It’s no secret that branding processes are fraught with challenges. They often take longer than expected and rarely do they meet with positive reviews. Most importantly, they can take time from other initiatives, both urgent and important. So here is a guide to running a startup branding process that gets the job done well, quickly.  There’s an infamous flak jacket that White House press secretaries for years have been handing-down from one to the next, filled with notes and advice. Consider this the flak jacket I bequeath to you. Go forth and conquer.

What branding processes have I been a part of?

(AKA “Why should you listen to me?”)

I co-led our rebrand at Codecademy alongside our VP of design Conor McLaughlin where we worked with the incredibly talented Mike Mcvicar and Katie Levy of Gander (and formerly of Red Antler) to update nearly every aspect of Codecademy’s brand (results here and here). 

I also co-led the branding process at Bloc alongside the talented Emelyn Baker (later led design at AltSchool, now a design lead at Google). I was also a part of SoFi’s first branding process led by CMO Julie Haddon (early marketing leader at eBay and Twitter, now at the NFL). 

Most recently I’ve spent a year working alongside Adam Hanft as we've rebranded EasyKnock and ventured into media including radio, out of home, and TV. 

After all of this, i still consider myself a beginner. Below is what I’ve learned so far.

What Should the Output of the Branding Process Be? 

Your deliverable should be a brand book that covers:

• Strategy - company mission statement and positioning statement. Optional: brand values, vision statement

• Logo - If you’re doing a rebrand, you’ll change the logo. At Codecademy we were happy with the logo Pentagram had created for us a few years earlier, but did a brand refresh of everything else

• Voice and Tone - written style guide defining the brand’s personality

• Look and Feel - fonts, colors, photography and/or illustration style

• Proofs of Concept for homepage, About page, and Facebook ads*

*This may not always be considered within the scope of a rebrand, but I strongly recommend you add it. More on that below.

Do Proofs-of-Concept

It’s easy to be aligned on a set of abstract colors or rules for voice & tone. But then when you show how the new brand book is implemented in a homepage redesign, everyone has strong, even emotional reactions, and you realize you aren’t aligned at all! I’ve seen this happen over and over.

To prevent this it’s critical to do proofs of concept for the homepage (the place that’s likely to trigger the strongest reaction) and a few other key assets. This may not be included in the scope of work initially, so at EasyKnock and Codecademy I made sure it got added. We created an example ad, email template, homepage mockup, and wrote About page copy. In fact as of this writing Codecademy’s homepage still looks quite similar to what we created so long ago.

The Secret Ingredient is Spiciness

If a brand is bland, it won’t be remembered. In How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp calls this “brand distinctiveness.” Emelyn at Bloc called it “spiciness.” Brands need personality. For example, many brands may aspire to be playful, but Mailchimp makes sure you feel it: they bake animated high fives and rocket launches into the product experience. I’ve never seen any other marketing solution be so brave or so memorable.

There’s a time and a place for spiciness, so Mailchimp’s Style Guide lets marketers know when it’s okay to spice things up.

I could devote a whole post to spiciness, but wanted to focus on the process for getting there. When she was leading Bloc’s branding process, Emelyn explained the concept of spiciness upfront, with examples, and got alignment from the team and the founders that we wanted a brand that had spice. Next, during the part of the process where we discussed brand values, she asked people to come up with 5 overarching values, but two that were meant to be “spice values.” The team eventually whittled it down to 3 values total, including one “spice value.”

What Does a Branding Project Cost? 

An external branding agency will run you $40K to $150K and will run a process that takes 8-24 weeks. But the real cost is the time of the internal team and the opportunity cost of that time.

I’ve never encountered a founder for whom the brand isn’t deeply personal. For a branding process to succeed, you need the founders to be totally bought-into the process and the output. That means they’ll need to be involved in most milestone meetings, which means the brand process is going to take a non-trivial amount of their time. 

Sequencing Is The Biggest Challenge for Startup Branding

Sequencing is critical for startups. Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast episodes with Josh Silverman and Drew Houston do a good job driving this point home. If you do the right things in the wrong order, you can fall behind the competition and miss the market opportunity entirely. For example if you don’t find enough traction fast enough the company could die.

A rebrand’s opportunity cost might be another strategic initiative or a project that might have a larger short-term impact on revenue . Read the story of Uber’s rebrand. Travis and Shalin were aware of the need for a rebrand for almost a year before they chose to begin, and once starting the project dragged on for a year and a half. 

My take: First, be comfortable saying “no” to a rebrand until you’re convinced the tradeoffs are worth it and until you’re convinced you have the time to invest in doing it well. If you delay, use that time to grow the team so you have capacity to keep one pod focused on short-term growth while another can focus on brand.

Second, rather than this traditional waterfall approach of a major rebrand, consider an agile approach where you empower your design and marketing teams to iterate over time. At EasyKnock we prototyped a number of unique visual treatments over the course of 4 months and went so far as to do treatments of our facebook ads and landing pages and measure how the impact on CTR and Cost per Lead.

Be Picky About Who Gives Feedback and How Feedback is Given

Branding can feel like a high-stakes decision that requires buy-in from the whole executive team or even the whole company. I’ve done this: it’s death by a thousand papercuts.

First, be picky about who needs to be included. Keep the team as tight as possible. If you don’t personally think someone’s feedback is going to add to the process, cut them. If they aren’t going to be able to be a part of the working group the whole way through, cut them. I tried the “working team” and broader “feedback team” and it made the process far more painful. Avoid it if you can.

Second, be picky about how feedback is given. Designers are often trained on how to provide constructive criticism. Consider training everyone whose feedback is being requested. The short version is feedback needs to be specific, actionable, and ideally rooted in some kind of rationale based on technique or logic. If you’re getting feedback that’s not helpful, as a leader it’s your responsibility to fix it. Your team (and their therapists) will thank you.

How to Build and Maintain Trust During the Branding Process

You need your CEO to trust the branding agency, so it’s critical the CEO not only be involved with picking the agency, but that they are 100% onboard with the agency you choose. If they had reservations about the choice, it’ll undermine the credibility of everything the agency does, and potentially doom the project. Every CEO is different, but twice I’ve seen that sourcing an agency through a referral from an advisor your CEO trusts can make a huge difference.

You’re going to need to run an inclusive, transparent, and brisk process.

A rebrand will impact the work of all your executive peers, but especially your VP of Product, Sales, and People. Your brand will influence your ability to hire, your ability to close deals, and implementing it will impact the roadmaps of your product and engineering teams.

Branding can also be deeply personal for every employee and company morale.

For all these reasons, someone will need to devote time to running the process well. This internal project lead will need to gather input at the right moments, ensure the right stakeholders feel heard and the rest understand why they weren’t included. For all of this to happen you should plan to devote 1 senior full time employee as the internal project lead, and plan for them to spend at least half of their time to this project for it’s duration (8-24 weeks). If your marketing team is less than 5 people, this project lead might be you.

Should you Hire A Branding Agency?

Yes. Branding often requires specialists who over-index on visual design, creative writing, and intuition. In my experience, startups tend to hire generalists but branding requires a few specific specializations. At Codecademy we had the right team for growing the business but not the right team to push the envelope of our brand. For the talents and experience level required to build a great at brand, it may not make sense to have that type of talent in-house until the business surpasses 150 employees.