Business Startup Checklist for Branding

At A Hundred Monkeys, we talk a lot about what branding is. Because it’s a broad concept, our clients often ask us to break brands down into bite-sized pieces. “What are the building blocks of a brand?” or even “Where should I start building my brand?” are common questions in our early interactions with startups. This isn’t always the best place to start. We believe that branding is just like life, and that brands are just like people. Each brand is unique, and may benefit from different starting points. Still, it’s still certainly possible to come up with a list of actionable bases that every great brand will need to cover at some point. So, without further ado, here is a business startup checklist for branding.

Know Your Vision

The first and most important item on our business startup checklist for branding is knowing your vision. If you cannot clearly articulate why your product or service is special, your intended audience will never understand why your product or service is special either. Find out what differentiates you from your competition. Find out where you stand and compare that to where you want to be in a year. Your vision needs to clearly express both what you can do and why you’re different from everyone doing something similar.

Write a Brand Mission Statement

Once you understand your vision, you can put it in action. Write a brand mission that articulates how you intend to apply your vision to customers or clients. This can be something you keep internally, or you can design it to be published on your website or elsewhere to let people know more directly about what you pledge to do for them. Either way, a brand mission is about getting down to brass tacks.

Develop a Brand Personality

Personalities aren’t just for people and pets. Your brand needs to have its own voice that communicates it to your customers as more than just a product or service. You want people to build a relationship with your startup, so make sure it’s not a boring date: add a quirk to your brand so that you’re remembered.

Create Visual Design

Your logo, choice of colors, and other design elements are a way to quickly communicate your brand’s personality using simple cues that help people easily understand what kind of company they are dealing with. Your visual design should be consistent across all platforms: your website, social media pages, mobile app, print materials, packaging, and anything else you can think of should communicate one cohesive identity.

Write a Tagline

The tagline of your company is your first chance to say, in words, what your company is about. It should be memorable, catchy, and fully communicate the scope of what it is you are trying to do. It’s also important that it aligns with visual design and brand personality: blues and greens call for a soft, kind tagline, while yellows and reds might work better with a more aggressive one.

Remember that it takes patience and effort to establish a good brand. Differentiation and a clearly articulated focus go a long way toward successful branding, but you have to build and maintain relationships with the people you want to work with as well. Following a business startup checklist for branding is a great start, but there are many other intangible factors that will play into whether or not your branding succeeds. If you need more advice on branding, don’t hesitate to call us at A Hundred Monkeys.