THE INFUSION OF BRAND PERSONALITY THROUGH BRANDING FOR STARTUPS, THE BRAND-BUILDING PROCESS
Is branding just about the name and logo design, or is there more to building brand personality? It is the elephant in the room, configuring business reality into elements. It is a widely-known phenomenon for stakeholders and consumers who choose to become part of their world. What about a startup that has just emerged with an inspiring idea but knows the basics of its guidelines?
For startups or established businesses, the rules in the world of marketing remain similar. However, the methods vary, catering to consumers' emotions, preferences, and psyche. We are inhibiting the technology arena, and startups are simultaneously capturing their space. Indian Government reported the estimated number of recognized startups in India as 86000. Still, the number rises collectively with the inclusion of budding businesses yet to come under the government’s radar of recognized startups.
Meanwhile, recognition and impression come through a series of strategic implementations, primarily the brand's mission/objective and values. The entrepreneurial surge in India has accentuated how branding takes place in a business. This is to craft a legacy representing and reflecting the extended product or service.
Branding for Personality that aids in Sustenance
For segmented consumers to come across a newly germinated business, branding must form consistency and relevance for the n number of times it appears in the market. Besides, fierce competition from colossi brands in the industry could swallow emerging startups with the potential to become unicorns in the near future. Further, the most significant miscalculation from an entrepreneur comes in the form of building a startup without deciphering the true essentials of branding and what it truly stands for.
Building a brand is a perpetual process—never let a brand die—appealing to the subconscious mind of consumers. As much as a consumer's buying journey seems like a series of practical steps influenced by emotion, where the feeling resonates more than the logic. This explains why branding for startups forms the fundamental practice of centralizing one USP, disseminated through several marketing collaterals.
For all the startup parents standing on the precipice of letting their baby fly sky-high, branding ensures giving wings that don't define the sky limit. While most startup entrepreneurs feel the bewilderment creep in slowly, finding the right people playing the branding game and navigating the market without falling off the edge is essential. And here is how it would reverberate a positive impact on a new business:
Validating the identity that solidifies the presence
When people trust us, they may want us to remain an essential fragment of their life. But only instilling this trust was easy. It is the identity that does half of the job. As human beings, we do not just seek validation, we give them to entities and beings around us, and a new business is nothing different. Identity through branding goes two ways; Tangible & Intangible.
When we say tangible, it means the visual cues which indicate your brand's presence, and intangible is the feeling that your brand is leaving behind in the consumers who choose to associate with the business. In a saturated market and people under the influence of attention recession, it is hard to align tangible and intangible to have a positive effect. The magic of the right branding strategy initiates the creation of a startup’s identity in the market.
Familiarizing the market with the idea
Every great startup we remember has had a narrative defining the origin of its great idea, which could change lives. It is practically the method of making a startup’s idea or product hero and illuminating all the ways it could bring a difference in a consumer’s life. Seth Godin has always talked about marketing with the intent to give status, recognition, and lifestyle to consumers. It is what branding does to disseminate a great idea to its ideal buyer persona. The communication should emphasize how the people benefit from the concept and not blabber about its greatness.
Defining the brand culture
Transcending logos, social media aesthetics, and all the other visual cues, the branding experience also comes from the culture that the brand fairly represents to the audience. Everything conjoined from the work culture, social responsibility, team creativity, and behind the scenes of product development can become branding material. Hence, it makes a brand talk amongst consumers, stakeholders, or potential investors.
Branding is crucial, and it builds the crux of a startup’s business model and creates a system that becomes a backbone pushing the plausibility of a brand’s existence in the market. And business owners newly popping into the market must know the value and vision of branding elements beyond just logos and color guidelines.