your Brand Journey
You’re a startup, which means you’ve got a very short history behind you. You may not have secured any major deals or any press coverage, but you can still play with the idea of a brand journey – that is, the narrative that you present to consumers as to how you came about, and what your mission is in business. Consider:
- What inspired your business idea
- The ethos behind both the name and the brand
- How you brought your team together to work on this project
- Where you want to go in the next year, the next five years, and the next ten years
These questions are all connected to your brand story and the journey you are aiming to take the business and its customers on in the years to come. Everyone loves a human touch; it helps distract from the pure business side of things, so make your founding story emotive and warming to help connect with more customers.
In your brand development journey, there are a few initial considerations that’ll help you lay the foundations for the future, and the three most important are outlined above to help you plan a compelling brand for your startup.