branding your online business

A brand is a unique vision that customers recall when thinking of your company name. It’s what you stand for. It’s the emotions you evoke inside your customers’ hearts at the mere the mention of your name. It’s associated with any previous experience the customer has had with you, and it can be earned and destroyed in minutes.

But long before you have those customers, you have to build a product and choose a brand – and both of these efforts can be incredibly time consuming and filled with uncertainty.

While building a product is laborious, branding doesn’t have to be a chore. By committing yourself to the lean branding approach, you can build a solid brand without the unnecessary hoops that so many companies jump through. Branding, at its core, is the process of instilling a positive, and memorable perception in your customer’s mind – and lean branding means doing this in an efficiently lean way.

If you’re in a startup, lean is your middle name. Your resources are likely limited, so lean branding is a principle you’ll want to embrace – especially if your company is still nailing down your core market and product. For most startups, lean branding is the way to go.

Branding at early days

At the ideation stage, even before working on a product, you’re going to have assumptions of what people want – and those assumptions may or may not turn out to be true. It’s quite normal, in these early days, to have a lot of uncertainties about the product and the market, but that doesn’t mean you should put off your branding efforts until everything is fleshed out. What it does mean is that your brand has to be fluid. Now is the time to start building your brand, and that brand has to be one that will evolve with you.

Lean branding ensures you are creating a dynamic brand that can morph into perfection as your product does as well.

Laying the foundation for your brand

In the early days, you won’t have much of a marketing budget – and that’s ok. It doesn’t take an enormous budget to build a brand, despite what some branding experts will tell you. It does, however, mean that branding has to be a concern from the get-go. You must lay a solid foundation early on, to build a lean brand.

This includes coming up with a brand that doesn’t limit your future endeavors, and validating it amongst peers and first customers. Names, logos and taglines, should be chosen, but they have to be general at the ideation stage – go with something that evokes your reason for being but leaves room for growth and allows you to evolve as the product does.

What can’t be vague is your vision and core value. From the beginning, what you want to accomplish has to be concrete, even if the way you accomplish it changes. Vision and core values come first, because having a brand without a vision is like a ship without a rudder.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself while validating your brand identity.

  1. Is your brand identity unique and distinct? It doesn’t matter, at this point if it’s perfectly aligned to product, but it should definitely align to vision.

  2. Is it significant enough to notice? Can you really own this brand without significant effort?

  3. Is your vision – how you want to change the world – set in stone? Everything else can grow and change, but this part has to be solid.

Lean Branding FTW

The lean branding process is ideal at the ideation stage. This process allows you to choose a company name that can actually be fairly vague, and then building upon it as you learn your target market, your ideal customer and create that first, maybe even not-quite-ready-for-prime-time product. Lean branding means setting the foundation for those wonderful customer experiences, long before you have customers or even an MVP. It means nailing down the vision and choosing a brand that will grow as you refine your product, even while you’re still in ideation.


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