Series Wrap Up: What is Product Brand?

Episode Transcription

Christian:

In this series, we set out to understand product brand on a deeper level. Brand is not just a logo, website, or a color palette, it's how your end user experiences everything related to your product. Andy Kennedy from Innovatemap shared with us how the brand encompasses more than just a logo or a website. As a listener, there's a few things to consider as you think about your brand. One, think about the entire customer experience. Two, what expectations am I setting with the digital brand experience? And finally, your brand tone of voice. One of the most compelling things Andy said relates to the business impact of brand.

Andy Kennedy:

Do you care about your audience's opinion about your business? If the answer to that [inaudible 00:00:51], it's hard to say no to. If the answer to that is yes, then I would say brand identity design is the proven way to shape opinions. That's what its job is. It's not a full stop, right? Brand identity design cannot all-in-one solve your PR problems, perception problems, but setting a correct foundation, using design to plant ideas in your audience's head, so that they see you in a certain way.

Anna:

Andy gave a great introduction to the topic, taking us right into some use cases of how to think about product brand. For Jon Howell, formerly of Lyft, connecting product and brand should be an intentional effort as it speaks to the entire experience an end user has with your organization. He shared how a business can justify brand experience design, noting its impact on building trust and loyalty with its customers.

Jon Howell:

So in part, we're trying to figure out how we can justify why brand experience design is important to our organization. And so one of those things is, how can we build trust and drive preference, but also ultimately creating affinity and loyalty to create more loyal customers? And in doing so, if we were able to identify a specific experience and identify the emotional highs and lows, and find a place where we're able to lean in on a user's emotion, this is a way we can build trust and preference by creating a relationship with them.

Anna:

And how the affinity with your brand can be built by creating memorable moments throughout the brand experience.

Jon Howell:

That's how they turn great experiences into memorable experiences, things that people didn't think about. A good example of this is on Twitter when it's your birthday, there's balloons that flow up from the bottom of the screen. You're able to pop them. The same goes if you visit somebody's profile that it's their birthday. It's that thing is not going to drive brand preference over time, but it's the thoughtfulness that a team focus their time on celebrating you and celebrating your birthday. And so people even share that. If you go on Twitter right now and you type in Twitter birthdays, you'll see screenshots of people celebrating the fact that, "Twitter gave me balloons my birthday. Or where are my Twitter balloons?" And so I think looking at those small things that might've slipped through the cracks, you're figuring out how you can build something that creates an emotional connection with users is the secret sauce.

Christian:

Adam Stoddard of Basecamp echoed similar thoughts related to creating brand experiences with one additional component to consider, scale. As a designer and a developer team of one, moving quickly and efficiently is essential to creating lasting brand experiences.

Adam Stoddard:

Because ultimately, the best brand is the brand that you can reliably produce and achieve. A really lofty goal that you can't actually reliably hit, that doesn't work.

Christian:

He discusses the ways to keep efficiencies in mind when designing.

Adam Stoddard:

And this goes for the Basecamp brand as well, but it's things like what I described where it's if we're making a new landing page, how easy is it going to be to create the assets that I need for this? Am I going to have to tap into a contractor to produce something? Is it something we can do in-house? And then there's the whole other side of, because I'm also the developer of all these websites. So there's also, how does this translate to something that's efficient for the web? Because the websites we produce are very lean. And if you put hey through the Google Lighthouse scores, you'll see nothing but hundreds. And that's a very intentional thing than you're going to like with these blobby, simple primitives, those translate really well to SVGs.

Adam Stoddard:

So they're small, they're light. I don't have to produce five different variations at various densities and sizes. And it just, again, streamlines this entire thing. And I think that's one of the benefits of how we approach design from this holistic perspective, that you can lose when you have specialists in these little silos where typically a brand designer isn't necessarily going to be thinking about how something they're producing might translate to an efficient webpage further down the chain, because that's so far removed from their area of expertise that it's just not even a thought.

Christian:

In thinking through how to apply some of Adam's insights to your organization, it's important to get feedback early instead of going off on design tangents. In his experience, the more rigorous and intentional you are upfront, the less wasted time there is.

Anna:

When founders Priyanka Vazirani and Shannon Almeida joined the series, they shared how their brand played a role in disrupting the news industry with one key thing in mind, your brand will constantly evolve.

Speaker 6:

It's never set. So I think [inaudible 00:05:33] is that even after a year, you're never going to be perfect. It's never going to be completely done. Your brand always evolves. It's always going to be changing, and you have to adapt to the situation and whatever rises. So I think that's something for us, that we learned the hard way earlier on, that it's never going to just be set from the beginning. You just have to keep reiterating, keep [inaudible 00:05:56] this for you.

Christian:

Our last guest, Emily St. Denis, Head of Platform at Female Founders Fund, provided a unique perspective from both her entrepreneurial journey of building a brand, and also from the lens of a venture capitalist sharing what she looks for when considering companies to add to the portfolio.

Emily St. Denis:

I would say a lot of what we do as such early stage investors is we're investing at the end of the day in a human being and an idea. And so a lot of times, yeah, we'll see a deck, but many times, there's nothing that's been built yet. Sometimes, there are communities that have traction and growth, so we can get a sense of what the vision is. But it's incredibly important to us that the founder is they want to categorize themselves as a true operator. And that's really what they're great at. They're great at ops. They're great at making these happen. They're incredible saleswomen. That's amazing, but we push very, very hard to have either a co-founder or one of the first hires be someone who can really think about brand for them.

Christian:

As we wrap this series, I think it's really cool to highlight another takeaway from Emily's interview. She phrased it as brand helps these early startups punch above their weight class.

Anna:

I love this, and I have said this to many people since Emily said this to us. And I think it's totally right. A really great brand, it makes you look more polished. It makes you look like you're farther along in your journey than you really are. This is one of my favorite takeaways.

Christian:

Yeah. And you don't really see it happening that often at the VC level. Here in Indianapolis, where the show is headquartered, we have High Alpha, which is a venture capital firm that really focuses on design. We see them, I think, in 2020, they had 10 startups, at least 10. And every one you look at, it looks really polished. But it's not just that it punches above the weight class. It's also as a potential buyer, I think the messaging resonates a lot better. I think it communicates what it does a lot better. There's less confusion when you have good brand. I think that alone gives you a competitive advantage over others as well.

Christian:

So if you're listening to this series and want to understand more about product brand, you can join other product professionals at betterproduct.community. Over the next few episodes, we'll be highlighting innovative product companies that have recently launched new products. So for now, I'm Christian.

Anna:

And I'm Anna.

Christian:

And this is Bet... I thought you were-

Anna:

[crosstalk 00:08:24] Better.

Christian:

Better Products. I thought you were coming in there.

Anna:

[crosstalk 00:08:28] Better.