Brand Identity For Startups

“Bad design is like wearing a bad suit.
It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but it may give people the wrong impression”

One of the best and worst parts of our brains is the ability to form an impression in under a second.
It’s how we judge books by their covers, or decide who to sit next to on the bus; working with ridiculously limited information in the blink of an eye, based on decades of experience.
We are all prejudiced – literally pre-judging a situation – because we don’t have the time or attention to ask questions and learn more.

You might have experienced this when travelling overseas – despite knowing nothing about the businesses and brands around you, you’ll form immediate interests or aversions based on their presentation.
e.g. which restaurant is the best fit for you, who’s going to make the best coffee, what sort of people shop for these clothes, or who to ask for directions.

It turns out that your customers are the same – forming initial impressions in a heartbeat that determine whether or not they’ll spend another five seconds reading your words, asking a question or clicking on your links.
More specifically, they’ll be forming this opinion based on your brand identity – the outer shell of your business.
Your startup has a brand identity whether you like it or not, so you may as well make one that you’re proud of and that catches your customer’s eye.

Don’t Let Design Trip You Up

Evander Strategy is not a graphic design agency, but we constantly work with designers, and that’s exactly why we’re writing this post - brand identity from the perspective of practitioners.
These design elements matter, but they can easily trip up talented founders who either dismiss the topic or become fixated on perfection.
We’ve frequently worked with entrepreneurs who are stalling on arranging meetings with customers/suppliers because they haven’t ordered their business cards, because they haven’t confirmed the layout with their designer, because they haven’t picked a logo or colour scheme, because they haven’t had time to properly think about the meaning behind each element of their brand.
Design is important, but not as important as sales or momentum.
The aim is to create a good enough brand identity that will create the right impression with customers, not to win any design awards.

Image: TDi 2020 Style Guide by McKenzie & Co.

What Goes Into A Startup’s Brand Identity?

There’s a whole industry dedicated to the deep analysis of each of these elements, but at the very least your startup needs:

· To pick a name that isn’t embarrassing or misleading

· A wordmark for writing your name

· Typefaces for your written content/headlines

· A few set colours for your visual content, documents and packaging

· A clearly defined tone of voice that your team can re-create in their work

· A few set styles of imagery for your ads and various channels

· Some templates for your documents or anything shown to a customer

Each of these can quickly descend into pretentiousness, but there’s a simple test:
does our customer recognise who we are and are we holding their attention?
If you pick beautiful design elements but customers assume you can’t offer them anything of interest, then the brand isn’t working.
The question for founders isn’t “do I like it?”, the question is “does this work?”.

A startup needs a simple set of rules for how to use these elements well, usually in a document called a Style Guide.
Style Guides are made by graphic designers, but they’ll need your input to match the elements with your brand values and brand positions.
You don’t need to build your style guide, but you need to know how to read and use it.
Let’s look at each component in a little more detail…

Names

“The two most important words in Last Tango in Paris are ‘tango’ and ‘Paris’, both of which are regarded as sophisticated and adult.
Last Hokey-Cokey in Macclesfield wouldn’t be the same at all.” – Mark Steyn

As an entrepreneur you are asking for the impossible: a name that no one else has taken that is simultaneously catchy, elegant and bound to avoid any criticism.
What usually happens is a disheartening process:

· You think of a decent option

· Google it

· Find out three other companies have taken all of those domains and handles

· Feel reassured that your name was good and think of another one

· Google it, it’s also taken

· Think of another option

· Google it, it’s taken

· Think of a ridiculous name

· Google it, it’s available and you hate it

· Get frustrated and go for a walk

· Think of more options

· They’re taken too

· Collate a list of half-decent options

· Talk yourself out of each of them with imagined criticism

· Delay your launch by another week

The truth is, there’s no singular and consistent process for naming startups.
If you look at other startups, you might see trends and patterns like:

· Merging two words together

· Dropping vowels out of other words

· Acronyms

· Idioms

· Your name

· Names of people who’ve inspired you

· Phrases you’ve heard from early customers

· Made up words

It’s worth brainstorming options in each of these categories to generate a long list.
The most important thing is to see the three tiers of names:

1. Great names that capture attention and make you sound good

2. Blank names that you can breathe life into by earning a good reputation

3. Bad names that are misleading, off-putting or unprofessional

Here’s the interesting twist – lots of startups aim for the first category and end up in the third, whereas the ones who pick a blank name get to create a strong brand in the future.
As Jeff Bezos described: “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person.
You earn reputation for trying to do hard things well.”
In most cases, it’s better to put your energy into creating a reputation, rather than creating the cleverest name.

In terms of what constitutes a good/blank/bad name, it’s highly subjective and tricky to detach from whether or not you like the actual business.
Without wanting to be rude to anyone, here are some observations from our team:

· LinkedIn is a great name for a networking site, Facebook is a great name for their original site, Instagram is a decent name that was a massive upgrade on their initial one: Burbn.

· TripAdvisor is a great name for travel reviews, Yelp is a great name for business reviews, Zomato is not a good name for restaurant reviews. By contrast, the more off-putting name Rotten Tomatoes is a great choice for a film review site.

· Who Gives A Crap is an excellent name for a social enterprise selling toilet paper. Thank You, Kinfolk and STREAT are well-suited names for social enterprises too.

· Jetstar, Spirit and Tiger are good names for airline, Qantas is not, despite the fact that Qantas is the one in with the best reputation. Australia’s new airline Bonza have made life hard for themselves with that choice of name.

· A lot of the “World’s most valuable brands” have names that were previously blank: Apple, Starbucks, Amazon, McDonalds, IBM, Samsung, Adobe, etc. Each of those founders had a rationale behind their choice (i.e. a story or their family name), but they don’t denote anything about what industry they are in or what the business offers.

· Puma feels like a good name while Adidas feels blank, even though they were both founded by rival brothers at the same point in time. Under Armour might be the best name in the sports industry, whereas Nike was a blank name that their founder famously didn’t like at first.

· Business For Millennium Development, where Isaac used to work, seemed to be a good name that tied into the Millennium Development Goals. That is, until the Millennium Development Goals pivoted to the Sustainable Development Goals. Also the decision to abbreviate to “B4MD” does feel quite dated, reminiscent of how people used to text on old mobile phones.

· Just to name the elephant in the room – Evander Strategy is in the blank category. It’s not particularly clever or meaningful, but it’s a lot better than the cliché consulting buzzwords that try to tie in words like “smart”, “grow”, “leading” or “synergy”.

Wordmarks and Logos

“The easiest type of logo is a wordmark – they’re simple, easy and look great.
These are the path of least resistance to a logo people won’t hate, and that’s all you need right now.”
– Marten Ascenzo

The old advice to startups was “you’ll need a logo, something that is clever, meaningful and instantly recognisable as being yours”.
Yes, if you can do that, then go for it.
The problem is, good logos are extremely hard to get right, and need the expertise of a graphic designer.
Wordmarks on the other hand are much easier to develop – it’s your startup’s name in a well-chosen font.
Realistically, startups will end up choosing two wordmarks.
The first is when you’re making your very first slides, landing pages or documents, usually in a Microsoft or Google application.
The second is when you start working with a designer, who will recommend options involving typefaces outside of the standard Microsoft/Google collections.
And that’s ok - the worst thing you can do is stall on sending out your decks or emails or letters because you’re embarrassed by your branding.

Typefaces

“Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.” – Steven Heller

There is a whole field dedicated to typography, full of passionate people who see beauty and ugliness in all of the words that surround us each day.
It’s a blessing and a curse; well-chosen typefaces bring them joy, poorly-chosen typefaces genuinely upset them.
You’ve probably used typefaces like Times New Roman or Calibri, each of which have a range of fonts like Calibri Light, Calibri Italic or Calibri Bold.

You don’t need to have strong opinions, but you do need to know a few key categories:

Serif typefaces, which have the “little hats and feet”, designed to be easily read when printed. These are stereotypically seen as traditional, trustworthy and a little old fashioned.
Sans-Serif typefaces, which have no “little hats and feet”, designed to be easily read on a computer or phone. These are stereotypically seen as modern, minimalist and inoffensive.
Script typefaces, which look like they’ve been hand-drawn by the author, even if you’ve commissioned them from a designer. These are seen as personal and authentic.
Display typefaces, which are distinctive and eye-catching, perfect for headings and awful for paragraphs. These can make you look professional or amateurish depending on how well they are executed.

Realistically, a startup will end up choosing 1-2 main typefaces for their products, services and content, and then maybe another for their wordmark, packaging and headlines.
You can make a head start by taking screenshots of examples that you’ve seen work well elsewhere, but ultimately you want a designer to guide you on what combinations will best suit your brand.
They’ll likely recommend something you’ve never heard of, and it might be one that requires a licensing fee, as well as an option that’s already on everyone’s computer, like Georgia or Verdana.

Colours

“The chief function of color should be to serve expression.”– Henri Matisse

Colours are a tricky topic for startup brands, because everyone has an opinion and conversations quickly descend into over-analysis.
It’s true that choosing a good primary colour for your brand can give you an advantage in the marketplace and differentiate you from competitors.
However, the psychology and meaning of every colour can become overwhelming.
You’ll hear stories and rules like “red means passion, blue means tranquillity, green means nature”, but for every case where this is true, there are several other cases where this has been irrelevant.
Every industry has their own set of competitors with their own colours: cars, petrol stations, fast food, banks, phone companies, etc.
Every colour has a good argument or justification behind it – it’s someone’s favourite, or it’s worked somewhere else.

A founder’s best move is to shortlist the colours/combinations that they think make sense for their brand/products/documents, then hold these opinions lightly when they talk to their designer.
It’s not that your intuition is wrong, it’s that a professional will think through more of the angles; the opportunities where your colours will be used, and how they will come across.
How a colour looks on your laptop or phone isn’t the same as how it will look in print or on a large display.
Marten Ascenzo tells founders: “You’re not Coca Cola, don’t try to use bright colours to catch people’s eye. You’ll look like a discount bin.”

Your best bet is to pick a main colour, then 1-2 complementary colours, and a black or dark grey.
For inspiration and to find well-designed colour palettes, have a look at Adobe Colour, and to find palettes based on certain objects/scenes, try a site like Picular.

Imagery

If your startup is using a website, social media or a retail space, then you’re going to need some well-chosen visuals to send the right impression.
No matter what your style is, your business needs to have a series of high-resolution images, backgrounds, textures and assets to use across your channels.
These can be made or they can be found – you can take them yourself, hire a photographer, use AI, pay for a license or use royalty-free images, and there are pros and cons for each.

You might want shots of happy customers, pained customers, mock ups of your products, examples of your services, people enjoying the results of your work, or scenes from life in your home town.
At Business For Millennium Development, we had a designer teach us the four main types of images that would match our brand:

· Landscapes

· Details

· People

· Projects

Using their descriptions and examples on the left, we were able to take the photos on the right with a cheap DSLR we already owned:

These ended up on our business cards, reports and presentations, and at virtually zero cost.
The price was the effort to learn how to make the most of the camera’s capabilities, and the foresight to bring it to the field.

Whether you should take these photos vs buy them vs find them really depends on your core business and how easy it is to find the right sort of imagery.
e.g. a café will have a much easier time than an accounting firm, because finding shots of latte art or coffee beans are more readily available than finding shots of people smiling at their tax returns.
In most cases, being creative and proactive can substitute for a large budget.
By putting in some effort today, you’ll create a growing library of visual assets that will liven up your social media, and at the very least give you some examples of shots to re-create with a professional in the future.

Tone Of Voice

You are not your brand, but you are one of the main influencers of your brand.
The business will have a tone of voice of some kind, and the two easiest defaults are “plain and lifeless” or “the founder’s voice”.
The trouble comes when you have multiple people in your startup who are all creating content – how do you avoid disjointed inconsistencies?
Your brand will need a clearly defined voice, one that has examples rather than lofty ambitions.

Similar to Brand Values, it’s easy to make aspirational claims, but these aren’t believable until you’ve demonstrated what those claims look like in action.
Don’t tell me you’re a comedian, make me laugh.
If your brand voice is to be humorous, show examples of your type of humour.
If it is to be friendly and relatable, show examples of that warmth.
If it is to be credible and authoritative, show examples of what credibility looks like in practice.
Remember, if you can’t be bothered writing or sourcing these examples, it’s going to be hard to expect others to magically read your mind and write in your desired style.

It’s important to understand the conventions of your industry, so that you know which conventions and habits to observe – and which to break.
These might include:

· Your use of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person in your writing

· How highly you value data and statistics

· Your links and references to other authors and sources

· The complexity of your language

· Your willingness or hesitation to write things that annoy other people

· Whether you’re trying to talk to the in-crowd, or invite a new audience to your field

You probably have some natural preferences, and these tend to emerge with practice.
For that reason, it might help to start by writing a batch of 10 articles or 15 social media posts, then review and edit them as a set.
This shows you patterns and similarities in your style, and gives other people some examples to follow.

Layouts

Each of these elements (name, wordmark, typeface, colour and tone of voice) can feel underwhelming on their own, but together they breathe life into your work.
By creating examples of the finished product, you’ll understand why you’ve made your choices and can create replicable templates for future use.

You’ll use these layouts for:

· Physical packaging

· Landing pages on a website

· Social media posts

· Sales collateral

· Proposals

· Presentations

· Annual reports, etc

The aim of these templates is to let you focus on the message and content, not picking fresh colours or placing images and icons.
With layouts, done is better than perfect, and being able to create these under pressure is more important than making constant tweaks with diminishing returns.

Embrace Your Limitations

Startup branding is cheap and imperfect, and that’s the point.
Your business is still developing and evolving, so there’s actually a disincentive to spend lots of money on a super-polished brand identity.
The aim is to make work that is credible enough, good enough, recognisable enough, not to create a logo as distinctive as Apple or Starbucks.
Use your style guide to create products and services that earn a decent margin, and once there’s money in the bank and you have a track record, you’re free to re-brand or upgrade each of these elements.
Most importantly, don’t wait for these details to be in place before you start talking to customers or running your initial sales campaigns.
If you have a good offer and a good market, those customers won’t have any issue with you changing your wordmark or shifting your colour palettes.

As Chris Anderson said: “Nail the basics first, detail the details later.”