Show + Tell: Starting with a Minimum Viable Brand
How to know the direction, even when you don’t quite know the exact destination.
The Story in Numbers:
Time in business: 6 years, 9 months.
Staff: 8 (Full + Part-Time).
Active Clients: 13
Website Staging Version: 55.
Current stage: staging.
Last time: Introducing our own rebrand
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You’ve probably heard the term “Minimum Viable Product” before. You probably heard it from a techbro, who maybe horse clicked at you and also said something about being “data driven” or “pivoting”. Don’t work with that guy.
Messenger aside, the MVP message is sound enough: quickly build a working version of your product, then get it out there to see if it has an audience or a niche. Create a lowest-cost version of the concept so you can collect objective feedback from disinterested parties. As David Deutsch would say, Conjecture followed by Criticism = Creativity. Once you’ve confirmed your hypothesis (that you have a good idea, one the world wants) you can then put the time and money into building out the real thing. Launch early, fail fast, invest once you know it’s worth it.
Want an example of an MVP? Here’s ours. We’re launching this on Gatsby, Netlifty and maybe Tailwind; a bit of an experiment for us (more on this later). We’ve also linked this up with Hotjar, so by viewing this, you’re actually giving us valuable user feedback. Cheers.
While the virtues of MVP have been well established (and documented) (and documented) (and documented), businesses can apply the same principles to their brand. If you want to start a new business or release a new product and you don’t have the time or money to create an entire brand system from scratch, a Minimum Viable Brand is your best bet. Otherwise, you might spend time and money you don’t have on creating something that’s not right for you. As we like to say, giving a Ferrari to a 14 year-old.
At its core, MVB involves identifying the same core components that a fuller, fancier Brand Strategy would:
People: who you are, and who you’re trying to connect with (Target Audience)
Product: what your product or service does on a functional level, including core benefits (which can and should be both emotional and rational)
Purpose: what you‘re striving to do (beyond just making money)
Proposition: the thing you’re offering your audience that nobody else is (this is usually the culmination of all the above, and is typically the hardest thing to do. It’s also the thing that has the most proprietary names and acronyms assigned to it: Brand Promise, BVP, KVP, Etc, Blah Blah Blah)—I want to put a pin in this, and come back to it at the end.
Personality: how you behave both visually and verbally, implicitly and explicitly—if the above constitutes your message, this is how you deliver it.
Strategists among you will even recognise this as Brand Strategy because a) there are an even number of things in a list, and; b) they all alliterate.
You can read more on these components here. I can go into more depth later if at all necessary, though again, I suspect it’s been well-enough documented. Point for now is, while these don’t need to be perfectly written, they do need to be clearly defined. Your business is likely to change and morph a lot in its early years, and while it’s important to be able to roll with these changes, it’s even more important not to lose sight of what you’re meant to be doing in the first place.
Think of it as a compass — we call it a North Star.
hate to explain via analogy, but it’s like a yacht race: a good sailor tacks and jibes (changes direction) to make the most of the wind, but always has a finish line that they’re shooting for. In the same way, set to the reference point of your North Star, “Pivoting” (changing tack in order to respond to feedback) is still oriented to a single general direction. You don’t all of a sudden do a complete 180 or veer off course just because a certain breeze is blowing.
We did this with Frank Body years ago.
There was a clear idea of who our People were (Millennials), what our Product was (caffeinated exfoliant scrub that made you look dirty lol), our Purpose (to make people feel connected and self-confident via a simple social media meme), and, of course, the Personality. We put a simple idea at the heart of the brand, along with a clear (and super basic) visual identity we knew could scale.