Most people have their own idea of what a brand stands for, and founders are no less likely to run the risk of misaligning on this than the next person. It’s critical to ensure your brand is centered on a core set of beliefs and those beliefs are rooted in your company's mission, vision and values. Ensure that everyone on the executive team down to the interns you hire is completely aligned on the unified promise to deliver every time. A “Brand promise” is what you promise to give to every human that is engaging with your brand. The brand promise must flow from the Mission, Vision and Values. The core beliefs and behaviors. Then it must be posted on the wall, in leadership decks and repeatedly driven home in brand sermons from the CEO to the middle management team. For startups, it’s easy to have a conversation about this regularly since there are few employees in the beginning.
Your branding system is just that, a system. It’s not just a logo and it’s not just a story. It has to all communicate at least one product benefit. That’s the “aha” moment for the best brands out there. For instance, Patagonia, why would they name it after a region in South America? Do you think that’s random, and why would they make their logo a silhouette of the mountains found in that region? Because their product was built for the most treacherous terrain. But look a little deeper and get at their core purpose statement “we’re in the business of saving our home planet.” In other words, if you can’t protect and steward one of the most precious natural regions, you will lose the planet altogether.”
Simple logos are the most memorable, and the most scalable. But it’s not simple to create a simple logo that has deep meaning unless you are aligned on your core beliefs. There’s an old rule that a story has no meaning without context. Most startup founders try to tell the entire story of their product inside one logo. The result, overly complex and cumbersome logos, illegible and non-scalable branding systems that do more harm than good.
Your Identity Must Be a System that can scale easily, but also a universe that expands on the story that your beliefs and brand mark started with. The best example of this is what Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple brand mark said about scalability. The bite out of the Apple brand mark was designed for scale so that it wouldn’t look like a cherry when small. Back in the eighties scale mattered with print being a central part of business. Today it’s even more important as web and mobile have become the primary ways people spend their time engaging with your brand. A simple way to start the system is to ensure you ask your agency, “how will this scale to various applications and screen sizes? You also want to make sure you have them deliver robust brand guidelines including messaging, fonts, color, and logo variations. And the format must be a website that is easily sharable across your organization. Here’s an example of one we did at La Visual > https://live.standards.site/paragon. If you fail to do this, you may think it’s not a big deal, but as your startup scales, employees will spend countless wasted hours trying to find the correct logo only to use the wrong one that another team member shared from some random google image search. And this happens every week, every time you're publishing new content, every post, every ad, every video, every email newsletter, every campaign landing page.
Your brand should be able to connect to the hearts and minds of employees first and then to the audience segments you are trying to onboard as paying customers. A startup’s brand must be an authentic representation of your company culture and have buy-in from a broad cross-section of employees and it has to be the majority. Once you have the buy-in it’s important to form a committee of brand evangelists who will defend the brand at all costs by protecting and upholding the standards and the values behind it all. This will then allow you to get better recruits as employees who align with your set of beliefs will start to apply organically, and you will have guidelines on how to identify a cultural fit with different data points. This ultimately strengthens your brand over time making it more consistent and believable and becomes a cultural icon set in reality like the Patagonias and Apples of the world.
