The 5 Basic Building Blocks For Branding Your Startup
By Michael Raisanen
A business can’t grow unless it’s been properly defined–and that’s the first step to creating a lasting brand.
Starting up a business is hard work, really hard work. Every day, the founders have to juggle mundane tasks: pitching new clients or investors, making sure there’s toner in the printer, sweet-talking clients, and managing contractors–all while having cash-flow-related panic attacks.
With all these daily commitments constantly eating up your precious time, it leaves little room for the important stuff, the reason you started the business to begin with: to do things your own way, by pursuing your own unique vision and building an organization around it. However, if a company is to grow healthily, it needs a defined identity. That’s easier said than done. The branding process is not complex in itself, but it does bring up difficult and complex discussions about who you are and what you want to achieve and how to express that through language, interactions, and design. First, you need to figure out who you are.
Define Who You Are
Most entrepreneurs have a clear idea in their head what they are aiming to accomplish. However, when asked what their new company does, most entrepreneurs will respond with a confused garble of abstractions, conceptual solutions, and often some tech jargon thrown in for good measure—an explanation that would outlast an elevator ride even in the highest tower of Dubai. That’s no good. Language needs to be refined, or you are dead in the water.
The most straightforward yet challenging way to do so is boil it down to one simple descriptive sentence. Avoid lofty super-pretentious proclamations like “We are changing the world by ushering in a new paradigm in social interfacing,” or some such nonsense. Don’t worry about not sounding “advanced” enough; simplicity is always king. Distilling everything down to one sentence is incredibly hard and takes hours upon hours of word picking and philosophical discussions in the conference room. Of course, that one sentence is not going to tell the whole story, but that’s not the point. The point is to train and discipline yourself to achieve brevity and clarity while communicating your brand. You should arrive at a sentence that summarizes what you do and provokes people to ask how and why.
The key to successful brand communications is a trifecta of brevity, clarity, and consistency. Avoid mission-statement sound bites at all costs; they are useless.
Differentiate
Yes, we’ve heard it a million times, and it seems obvious. Still, so many new companies keep falling into the trap of telling everyone how fantastic they are, what a great team they’ve built, and how awesome and cutting edge their technology is. Whey are trapped in their own ego bubble. Instead, what people want to hear is why your thing is better than the other things.
Avoid the Helicopter Mom Syndrome
Your company is your baby. But there’s no need to smother it by sticking your fingers in every single pot and pie. Building an organization means delegating tasks to other people in your organization. They were hired because of their expertise, so let them go ahead and do their jobs. Micromanagement slows down the process and diminishes the quality of work. Instead, focus on the organization as whole: How do projects get done? Quality control? Processes for hiring? Knowledge sharing? Company culture?
You might ask yourself what all this has to do with branding. In fact, it has everything to do with your brand. Early on, the people in your organization are the only thing your brand has got going except for a promise of future expectations. There is no history, no established product or service at this stage, so make double sure that you come across the way you want in every thinkable touch point. And let people do their thing.
Craft a Visual Identity
Once you have sorted out the more existential facets of the brand identity, you can start sorting out a visual identity: logo, website, fonts, colors, business cards, and letterhead. The great thing about design is that if applied correctly it can make your business instantly emit the values you want to communicate–trust, gravitas, innovation, quirkiness, luxury, whatever your brand identity dictates. However, do not attempt to design your own brand. It almost never works. Hire a professional who actually knows what he’s doing. It will pay off.
Existential Anxiety Is Normal
Building a start-up usually entails spending an unhealthy amount of time locked up with your partners strategizing, brainstorming, and planning ad infinitum. This is a necessary phase to make sure that you have kicked the tires from every angle and really polished the concept. However, a peculiar side effect of all this intense work is that sometimes you lose all judgment of what exactly you are trying to achieve. Is it good or bad? Does it even make sense? Am I the only person in this world that can see any value in what I’m doing? Am I crazy? Without any existing customers, you don’t have a real feedback loop to confirm if what you are doing is even valid.
Don’t be alarmed, this existential brand-identity anxiety is normal. You need a break. Talk to someone from the outside world who can confirm that you are still sane. Try out your descriptive sentence on some random people, show them your logo, and see how they react. It will bring back a sense of perspective.
Building a new brand is not easy, but it needs to be done. So, lastly, get at it!
Michael Raisanen is the CEO and Co-founder of TIO Agency, a New York City–based creative agency specializing in creating successful marketing programs using brains, creativity, technology and common sense. He works with clients ranging from freshly hatched start-ups to global brands. Originally from Sweden, he now lives with his wife and two sons in New Canaan, Connecticut.
]]>How Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. Stayed a Step Ahead
By STEVE LOHR, New York Times
Because it has become so consistently successful, I.B.M. is almost boring. This is a company so predictable that its financial forecast is packaged as a “five-year road map,” as if it were some sort of state planning exercise.
Yet behind I.B.M.’s relentless progress over the last decade is a game plan that has been anything but conservative. The company shed multibillion-dollar businesses. It chose higher profit margins over corporate size, and expanded aggressively overseas, seeking sales, low-cost engineering talent and quicker organizational reflexes.
Investors, however, haven’t been bored. The company’s stock price has surged. In November, Warren E. Buffett, who typically shuns technology stocks, announced he had accumulated $10 billion of I.B.M. shares, a stake of more than 5 percent.
All of that didn’t just happen. A large portion of the credit goes to Samuel J. Palmisano, who steps down on Sunday after nearly a decade as chief executive. During his tenure, I.B.M. has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company – when so much of the study of business innovation focuses on start-ups and entrepreneurs.
This column is a glimpse of the thinking behind some of the major steps I.B.M. has taken under Mr. Palmisano’s leadership, based on two recent interviews with him.
He says his guiding framework boils down to four questions:
• “Why would someone spend their money with you – so what is unique about you?”
• “Why would somebody work for you?”
• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography – their country?”
• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”
Mr. Palmisano formulated those questions in the months after he became C.E.O. in March 2002 His predecessor, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., recruited to I.B.M. in 1993, had already pulled the company out of a financial tailspin, first reducing the size of the work force and cutting costs, and then leading a remarkable recovery.
In meetings after he took over, Mr. Palmisano told colleagues that I.B.M. was still good, but that it wasn’t the standard-setting corporation that it had been when he joined in 1973. (A history major at Johns Hopkins and a star offensive lineman on the football team, he turned down a tryout with the Oakland Raiders of the N.F.L. for a sales job at the company.)
The four questions, he explains, were a way to focus thinking and prod the company beyond its comfort zone and to make I.B.M. pre-eminent again. He presented the four-question framework to the company’s top 300 managers at a meeting in early 2003 in Boca Raton, Fla.
“This needs to be our mission and goal, to make I.B.M. a great company,” he said, according to executives who attended the gathering.
THE pursuit of excellence in those four dimensions shaped the strategy. To focus on doing unique work, with its higher profits, meant getting out of low-margin businesses that were fading. I.B.M.’s long-range technology assessment in 2002 concluded that the personal computer business would no longer present much opportunity for innovation, at least not in the corporate market.
The hub of innovation would shift to services and software, often delivered over the Internet from data centers, connecting to all kinds of devices, including PCs. Today, that is called cloud computing; when I.B.M. started promoting the concept several years ago the company called it on-demand computing.
So Mr. Palmisano led a lengthy strategic review of the PC business, deciding to sell while it was still profitable. Internal arguments against a sell-off were intense: PCs pulled in sales of other I.B.M. products in corporate accounts, the cost of electronic parts for its larger computers would jump without the purchasing power of its big PC division, and the corporate brand and its reputation would suffer without PCs, the one I.B.M. product touched by millions of people.
Lately, Hewlett-Packard has engaged in a similar debate, first declaring that it was looking to sell its PC business, then backing off. “I’ve heard every one of the arguments, every one of them,” Mr. Palmisano says. “But if you decide you’re going to move to a different space, where there’s innovation and therefore you can do unique things and get some premium for that, the PC business wasn’t going to be it.”
In 2004, I.B.M. sold its PC business to Lenovo of China. Mr. Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.
In total, the PC, disk drive and other hardware businesses that Mr. Palmisano sold off generated nearly $20 billion a year in sales, if not a lot of profits.
The divestitures meant that I.B.M. was no longer the world’s largest information technology company. Hewlett-Packard took that title and took a different strategic path as well, doubling its bet on PCs by acquiring Compaq in 2001. “You see the choice that was made, and how the economics worked out,” Mr. Palmisano observes.
Today, I.B.M.’s stock market value, at $217 billion, is more than four times that of the struggling H.P.
I.B.M. invested heavily elsewhere, buying the business consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, for $3.5 billion in 2002, for its expertise in specific industries. For I.B.M., the emphasis was to move up from selling customers computers and software to helping them use technology to solve business challenges in marketing, procurement and manufacturing.
Corporations and governments are drowning in a flood of data from internal systems and the Web, struggling to make sense of it. To get ahead of that challenge, I.B.M. has spent more than $14 billion since 2005 buying 25 software companies that specialize in data mining and analytics, looking for useful patterns in data in fields as varied as disease treatment, traffic management and crime detection. And it has increased its research and development budget by 20 percent under Mr. Palmisano, to about $6 billion a year.
Combining research, specialized skills and sophisticated technology is the recipe behind I.B.M.’s Smarter Planet initiative, begun in 2008. It now has more than 2,000 projects worldwide, applying computer intelligence to create more efficient systems for utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care.
The idea, Mr. Palmisano explains, is to “go to a space where you’re uniquely positioned and use the value of I.B.M.’s integration.”
For him, the Smarter Planet effort is a return to I.B.M.’s roots. Shortly before he became chief executive, he dipped into corporate archives, reading speeches and memos from the founder, Thomas Watson Sr. When Mr. Palmisano was an executive assistant to John F. Akers, then the chairman, in 1989 and 1990, he had lunch with Thomas J. Watson Jr., a former chairman, once a month. The Watsons, he says, always defined I.B.M. as a company that did more than sell computers; they believed that it had an important role to play in solving societal challenges.
“It’s old-fashioned, but it’s motivational,” he says.
And it resonates with the young people I.B.M. is recruiting these days, he says. A couple of times a year, Mr. Palmisano speaks to groups of elite students whom I.B.M. is trying to woo to its research labs. The pitch, he says, is that I.B.M. is a place where you can make a difference and do deep science.
“You can change the world, and you can compete for a Nobel prize,” he says, referring to I.B.M.’s five Nobel winners.
(Eighty-seven percent of the candidates who were offered jobs by I.B.M. Research this year joined the company.)
Mr. Palmisano’s appeal to young technologists is just one example of an answer to one of his four questions. All four, he says, must be addressed. That challenge is now passed to Virginia M. Rometty, who this week becomes the ninth chief executive in the company’s 100-year history.
“The hardest thing is answering those four questions,” Mr. Palmisano says. “You’ve got to answer all four and work at answering all four to really execute with excellence.”
]]>Looking at Blackberry, what if isn’t a smartphone after all? What if its success was due to something entirely different from its smartphone features and benefits?
To answer these questions, we need to know that belonging is a fundamental human need. It is something we strive for every day in how we behave, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the brands we buy and the ones we avoid, and the people with whom we do and don’t associate. We are also constantly monitoring where we stand in the pecking order of the communities to which we belong. Are people – the right people – including us or excluding us? Are the listening to us? Are they giving us the appropriate social cues that, in their minds, we have credibility and their respect?
It is within this “belonging” context that the RIM’s success was sewn. In the early days of the Blackberry, when it was nothing more than a glorified pager, it was a product for senior executives and other people at the top level of the food chain. In other words, it was only for people of status.
Having and using a Blackberry made us feel important because it was a constant reminder to that we arrived. It enhanced and reinforced our self-perception that we were a person of status. Being seen using our Blackberries was a signal to others of our status, either as a superior to them or, if they were peers, being at the same social level. In other words, the real role of the Blackberry was to establish our social status. Having one was an indication to us and everyone around us that we had made it and that we were a member of the important people community.
The beginning of the end began on January 7, 2007, in part, because RIM never knew what a Blackberry really was. Too many people at RIM thought, and still think to this day, that a Blackberry was about security in communications and a whole host of other features and benefits. This is a classic case of looking at a product from an engineering standpoint rather than a psychological one. The result of this product-centric perspective is a classic case of only understanding what you are selling (a smartphone) as opposed to the far more valuable perspective of understanding what the customer is buying (status).
The significance of January 7, 2007 is it was the date that Steve Jobs stood on a stage in the Mosconi Centre and announced the world was changing with the introduction of the iPhone. Because RIM didn’t understand what the customer was buying, as opposed to what it was selling, it didn’t appreciate the significance of the iPhone freight barreling down the track. The iPhone usurped the Blackberry’s role of social arbiter. Having been stripped of its primary value, the Blackberry became the emperor without any clothes.
Unlike RIM, Steve Jobs era Apple has always understood exactly what people are buying: the feeling and perception that they are a part of the cool crowd. Apple is about changing the game in everything it does. It does this through groundbreaking innovation, creativity and design. By extension, when we use Apple products, we become a member of the Apple game-changing community. We become game-changers ourselves in our own minds, even if the only way we change the game in our lives is by using Apple’s products. Apple knows its customers are buying status and reinforces it in everything it does, from how it develops features to how it communicates them to buyers.
It wasn’t RIM that determined what people were really buying when Blackberry ruled the roost, it was its community of users. There is nothing wrong with that but RIM never picked up on it and then worked to constantly reinforce that exalted position. Apple always new what people were buying – as opposed to what it was selling – and when it moved into RIM’s smartphone sandbox, it did so by consistently reminding us how cool we would be using the iPhone. In the five years of the iPhone’s existence, Apple has never strayed from the single-minded focus promoting what people are buying.
The proof of the value of distinguishing what the customer is buying versus what you are selling couldn’t be more evident in the performance of these two companies: Apple now one of the most valuable companies in the world and RIM on a race to the bottom.
]]>• What do you do?
• Why should I buy your product or service?
• What makes you different?
• Can you give me a better price?
• Why should I work for you?
• Why shouldn’t I leave to take that job offer from our competitor?
• Why should I hire you?
• Why should I invest in you?
• Why should I be on your board?
• Why should I donate to your cause?
• Why should I volunteer for your organization?
• Why should I buy your book?
• Why should I read your blog?
• Why should I subscribe to your newsletter?
• Why should I visit your website?
• Why should I return to your website?
• Why should I trust your brand?
• Why should I come to your store?
• Why should I attend your public speaking presentation?
• Why should I attend your conference?
• Why should I visit your tradeshow booth?
• Why should I subscribe to your RSS feed?
• Why should I vote for you?
• Why should approve your recommendation?
• Why should I join your workgroup?
• Why should I attend your function?
• Why should I return your call or email?
• Why should I partner with you?
• Why should I, as a supplier, give you special treatment?
• Why should I give you a loan or a line of credit?
• Why should I give you a grant?
• Why should I sponsor your event?
The answer influences every area of your business at every level:
• How successfully you develop products and services
• How convincingly you brand, market and advertise
• How quickly and easily you sell
• How cooperatively your executive team works
• How you inspire your employees to perform at a higher level
• How effectively you attract the right talent
• How credibly you communicate with – and get agreement from – your shareholders and board
• How effectively you manage suppliers
• How valuable you are to strategic partners
• How quickly you are able to innovate and adapt
• How powerfully people – internally and externally – tell your story and sell your brand
Why should I choose you? A question with such far reaching implications everywhere and at every level of your organization. That is what makes it the single most important question in business.
]]>The warning signs of defending the status quo
By Seth Godin
When confronted with a new idea, do you:
Calling it out when you see it might give your team the strength to make a leap.
Top ways to defend the status quo
By Seth Godin
All quotes actually overheard, or read on blogs/comments about actual good ideas.
]]>Our reaction was probably what you expect: we thought he was out of his mind! But then he told us a remarkable story, one that we won’t do justice here, of the creation of these jeans. Apparently there is a subculture of people who collect limited edition jeans. So manufacturers cater to this market by making esoteric models. He explained to us that the cotton came from a special kind of sheep from a special area in Japan that grazed on a special kind of grass and were sheared in a special way, and so on and so on (he told us the details of each of the “specials”). By the time he finished his story, we thought $700 was cheap for those jeans (we also didn’t think he was crazy anymore).
If we examine what happened, before the story there was a large value gap between what we thought the jeans were worth (maybe $200-ish) and their actual price tag. After the story, if we put ourselves into the shoes of one of these collectors, the price seemed reasonable. So while we didn’t buy the jeans (we don’t belong to the collector subculture), we bought the story hook, line and sinker.
The story created a context for the jeans that was much bigger than the fabric or the design (the context goes way beyond features and benefits). All of the compelling elements of the story get attached to the jeans, giving them greater value. It’s almost as if those story elements are decorative features on the jeans that make them look better. When people wear the jeans, or even just own them, they’re going to tell that story to everyone who will listen because it taps into an emotional need for ego fulfillment and belonging. The payoff they get by feeling special and by being seen to be special provides an emotional ROI that is far greater than the measly $700 the jeans cost.
If you are frustrated that people are not seeing the value in your product or service, maybe it is because you don’t yet have a story that creates a larger context and closes the value gap.
]]>In either case, you are putting yourself behind the eight ball right from the start. In the first instance, you are likely overwhelming your prospect with information on a subject that they know and care little about – your product or service – and, as a result, you are making their eyes glaze over.
When you ask them “What keeps you awake at night?”, you are making them feel uncomfortable because they don’t want to tell you. You don’t know them well enough yet so they don’t trust you. You have not yet earned the permission to ask such a personal question.
Asking what keeps them awake at night combined with doing a ton of research on your target and its key players is an effort to understand your prospects so well that you can shape your pitch and your offering to their specific needs. While this is honorable, it is actually impossible to achieve without your prospect’s open and enthusiastic participation. While you can get a general understanding of any company’s need as it relates to your offering, the psychology of each key individual and the sociology of how they interact (including office politics) are so complex, you can never truly know what’s going on in their minds, individually and collectively, unless they tell you. And they will tell you as long as you don’t conduct your sales conversation in the traditional manner described above, which actually shuts them down.
Here is a simple agenda for a highly effective and proven sales conversation:
1. Inspire them with what you do and what is in it for them (this is not accomplished through a recitation of your features and benefits). The magic of inspiring them right at the beginning is it is like dangling a steak in front of a ravenous lion: you make them hunger for what you do, and their desire for your product or service transforms them into open and enthusiastic providers of critical sales information.
2. Once they are engaged and hooked, sit back and let them ask questions about what you do and how you do it. They will have many! They are telling you two really important things by asking you these questions: what they need to know to get to yes (not what you think they need to know), and what the hidden factors and hidden agendas are that are driving their purchase decision (the ones you could never discover through research or by asking them what keeps them from sleeping).
3. Once they have asked all of their questions, you can mop up the meeting by probing for any information that you still need to know in order to deliver your product or service to them more effectively. By this point in the conversation you have earned their trust and you have permission to ask “personal” questions.
Items two and three on the agenda are easy. In number two, you just sit back and go along for the ride. And in number three, they’ve already given you most of the information you need, so you just ask questions that give you what’s missing. As for agenda item number one, how you transform your culture into one that inspires is a far tougher task but it starts with a simple first step: the will and commitment to do so. For the path to #1, please see our blog post “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” (http://www.theblueprint.ca/?p=35).
]]>In frustration, one salesperson in the audience put up his hand and said “we’re no worse than any of our competitors”. Peters looked at his audience and said “do you want your sales story to be that you are no worse than your competitors?”
As the provincial election draws near, the three leaders and their parties are each sending the message that they are no worse than their competitors even though what they want to say is that they are far better. This disconnect is created because each of the three parties insists on running the same old, same old political campaign formats that politicians and their strategists have used for decades.
The Conservatives and the NDP are trying to attract voters with one pandering promise after another. Sweating the details but not how they link together, they have no sense of a big picture and where they are leading this province in the future. Dalton McGuinty was quoted in yesterday’s Toronto Star as saying “Where are we going? How are we getting there? They don’t answer those questions.” That they don’t articulate where they are leading us is exactly our criticism of the Conservative and NDP campaigns but what of the Liberals? Nothing. Silence. No “here’s where were going”. No “here’s how were getting there”. Do you think the irony of McGuinty’s statement is lost on him?
This game of election cat and mouse, with none of the parties having the imagination or courage to develop and articulate a real vision, makes the campaign a race for the bottom. This discourages voters because they see right through the political gamesmanship. It makes them cynical and drives them away. So it is no surprise that with each election the turnout rates drop to embarrassing levels, especially among the youngest voters. In the end, the campaign style endorsed by the three leaders trains voters to tune out, which compromises our entire democratic process.
The caution for corporate leaders is if you don’t have a clear and inspiring vision for your company that you are constantly communicating both internally and externally, you may be discouraging your most important stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, shareholders, board). If you are not dedicating any time and energy to this task, or if your vision is not clear and inspiring, it is probably safe to assume you are actively discouraging your stakeholders! The cost for politicians is the difference between winning and losing. The cost for corporate leaders is diminished profitability, an inability to attract and retain the best talent, a declining share price and potentially a loss of career.
]]>Why, you may ask, is answering “who are you?” so important? The short answer is that anywhere you say you want to go has to be true to who you are. So it follows logically that you need to know who you are first. If not, you may waste a lot of time, money and energy considering destinations that have no relevance to who you are.
To get a better understanding of this, imagine you are planning a vacation and you are considering two destinations: Paris and the Amazon jungle. You can immediately see that these are two fundamentally different destinations. If you are the kind of person who loves modern amenities, fine food, luxury hotels, and the best of Western art and culture, you are going to find the Amazon jungle a little…lacking. And if you love physical challenge, ancient culture, the rugged outdoors and sleeping under the stars, Paris would seem a little…prissy. You can see in this example that knowing who you are is essential to picking the right destination if you want to have an enjoyable vacation.
Strategic planning is exactly the same. You are picking a destination for your company and then saying this is how we’re going to get there. To pick the right destination, you have to know who you are as an organization, especially since the cost of making a mistake is far greater than a week or two of superficial discomfort. Depending on the size of your organization, the cost of a disconnect between who you are and where you’re going can be anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions (New Coke!).
When you really, really nail the answer to the question “Who are you?”, where you are going and how you will get there will always be aligned with your corporate DNA.
]]>This happens when a company sanitizes the objectives and wording of the research, much to the frustration of the market research suppliers who are fighting to maintain the integrity of the study. Market researchers usually design studies to reveal the naked truth, a topic that can be quite painful and that can compromise careers, so they often lose the battle with the client over what questions to ask and how to word them. As a result, the studies either don’t reveal any new learning or what they do reveal is so incremental that it has almost no impact on growing the business.
Nowhere was the reality of this dynamic proven to us more dramatically than in a conversation we had with a very senior executive in a very successful global company. He said “What you don’t realize is that most market research serves only two purposes: to prove what you already know and to validate decisions and actions you have already taken.”
Although it sounds cynical, most market research studies we have seen – and that is in the thousands over the courses of our careers in a wide variety of businesses – fall into these two categories. In other words, too often market research is like one of those fun house mirrors that is distorted to flatter your self perception.
Market research works best when a company understands that it has to be vulnerable, to lay itself bare to unvarnished truth of the marketplace. Only through an aggressive effort to break down the barriers and inhibitions that block people from speaking candidly and emotionally about your company, brand, products and services can you obtain an accurate understanding of who you are to your customers and where the opportunities lie with them.
Here is a suggestion for a question that will return some really valuable information about how you are viewed by your customers. In some form of qualitative methodology, ask customers “What drives you crazy about us?” If it sounds extreme, that’s on purpose because it will accomplish two things: it will encourage a passionate and emotional response, which loosens inhibitions, and it will give you a long list of improvements to consider in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you can let your ego/fear of looking bad get past the fact that you are deliberately soliciting emotional criticism as a means of self-improvement – in other words, being totally vulnerable and willingly laying yourself bare to your customer – you will gain valuable business building insight about yourself, your customers and your competitors.
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