Adventures in Branding

Branding for a small business (who aspires to greatness) can be daunting.  On one hand you don’t want to think about it too much, as it can be distracting from the real business of building something worth buying.  That said, it is important and something I have spent some time this past month working on.

So, where does one start to create a brand.  In my case, the whole thing started when I misplaced the high resolution and source files for the Creative Outlet Labs logo (perhaps I confess too much) that a talented friend designed for me several years ago.  I started using the low-res version on www.CreativeOutletLabs.com and on www.isAbsolutelyRemarkable.com, while I searched for the files and even contemplating recreating it.

As a tangent, I love the idea of Creative Outlet Labs.  All of the business concepts that I have toyed around with have been in the creative space, thus the mention of Creative Outlet.  The Labs portion was a nod to technology (another pillar in my business ideas).  My vision is that Creative Outlet Labs would work to push out dozens of great ideas, businesses, applications, and can’t-live-without innovations over time, each of which might have their own identity.  From a branding perspective, the phrase Creative Outlet Labs has some serious limitations as a brand.  For one it is EXTREMELY long at 20 characters and is a bit of a tongue twister.  How you might want to break it up to fit it into a reasonably-sized logo make it look funny.  You put Outlet on its own line and it appears that we are advertising a discount store, for instance.  Perhaps it was destiny that lead me to lose those original logos.  It wasn’t meant to be.

So, work began on the “Remarkable” concept (now in serious development).  At first my thought was to downplay the “Remarkable” piece and put Creative Outlet Labs at the center, but now that I am up to my ears in development, designs are underway, and marketing plans are being fleshed out it became clear this was a bass-ackwards approach.  Demonstrating flexibility, I decided to turn 180-degrees and de-emphasize Creative Outlet Labs and focus on Remarkable for the new launch this Summer.  The company is still Creative Outlet Labs, but in the same way that a company called Obvious made Twitter (wait, they just changed the company name to Twitter Inc, so perhaps that is a poor example) or how the company 37Signals makes Basecamp (while they don’t even own the domain name Basecamp, which gives me hope).

Now, this lead me to all sorts of follow-on choices and decisions, some of which are agonizing and are indicative of the kinds of trade offs a small business makes.  I still have a little website that works great at www.CreativeOutletLabs.com.  At some point soon, I’ll be merging that content into the new site (I’ll leave you in suspense, although you link to Creative Outlet Labs will still work).  However, I can’t do that immediately as I don’t want to take focus off the main development activity to do something that would be temporary.

Furthermore, I have a super fun mini-tribute application that lives at www.IsAbsolutelyRemarkable.com that I plan to rebrand as well this Summer.  This is planned without any disruption in service, so keep sending those mini-tributes and sharing smiles!

I am still several weeks from unvieling the logo designs and plans, but I can tell you about the process to create the logo itself (the manifestation and distillation of the brand into a single image, pretty heady stuff).

I started with some brand characteristics (I know, how “corporate” of me).  These were some things that eventually I’d like the service to be known for.  I am not naive enough to think that I can will this to happen, but if I am purposeful about it, aligning design and decisions around these characteristics, perhaps one day these things will be attributed to me by my customers.  At least that is the concept. 

So, I started with a list of four characteristics (I’ll share those in another post, perhaps as I describe the kind of decisions they have been prompting me to make).  The designer took these, along with example logos that I liked, example logos that I didn’t like, and examples from others in the industry.  I even made a list of characteristics of a great logo that I have developed over the years (having lived through very bad branding efforts, world-class identity developments, and having worked in start-up environments where these decisions are made and for one of the most valueable brands in the world, all of which provided great learnings in this area).  If you are interested, I’ll share some of these brand concepts in a future post.  These formed a starting place for a great discussion and several rounds of back and forth concept design and “narrowing down.” 

We now have a logo that we’ll start using soon and are working on the corrolary items like color palettes, font treatments, and other design language that will drive the brand even further.  I know, perhaps these are only decisions that a marketeer can appreciate.  That said, I have been able to narrow down preferences and really reinforce and articulate the important aspects of the branding through this process.  As with other things, sometimes the journey is more important than the destination (although in this case the destination is very cool).

The whole process reminds me a lot of naming a child, actually.  There is a lot of pressure to do it right and it is only years down the road when you know you might have made a mistake.  Perhaps I should add this as a chapter to the book I may pen someday.  The working title for the book is “How Entrepreneurship is like Motherhood”  (more on that later).  I think I will call this chapter “Branding: Practicing yelling the brand from the back porch” or “Branding-Branding-Bo-Fanding-Banana-fana-fo-fanding-Me-My-Mo-Manding-Branding.”

Perception is Reality

When I was in high school I was involved in competitive speech and debate, something I really enjoyed and was fairly good at.  I would often joke with my classmates and my coach that “perception is reality.”  If you appear confident, you will be perceived as more engaging.  If you dressed the part, you’d be taken more seriously.  If you walked in with file boxes of literature and research, you had immediate credibility.  You could help judges and competitors focus on your strengths by playing them up.  I find that this was an important lesson when I was sixteen, and is just as true today.

I recently wrote a post about the relationship between storytelling and branding.  In it, I pose the relationship between the reality of the product offering a company brings to market and the perception of the customers about how that product affects their lives.  In essence, all great brands leave their customers with a feeling - sense of being part of a larger story, movement, or idea.  Just like the file boxes make the debater more “serious” and “prepared,” so all products affect how individuals view themselves.  The perception of the brand in the mind of your customers, is in fact, the reality of what your brand stands for.

As we march towards the public release of the web application, Remarkable, I am challenged to define the few things that I want my customers to feel about themselves when they buy, use, and recommend the product to others.  Do I want them to feel technologically-saavy (not if that makes that application too difficult to use)?  Do I want them to feel thoughtful and connected to people in their lives?  Do I want them to feel organized and “with it”?  Do I want customers to feel creative (without overwhleming folks with options that detract from simplicity)?  How can the service itself make people feel proud to be associated with it?  So much so, that they want to use it again and again and recommend it to others.

It is these discussions that help drive the product design to focus on the things that are most important to the customer experience.  These decisions help reinforce the feelings of our customers.  I can’t wait for you to experience it and give me feedback first-hand.

Sign up for the beta (and encourage others folks you know and want to impress to do the same) and I guarantee you will feel like a part of an elite and exclusive group when this Summer I let you take an early peak at the application.

This cool picture is from Retinal Fetish on flickr.