Why start-ups should also think about their branding

When creating a start-up, due to a lack in resources, founders focus on developing their product and often neglect a fundamental consideration: defining their brand, elaborating its expressions and/or its language. And yet, having a brand and well-established codes are also factors of success, when researching for investors but also for the development of an emerging company. 

Searching for investors

The priority for a start-up is to raise the necessary funds and resources for its development. Proposing a good, innovative or even transgressive idea and a good product is essential. But is it enough to convince?

The pitch test, which start-up founders are increasingly faced with, also requires them to be able to generate rapid and strong buy-in, to convey a vision to which their audience is receptive, and to develop a storytelling that can “embark” its audience. Branding – which consists in defining the essential elements that guide and express the brand, such as its purpose, mindset and values – is therefore essential.

In fact, having a brand language, an inspiring storytelling, presentations that already reflect a certain level of maturity, a well thought-out and assertive name and graphic identity offers two primary advantages:

• Showing an ambitious image established by well-mastered branding helps the presenter to feel at ease, builds confidence and structures his or her presentation;
  
  
• the business plan may be solid, but a pitch is also about selling a dream, getting people to buy into a vision, and the more elaborate the vision, the stronger the desire to take part in the adventure.
  
  

Looking for customers

A product fulfills a function, but a brand produces meaning. And the issue of meaning becomes a predominant factor in product acceptance and loyalty. Branding consists in determining what will give meaning to the brand and inspire both its storytelling and its relations with future customers.

It simply isn’t enough to have a good product and a logo that people find “fun”. Well-thought-out branding that positions the brand correctly, conveys ideals and values, and is expressed through relevant visual expressions in line with the aspirations of the target audience, will have a greater impact and generate support that will last longer.

Long-term thinking

Few brands survive in the long term as pure mono-products. In fact, an innovative product – i.e. one that initiates or modifies certain habits and uses, or responds to new issues and expectations – is destined to evolve, and even to be broken down into product ranges. Branding is a way of anticipating these issues and thinking about the logic of development, in terms of brands, of evolutions or future products.

Here again, having thought through the brand from its core facilitates these extensions, and ensures continuity of discourse and coherence, so as to avoid losing one’s way and maintaining the link with one’s stakeholders.

The key elements that make the difference

Above all, mastering branding means:

• Defining the brand’s purpose, what it intends to contribute to society in general to improve the well-being of individuals and/or their environment. This is the brand’s social, societal and environmental commitment.
  
  
• Specify the values that will inspire and guide its behavior, mindset and way of being.
  
  
• Design its graphic language and distinctive codes (logo, graphic line, type of visual expression).
  
  
• Establish the foundations of its storytelling (tone, themes, story and discourse structure).

These are the key elements of a mastered branding approach that can effectively and consistently accompany an emerging start-up through every stage of its development, from the search for investors to its future expansion, including relations with all its stakeholders.