Dave Kellog on Startup Branding

Branding may seem a hairy topic but it can be broken down into: 

• Brand targeting: Who Do We Sell To?
• Brand promise: Why Do They Buy From Our Company?
• Brand positioning: Why Do They Buy Our Product?
• Brand identity: Do We Look Like Us?
• Brand values: What Do We Stand For?
• Brand voice: Do We Sound Like Us?

This is brandspeak for figuring out who you’re selling to.  Think STP (segment, target, position).

• Figure out a mechanism to segment the market — e.g., by company size, by vertical industry, by adjacent systems
• Target one or more of those segments. For startups, fewer is better.
• Position your product to those target segments.

The high-level expression of why someone should buy from your company, often more simply known as the value proposition. For tech startups they tend to fall into a few patterns:

• We are you (e.g., Mosaic, we built it for ourselves at Palantir).
• We fixed it. We took the last-generation leader and made it better (e.g., Cube to Adaptive, Pigment to Anaplan)
• We rebuilt it.  We run on the modern stack with modern technology (e.g., OnPlan to Vena)
• We verticalized it (e.g., Plannuh for marketing, Place for SaaS)

Positioning comes down to answering one of two questions:

1. Why buy one? (Benefit oriented)
2. Why buy yours? (Differentiation oriented)

Startups who are alone in defining their category need to focus on the first question. Those in crowded categories (either a new market with several nascent entrants or a more developed category with the usual suspects), the emphasis needs to be on why buy mine.