3 Learnings from Building a New Brand you’d want to know
Building a brand from scratch is one of the hardest things to do and there are simply too many frameworks, guides etc out there that will either scare you, or prepare you to do too much at the start. After building Jetpac Global for almost 2 years from scratch, here’s what I’ve learnt so far, and by no means are these any close to any form of professional tips, but simply some personal takeaways that I’ve gone through while building up a new brand.
Inspiration for creativity comes at the most random of times, even in the car!
Ideas don’t actually come when you’re expecting it, so don’t beat yourself up when you have a block or when your ideas don’t seem to be working for your newly created brand.
And yet, sometimes, irrational ideas become reality for your new brand. You want to know the hard truth? You can do as much research, surveys, analysis on why a certain brand aspect will work - but at the end of it all, it’s all about how the actual target audience reacts to your brand. We ran a series of surveys and research for our brand name initially and it came up to be something completely boring & ‘traditional’ for our product. We attempted to roll with it, and yet internally, it didn’t sit well with anyone. So, they key learning here is that when you’re first starting out, everything is on the table, so don’t kill any ideas! The next fun fact: Jetpac’s name was then in born out of a night car conversational mistake on our way to dinner - there’s that! When it clicks, it clicks and you + your team will know it.
And this routine should go on, inspiration comes from everywhere around us.
Don’t be stuck to one identity at the very beginning, you’ll have plenty more identity crisis along the way anyway
Don’t overthink your brand identity at the start because you’re still way too early in the game to be tying yourself down to something concrete.
Think of it like a dating scene. When you’re first getting to know a person, you’d not want to immediately marry them until you’ve gone through certain milestones in life together, validated that you can do life together and weathered through tough times as a team. It’s the same for your brand. When you first start out, you’d want to get to know what makes sense for your brand, how people perceive it, how you want to tell your story in a way that will speak to your audience. When you’ve reached a certain growth stage that spells stability, that’s when you can start cementing certain solid guidelines and principles for overall consistency of your brand. That being said, at the beginning, do have basic foundations in place so that your brand identity can continue to build up with some level of consistency for your team, especially marketing and creative, to be able to continue selling and marketing your brand to your target audience.
Be open to experimentation and change At the beginning, there will be several opinions, ideas, suggestions coming from everyone because you’re in a small, tight knit community of like minded hustlers wanting it to work. Be open about it, take the ideas in, synthesize them and plan experiments. They can come from messaging, taglines, brand colours, look and feel, mission…etc.
Do several brainstorm sessions, allow everyone to chime in and have an opinion and to throw out silly ideas, because these moments of creativity will assist in making up the big idea eventually for your brand. And as quoted from Man Men, “Keep banging your head against the wall, and then it happens.”
And remember, as your brand grows, your strategy may keep changing and therefore your adaptability to manueveur through the strategic decisions made by business that may impact your brand identity.
Don’t build your brand without knowing WHO you’re talking to
Saved the best for last, of course!
Trust me when I say that too many times, I’ve seen brands create a grand narrative about saving the world, when no one actually cares about what they’re trying to sell. The focal point of any new brand is your mission, vision, and purpose. This, creates the core of your brand. While there are several brand templates out there that you can leverage on, what I can share is that creating a new brand takes a lot of work to make it even relevant to your customers or target segments.
Questions you need to ask are things like,
What exactly am I solving for? This should be easily distilled down to a single sentence that is written in human language for all to understand.
Why will someone even think about considering my brand to solve their problems?
What part of my brand identity will potentially resonate with them?
How do I make my brand stick? Or in technical terms, Top of Mind brand recall?
What do I want to be known for? What do I NOT want to delve into for my brand?
What’s my brand archetype? Who do I want to be as a character in the movie?
Think about the largest brands today like AirBnB. Disney. Red Bull. Nike. At one glance even without stating their actual purpose in words, we know what they stand for, and why they coined their brand identity accordingly. Did they get it from the get go? Of course not. Building an identity takes time, effort, heaps of customer insights and experiments to get to where they are today.
Hopefully this gives a good 2 cents into starting new brands, and what you can look forward to, but also take note of because it’s easy to say that we’ll create something new, something boomz, something mega, whatever that is. The hardest part is getting it right, over and over again as your business strategy evolves. Don’t be afraid to kill, pivot, or double down when needed because your brand’s not a rod, its meant to be maleable into whatever it takes to make your business succeed.