The truth is that no one needs a clone of an established business; they need a new and soulful connection to a company that will solve their problems in a fresh, innovative, and meaningful way.

One way startup companies can stand out from the pack early on and create long-term sustainability for their business is by investing in brand, and creating a truly singular expression that connects directly with people through a compelling story. Getting the branding right provides that extra boost that a company needs to make the leap on to achieve great things.

Here’s how startups can really embrace a creative approach to brand - one that doesn’t just make them stand out, but gives them the foundation to scale and stand the test of time.

Find inspiration outside of the box

Creative people have always found inspiration in the most unexpected places: Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus was, he says, inspired by a Le Corbusier lamp; Billie Eilish samples TV and traffic sounds; The Hunger Games novelist Suzanne Collins’ creative spark arose while she flipped channels between news coverage in Afghanistan and a reality game show.

In the business world, entrepreneurs often talk about the surprising moments of inspiration that led to their innovative products and services, so why shouldn’t brand be any different?

As a brand designer, I like to look to my everyday life as a source of inspiration for how to help companies connect with customers. It’s second nature to look the things that pop up during my day - from the music I’ve listened to, the signs I’ve seen while driving around, to the books I read to my children; then I explore what I can learn from these about communication and storytelling. It’s surprising how many elements can influence a brand project, but then modern brands don’t only speak through one channel or way.

Embrace the complexity of the human experience

A crucial element to giving your brand soul is about making your customers feel that your company meets them on a human level. It all comes down to understanding how your company serves people’s complex lifestyles, and using brand to communicate your unique, personalised role in the bigger picture of their lives.

Airbnb remains the quintessential example of this approach: the brand has always traded on the idea that renting a home in a city creates more authentic and meaningful experiences than taking a room in a hotel. The service the brand offers isn’t really that different from resorts and hotels: somewhere to sleep and put your things while on holiday. But unlike hotels, Airbnb understands – and adds to – the story travelers are telling themselves. A hotel may provide a reliable home-base, but an Airbnb provides a deeper connection to the place you’re visiting, and allows you to customise your experience on holiday through the style, location, and other unique elements of your home away from home.

Car subscription service Ferry is now doing something similar in the automotive space, with a brand strategy that heroes the experiences having access to a car can facilitate. It’s about how having accessible, sustainable travel can make your life more convenient, more enjoyable, and ultimately more meaningful.

Whilst the auto-industry has been circling around the relationship between lifestyle and automotive products for decades (hence the saturation of car ads that never even mention the car) – Ferry doesn’t just lean on lifestyle for effect. Rather, its service is designed with lifestyle in mind – it doesn’t promote a fantasy, it offers a better reality, by meeting consumers where they really are in their lives.

Absorb everything, then simplify

In startup and design culture, simplicity is often heralded as king – and for good reason. It’s true you have to acknowledge and understand the complexity of your customers’ lives, but it’s also true that you need to keep the story you tell them about how your products and services can help them succinct and clear.

So while it’s essential to look for inspiration everywhere, and crucial to recognise your small role in the many facets of your customers’ lives – you’ve then got to be brave enough to kill your darlings and get to the point.

In other words, as much as you need to look outside the box to find inspiration, it doesn’t mean you need to show off every single thing that inspired you through your brand comms.

The branding process is really about absorbing everything you possibly can, feeding it into to your understanding of your product or service and the audience it serves, and then narrowing it down to a razor-sharp communication.

For Airbnb, it’s about authenticity of experience. For Ferry, it’s about accessibility and sustainability. And if we look back at the examples of artists who turn to the wider world for inspiration, it’s easy to see that while Kanye was inspired by a lamp, he’s not literally waxing poetic about light switches, and Billie Eilish’s use of traffic sounds doesn’t make her music an homage to roundabouts.

Rather, these inspired details ladder up to something greater, something bigger than the sums of their parts. Inspiration is the raw ingredient to soul, but soul is the big picture. It’s the same for building a brand that stands the test of time.

You can’t copy-paste the big picture, so you can’t short cut through what it takes to get there, either.