Entrepreneurs invest a lot of time, energy and money into launching their startup. The hours are fueled with excitement and anxiety. There’s a sense of urgency to launch quickly and generate revenue before running out of seed capital. The marketplace is filled with an abundance of competition; hence setting a startup apart from the rest is crucial to its survival and success. This is where branding steps in; once the strategy and goals of the startup are well defined, companies start branding.
Branding is what distinguishes companies apart through a process of creating a unique name, logo, and the experience delivered to customers to attract them and retain their loyalty. The essence of branding is not merely a logo, slogan and a color palette; it is the psychology that is behind a business, the connection between the company and the customer, and understanding your customer and their love for your product.
Many entrepreneurs tend to fail to understand the essence and create a poor identity for their brand. It is important for them to understand that all aspects of branding are critical to their business. They sometimes tend to spend so much time creating and perfecting their startup and don’t allocate the sufficient time and resources to this important step. Some spend a vast amount of time on their beloved idea, which they fall in love with, and end up creating a brand identity based on their thoughts, emotions and visions, completely neglecting to get feedback from customers. They simply assume that customers will love the startup as they have packaged it ignoring their customers’ brand experience.
The branding process should be considered similarly to the product development process; consider customer experience in the design process, gather feedback, adapt, iterate, and repeat until the brand created will resonate with the target. Through receiving customer feedback, resources would be utilized to only improve what customers care about rather than being wasted on items the customer doesn’t care about. Focusing on brand identity while neglecting brand experience is rather pointless when the customer won’t care about the product being promoted.
By a startup improving their brand experience and tweaking flawed products/services, they will gain a clan of passionate and loyal customers who will push the company to grow and thrive. Ignoring that fact could lead to a quick diminishment of any startup.
