There is a common notion that a great idea that’s perfectly executed, is all it takes for any startup to be successful. However, in today’s highly competitive startup ecosystem, more and more startups are flooding the market in every sector. In order to stand out from the crowd, startups need to invest in their branding to attract potential investors and clients. It doesn’t matter if your business is small or big, B2B or B2C, profitable or non-profitable, you will need a brand identity.
But what exactly is startup branding?
Branding is a marketing strategy aimed to make people quickly identify and experience an organization’s brand and products and select them over competitors’ products. The strategy involves the practice of creating a name, a logo, and other design assets that are easily identifiable as belonging to the organization.
According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, “95% of customer purchasing decisions are subconscious”. Even if the competitors have a wider range of features, better pricing models, more experience in the market, etc. A great startup branding can motivate a customer’s subconscious to go with your business’ products and services over competitor’s ones.
Key Branding Statistics:
88 % of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like
46 % of consumers say that they would pay more to purchase from brands they can trust
64% of consumers make a purchase after watching a branded piece of video content
Consistent brand presentation has seen to increase revenue by 33 %
It only takes about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for people to form an opinion about your website
More than half of startups fail to launch due to problems with marketing or product-market fit. Fortunately, these risks can be easily mitigated with good branding; yet many startups do not prioritize branding as a “must-do” in the early stages of development. On the surface it may seem like a no-brainer—just do the branding and change the outcome—yet branding is still not something that is always prioritized by startups.
Products tend to change, teams transition and customers shift in the journey. But, once a brand has been created the core of the brand remains a constant and everything settles around it. A clear brand strategy provides clarity and a roadmap for the team to be successful and how to meet the organization's goals. So, creating a brand far outlives the mere purpose of gaining market share and benefits an organization organically.