How to hack your brand in 24 hours
Over the years, I’ve developed a lean branding framework that enables early-stage entrepreneurs to put together a meaningful brand quickly.
If you are an early-stage entrepreneur, chances are you don’t have the budget and the time to build a million-dollar brand. You probably resorted to 99design for logos or hired a design intern to create a simple brand guideline.
However, you probably noticed something is not quite right, and you aren’t entirely sure why. This is either because you never communicated your brand narrative to your designers or the designers simply don’t know what you’re looking for.
What I am about to share with you today isn’t the agency's way of building a brand because that would take 4 months and cost you $80,000. Rather, it’s a framework you can use to hack together a meaningful brand in 24 hours.
But before we get into that, let’s talk about what a brand is. My favourite definition of a brand is:
“Your brand is what people say about you after you leave the room” — Jeff Bezos, Amazon
I love this definition for its simplicity and the way Jeff connects a brand to a person’s character.
In a nutshell, this is really what a brand is. You can think about a brand in the way you think about a person. Like a person, a brand has its identity, voice, values, personality, beliefs, story, character, attitude, and soul.
In this guide, I will show you how to create a brand narrative from start to finish.
In the early stage, a startup’s brand reflects the founder’s ethos, values and beliefs. It is an extension of you. This is why it’s important to understand your identity and the events that have occurred to shape your identity. Here is a sample interview script that I use with my clients.
Early childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
As you dig deeper to understand your life story, you will learn the truths behind what motivates you and why you do what you do. Try to recall the emotions you’ve felt as you talk about the series of events that have shaped your identity.
In 2006, during a trip to Argentina, Blake Mycoskie witnessed the intense pockets of poverty where kids would suffer from foot injuries because they had no shoes.
Having been born to an orthopaedic surgeon, Blake understood the long-term consequences of being shoeless. Inspired, Blake founded Shoes for Better Tomorrows, a for-profit business that would donate one pair of shoes for every pair of shoes sold (also known as the “One for One” model).
Shoes for Better Tomorrows was later rebranded as TOMS, and the company has since then donated more than 70 million pairs of shoes to children in need.
One for One became a powerful company mantra that invites consumers to join Blake’s mission to provide shoes to every child on the planet.
After you have told your life story, review it and pick out the words that resonate most with you. These words can be your values, such as honesty, integrity, and loyalty, or words related to your product or service.
In this step, you want to unload all the words associated with your brand. Don’t overthink; write them down without second-guessing yourself. The purpose here is to get your ideas on paper first so you can review them later. Think of these words as the Lego blocks you will use later to build your brand narrative.
Step 3: Research quotes that are related to your values
The brand often inspires us to pursue things greater than ourselves.
Nike wants us to find our greatness.
North Face inspires us to never stop exploring.
Airbnb makes us feel like we can belong anywhere.
All three brands attempt to fuel our aspirations for what we value, whether achieving our true potential, igniting our passion to explore, or realizing our yearning to belong.
Quotes and idioms also inspire you to become something more. Great quotes would always have a philosophical basis, which makes them inspiring in the first place.
Examples:
Here, you want to brainstorm as many quotes as possible associated with your values and beliefs. It would be better if they were tied to why you wanted to build this company in the first place.
In this step, you want to visualize what your brand would look like by collecting images that evoke the emotions you want your audience to feel.
For Absolut Vodka, it’s about owning the night. It’s about having these unforgettable nights that can happen anytime and anywhere. It’s about having these nights to open up and truly connect with the people around you.
Their mood board shows images of people socializing and having a good time over great food and drinks.
This is the final piece of research to add to your arsenal. You will understand how to uniquely position your brand against your competitors by conducting a competitive analysis.
In a letter to his team, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, once said,
What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product. (People buy “software” to address a need they already know they have or perform some specific task they need to perform, whether that is tracking sales contacts or editing video.)
However, suppose we are selling “a reduction in the cost of communication”, “zero effort knowledge management”, “making better decisions faster”, or “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go”, or “75% less email” or some other valuable result of adopting Slack. In that case, we will find many more buyers.
Many software products have group chat features, but Stewart knew what he was selling on day one — he was selling organization transformation.
Another example is RunGo, a running app that allows you to explore new routes with turn-by-turn voice navigation. It has many competitors in the running space, but each has a different brand message.
By understanding how each competitor is uniquely positioned, RunGo was able to focus its brand message around discovering new running routes independently and position itself as the only running app that empowers you to explore.
The creative process is messy. Up to this point, you have been collecting ideas and information about your brand and probably feel like you are not getting anywhere. That’s fine. You are supposed to feel this way.
But trust me, if you’ve done the work, the ideas will come to you. The key to crafting a great brand narrative starts with nailing down the top 2 to 3 values you want to convey and the belief that echoes these values.
There’s no better way to explain this than showing you two brand narratives I’ve created for my clients.
The first is BTL, a publicly traded company that offers blockchain solutions to businesses across multiple industries, particularly the finance, energy and gaming sectors.
When I interviewed BTL’s Co-founder and CEO, Guy Halford-Thompson, he said that BTL’s technology will apply to any process that requires trust and depends on the synergy across a trusted network of applications. Synergy and trust became the two most important values to highlight, thus defining the brand's logo.
By diving deep into blockchain and understanding the founders’ story, I developed the following brand narrative highlighting BTL’s commitment to building a more transparent and decentralized world.
The second example I want to share is Pangea Maps — they make beautifully crafted contour maps of places most important to you and your loved ones.
After having a long conversation with the founder, Tom Percy, I realized that he wasn’t just selling a piece of art but a gift that would transcend space and time.
Take Glen and Melinda’s story as an example. Glen bought Melinda the contour map of Sydney Harbour because it symbolizes when they decided to spend the rest of their lives together. It’s these stories that make Pangea Maps so unique and deeply personal.
Like all great stories, a brand narrative has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a story pattern that we recognize and are familiar with. Humans are deeply wired to recognize patterns, which is essential for survival.
It can even be said that our superior pattern-processing abilities are responsible for evolving our unique features such as intelligence, language, imagination and invention.
“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” — Jonathan Haidt, Psychologist and Professor
Your narrative can be as long as you want it to be or as simple as a few sentences. However, it must follow a story pattern that answers the following questions:
A great brand narrative shines as your brand’s North Star. It encompasses the values and beliefs that your brand cares about. It’s meant to be used internally among you and your team.
At the same time, it is a great reference material for any marketing collaterals, from your website’s copywriting to the imagery you use in a campaign. Once a brand narrative has been created, everything else will fall into place.
I hope this guide has given you the knowledge to hack your brand together quickly. If your startup has over ten people, I recommend Jake Knapp’s three-hour brand sprint.
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