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Notes for startup

Chapter 4: Branding

Your brand is the personification of your company, and developing a strong brand is absolutely critical to your success.

While startups often neglect brand building, Fortune 500 companies prioritize it. They treat branding as a critical facet of their business strategy.

Brand equity is the monetary value that comes from having a recognizable brand. Marketing experts have found that positive name association enables a company to justify a price premium over similar goods.

Brands serve 3 primary functions:

• Navigation: A strong brand helps customers make a choice
• Reassurance: A brand reassures customers that the product they’ve chosen is high quality and trustworthy.
• Engagement: Brand visuals and communications make customers feel that the brand understands them.

Brand loyalty is important in an industry in which product turnover is high. People have invested time and energy in learning how to use your products, and this makes them reluctant to switch to a new product:

• High-quality software products are developed to engender what’s known as lock-in: over time, customers become accustomed to the feature set, learn advanced shortcuts, store their data, or create large libraries of files.
• With most hardware products, this kind of lock-in is difficult to achieve.

A strong brand gives you leverage when expanding your offering into a new category. There really aren’t ‘connected products’; there are just connected brands. You don’t just experience the product; you experience an ecosystem

Your mission

A brand must have a mission. Your mission is what your company is doing, why, and for whom (elevator pitch):

• Apple: Committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals, and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software, and Internet offerings.
• Microsoft To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.
• Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.
• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

These sentences distill each company’s intent and purpose into a single statement that represents the core of the brand’s identity. The company’s products also reflect this purpose.

Knowing your mission helps your company in both an internal and a public-facing capacity. Internally, it serves as a guide for employees to know what they stand for and what they’re working toward. It provides a company with a framework to evaluate strategies and products: to what extent does a specific action or product release advance your mission and align with your core values?

Sean Murphy said:
There’s a tremendous pressure to cut corners when you’re a startup. Having strong brand principles gives you something to refer back to during development. As the product evolves, you’re going to make decisions with respect to what you understand your brand to be. The software, the service components...it will all be viewed in the context of answering the question “Who are we?”

A company should have a brand ideal, a “higher-order benefit it brings to the world” that satisfies a fundamental human value that improves people’s lives:

• Eliciting joy
• Enabling connection
• Inspiring exploration
• Evoking pride
• Impacting society
  or one word happiness

Emotional connections lead to deeper relationships with customers.

You can’t be all things to all people. A well-defined set of values and authentic messaging will help you attract customers who share your values and vision, and care about what you are trying to do for the world.

Brand Identity and Personality

A brand is not what you say it is, it's what they say it is

• Brand identity is the sum of all of the parts. Identity is deliberately constructed by the company, with the goal of ensuring that customers both recognize the brand as an entity and can articulate how it differs from the competition.
• Brand image is the consumer’s perception of this identity: how the market views your brand.

Process to shape identity:

• Conducting research
• Clarifying Strategy: Define goals, identify key messages, and determine appropriate strategies for naming, branding, and positioning.
• Designing Identity: Define a unifying “big idea” and develop a visual strategy.
• Creating Touchpoints: Produce visual elements, refine the look and feel, and protect trademarks.
• Managing Assets: Develop and implement a launch strategy to unveil brand elements, define brand standards, and establish guidelines to ensure consistency.

Brand Positioning:

• Brand positioning is about identifying the space you want your brand to occupy in your audience’s minds
• Positioning is about the brand, not the product that the company offers.
• The goal of brand building is to attach emotional value to the brand.

A startup with limited funds can work through an effective brand-building process without using an agency. To derive brand values and personality, the founding team should start with the kind of people they are. Start with cultural attributes that are very true to you

Early brand building takes a lot of time and discipline. It should be a serious, process-driven endeavor. Startup founders put a lot of energy into product development and trying to attract customers. Identifying brand values and knowing who you are is equally important. Your ultimate goal is to sell your brand—the values, vision and emotional connection—not your product.

Brand Personality

• A fundamental component of brand identity is brand personality.
• Brand personality is “the character of a brand as defined in anthropomorphic terms.” Brands can be kind, funny, masculine, elegant...the possibilities are endless, such as “the Joker” or “the Rebel.”
• Emotions are involved in the purchasing process, as the customer has a need or desire and is looking to fulfill it.
  Defining a brand is like defining a person. No different from how you would describe a friend, brand attributes are the adjectives you choose to define the personality of your brand.

Using the 12 archetypes defined in Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson’s book The Hero and the Outlaw (McGraw-Hill), the Contour team identified the persona that fit their desire to facilitate imaginative self-expression: the Creator. Using the Creator as an anchor, they focused their brand on creativity. They worked on producing a product that would be loved by Creator types: artists, innovators, and dreamers.

Brand Assets and Touchpoints

Brand personality is brought to life via brand assets. Assets include the brand name, logo, tagline, graphics, color palettes, and sounds...sometimes even scents and tastes.

Naming

• Naming your company is incredibly important. A name is the most frequently used brand asset. A name should be distinctive and memorable. It must also be legally available and not trademarked by anyone else.
  One important difference between naming a hardware startup (or product) and a software startup is that the name is more likely to appear on packaging, and possibly on the device. Clarity and readability are critical.
  Some companies use their founder’s names. That way a corporate brand can benefit from being associated with a charismatic founder’s personal brand (Beats by Dre), but there is a risk of negative associations if the founder endures any personal scandal or hardship

Begin your naming process by deciding what you most want the name to evoke:

• Emotions that you want your product to evoke
• Locations where people are likely to use it
• A distinctive physical characteristic of the product
• A metaphor that represents your user or your product
• A verb related to your product’s functionality

It’s helpful to work through this process with a group of people. Word association and building off of the creativity of others can make it a
lot easier and more enjoyable.

SMILE test:

• Suggestive — evokes a positive brand experience
• Meaningful — your customers “get it”
• Imagery — visually evocative to aid in memory
• Legs — lends itself to a theme for extended mileage
• Emotional — resonates with your audience

SCRATCH test:

• Spelling-challenged — looks like a typo
• Copycat — similar to competitor’s name
• Restrictive — limits future growth
• Annoying — forced
• Tame — flat, uninspired
• Curse of knowledge — only insiders get it
• Hard-to-pronounce — not obvious, unapproachable

If the names pass the tests, we should test them in the wild: friends, online people Mechanical Turk...

Brand first, distribution second lesson:

Focusing on retail sapped Contour’s resources, leaving little available to drive consumer demand. GoPro focused on emotionally connecting with customers, creating an inspirational brand identity through the use of thrilling action videos shot with the product. GoPro built a movement. “Contour wasn’t the best in the world at one thing,” Marc reflects. “We were pretty good at product, we were okay at brand, okay at distribution, but we weren’t unbelievable at one thing.” The lack of a crystal-clear value proposition, combined with nebulous positioning, made competing with its well-branded rival an insurmountable challenge.

Your brand name and personality are the cornerstones for the rest of your visual assets: logo, graphics, color palettes, and icons—and you have many creative choices to make. Certain colors evoke specific emotions. The goal is to create representative visuals that are immediately recognizable and memorable and that retain their impact when displayed across different mediums.
The sensory experience should be coherent and in line with the brand personality. For example, if your brand personality is elegant and
sophisticated, a low-resolution cartoon animal logo would seem incongruous.

The points at which brands interact with consumers are called touchpoints.

Consumers might encounter touchpoints at the:

• Prepurchase stage: to shape a consumer’s perception of your brand and communicate your value proposition. You are attempting to increase the consumer’s likelihood of buying your product
• Purchage stage: the goal is not only to make the sale, but also to establish a deeper relationship.
• Postpurchase stage: geared toward building loyalty, ensuring satisfaction, and turning customers into brand evangelists

Across all touchpoints and at all phases of the purchasing decision, you’re selling the brand, not just the product

Positioning and Differentiation

Your brand position is the space in a given market that you occupy in the minds of consumers. It’s your unique niche.

Positioning is a function of three elements: customers, competitors,and a characteristic which is your differentiator.

A powerful point of difference for positioning your brand is something that’s both defensible (your competitors can’t quickly replicate it) and important to your target customer.

Marketing expert Geoffrey Moore has a template for synthesizing a thorough positioning statement in his book Crossing the Chasm

For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity), the (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit - that is, compelling reason to buy). Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).

“You can build a great product, but if you can’t explain what it is and how it works really simply, and then build a story around it, it’s not going to sell,”

Chapter 5: Prototyping

Fail early and often

Reasons for Prototyping

• The most important reason to prototype is fundamentally to learn.
• It’s important to learn from every prototype by defining a hypothesis, or something you expect to learn from each prototype.
• If you’re bringing a prototype to a VC partner meeting, don’t cut costs: get it from a nice model shop.

Benefit of low-resolution prototyping
Often, showing a raw version of a prototype or idea will garner rawer feedback from your users, more basic feedback about the product, including fundamental features.

Prototyping terms

• Proof of concept (POC): Used to prove out one tricky technical challenge and lower the risk of continuing development.
• Gestural prototype: A rough representation, usually used to explain a concept and garner feedback from users, meaning there is lots of hand-waving and saying things like “imagine if it did X” to visualize the device’s user experience.
• Breadboard prototype: A phrase often used by mechanical engineers to indicate a build that integrates subsystems.
• Scale models: Models smaller than the actual product can also be productive communication tools if the real product is too large to carry around with you to every meeting.

Works-like and Looks-Like prototypes

One common approach to this is the separation of works-like (WL) and looks-like (LL) prototypes.

• A WL prototype focuses on the core functionality of the product to make sure the technical challenges have been met and fundamental subsystems work before adding the burden of integration.
• An LL prototype focuses on the form, aesthetics, and design language, and potentially even touches on a product’s ergonomics to emphasize its look and feel, regardless of its internal functionality.

There are even more reasons to separate LL and WL prototypes during iterative prototyping cycles.

• From the design side, you can get user feedback on the form and feel of the product from users with an LL prototype, without the product necessarily working yet.
• Separate WL prototypes can help engineers solve smaller problems on a test bench before trying to integrate with a form factor or CMF (color, material, finish document) that adds additional constraints to the problem.
• Enable teams to work in parallel.

Teardowns

• Taking apart competitors’ products already on the market (commonly referred to as teardowns) can be helpful early in the prototyping process. (iFixit)
• Look out for: component selection, how each part was manufactured
• Don't simply copy the ideas

Assembling your team

It could be important to engage design services like branding, user experience, and industrial design if you need help crystallizing your vision and explaining the value proposition, but if your burden from investors or the market is to prove that your wacky idea will actually function, emphasizing mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or firmware engineering early on may be more important.