Brand

The day has arrived…your new freshly baked web designs, hot from the design oven are about to go live. You’ve briefed the designer thoroughly to make sure your new look matches the moodboard. The excitement is palpable and the expectations are high.

Let’s face it. Sales and customers are a startup’s bread and butter. Even if you’d like to go the VC route, you need to show traction. But how do you acquire users and customers without much, or any money? Seems like a chicken and egg problem doesn’t it.

The Halo Effect is a type of cognitive bias, commonly known in marketing as the tendency for positive impressions in one area to influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas. When it comes to branding specifically, I believe that this effect has been demonstrated to reinforce as well as rejuvenate a brand in the eyes of its fans, it can be utilised to spark conversations around it and thus leading to more organic growth. The question that poses itself is how can we successfully achieve this effect, and why is it necessary to keep a brand alive in the fast paced and media devouring environment that we live in today?

The founders, marketers, brand managers, whoevers, who remember to think long term in times of crisis will be the ones who come out above the rest once things settle. We’ve been seeing this theory plastered all over our Linkedin feeds recently.  

If a guest asked for toast, would you butter a piece of bread and serve it up to them? No way – the ‘toasting’ is the essence of toast, and anything else is simply a job half done. The same applies to your brand. Skipping straight to designing your business logo is equal to spreading the butter straight onto bread…it’s ineffective and lacks the ‘essence’.

How hard can it be to design a logo? Simply draw a shape, choose a font, type in the company name and that’s a job well done, right? 

When a startup has a headache, it is far more critical to the business than if it was a corporate. Why? There are quite a few reasons…

Does design really impact how your brand is perceived? We break down how this ‘hidden’ visual language of design can be used to influence in branding.

Across the globe we have witnessed a plethora of brands hit impressive targets in terms of sustainability. Despite clear leeway opening up between these brands and those left behind, an opportunity presents itself for reinvention.

In my first article on ‘Burnout’ I said: “If a tree falls in the woods and doesn’t get a flurry of retweets, did it even?” It’s a good question that could be called facetious, depending on how seriously you take social media.

While there may be stories of some brands named in eureka moments, there is a methodical process you can follow so you don’t have to rely on random inspiration. We break down what goes into naming a brand.

As a global pandemic sweeps large parts of our world, one could be forgiven for not having their new marketing strategy or business pivot plan at the top of their agenda. We are collectively experiencing some form of anxiety to one degree or another, with our systems on constant, low-level ‘limbic alert’.

Social media has been a phenomenon. Before Facebook’s founding in 2004 there was the likes of Bebo, Faceparty, and MySpace. However, the last ten years have seen a huge spike in both users of social media and reasons for using it.

‘How to prepare your brand for the next stage of growth’: Many of us have tried a digital detox for ourselves: whether we’re trying to get back to nature, not ignore our families, or just step away from the phone for more than an hour! It is often far harder than we think, no matter how many influencers go on about it – ironically, on social media.

Your brand identity is how customers perceive you. A simple way to look at it, is to view your brand as a person. Someone unique, with their own beliefs, values, look and feel. Your brand identity is what sets you apart from others. So, it’s important to have this down pat. Here, Carie Barkhuizen, founder of Seymour PR, shares her top tips for building brand identity quick-smart.

A science-backed checklist for startups who want their marketing to get noticed.

Startups shouldn’t try and be liked – Instead, they must strive to be noticed and remembered  – that’s any new businesses biggest marketing challenge. Why is that?

Every leader has a distinctive emotional signature, which they imprint on every person they meet. That emotional signature is one of the most powerful tools of motivation. How you make other people feel will determine how motivated they are, and that will determine how well your team performs.

Congratulations! You are officially moving from the status of startup to scaleup. It’s a big move that brings lots of opportunities, and you have managed it because you have been successful. What that success looks like will be different for different companies. For some, it’s because of sales: either a few big global sales, or in other cases, huge numbers of small scale sales. For others, it will be because you’ve landed investment. In some parts of the world, grants allow a startup to accelerate their growth and really anchor themselves in the market.

With the UK currently home to more than 5.9 million SMEs, the likelihood of reaching success for any small business owner depends largely upon their ability to make their company stand out from the crowd. Differentiating your brand from others can be a challenge in any industry, but with the right knowledge and mindset it can be achieved.