How we develop minimum viable brands to test new ventures
New ideas come from anywhere. The shower, the grocery store, waiting for the bus. Most of them disappear without us giving them a second thought. This is precisely why I encourage everyone I meet to carry a notebook with them everywhere they go. To capture those raw and unformatted ideas before they evaporate into thin air and trust me, they do! Personally, I like grid lined moleskins. If you can’t carry around a notebook, your smartphone will do just fine.
This is also a roundabout way of making my point that great ideas are both endless and a commodity. If we let our minds wander, we can generate literally hundreds of ideas in as little as a few hours. We could cure world hunger, achieve world peace, anything at all really. The reality is that these ideas will most likely never amount to anything more than a fleeting thought dismissed within the nanosecond. Furthermore, it’s incredibly difficult to bring a great idea into reality without the right execution, the right timing, and a disciplined team.
I’m not saying you can’t launch a new business or idea without a solid foundation. You certainly can! It’s been done and done well quite a number of times already. In saying that, the success rate of a new venture skyrockets when all stars align – timing, execution and the right team.
Unfortunately, we can’t help too much in the timing department. If we could, we’d make sure the world was ready for the Mercedes Avatar Concept Car, but it just isn’t.
A venture design studio really comes into play when you need the advice, support and access to an experienced group of minds, purposely built to bring your idea to life – dramatically increasing your startup’s chance of success.
I won’t talk about identifying the right time to launch or product-market fit right now. Instead for this article, I want to focus on the execution expertise we bring to the table and save the augmentation of your team for a post at a later date.
Our approach
We take a strict, three step approach to building a venture through design. And, if you’ve read any of my previous articles, you know that I use the term ‘design’ in quite a broad sense to encompass design thinking and the application of design principles to a multitude of things.
Straight to the chase.
Our first step is to determine whether we believe there’s potential in your idea or not (and if we don’t, we hope you find someone who does believe in your idea, go forth and build an empire and come back to rub it in our faces!). Once we believe in and share your passion for the project, we start to develop your minimum viable brand (MVB) using the process outlined below.
If you’re not sure what a Minimum Viable Brand is, here’s a fantastic article from Harvard Business Review.
Step one: Strategic System
In this step, we work with you through a single one-day workshop to help you (and us!) gain further clarity around your idea. Why it exists, who it serves, what makes it distinctive, etc.
It’s here that we develop guidelines for what will later become your strategic blueprint and the first iteration of your brand strategy. This becomes your internal compass and guides direction until your brand has the space to evolve into its own living, breathing thing.
Step two: Design System
The design system is the development of an identity for your business. It’s the first initial signifiers of the brand developed in your strategic system. It’s something for the market to identify with in the next step. This is a very stripped down version of your branding, your visual and verbal identity and your first tangible asset to live within your brand atmosphere.
It’s not intended to stay in the market (though it might) but it’s something to get you started. Something to get movement and start to build associations and hopefully, hype and consideration for your product or service.
Step three: MVB Launch
Step three is about launching your new venture to the market as quickly as possible. Here, we take the strategic system and your design system to put a foundational campaign together and start to generate some interest in your product. This campaign is not intended to generate revenue, or bring in leads or sell anything. It simply exists to gather valuable, real-time data and insights on how your target prospects are interacting with your MVB.
Do they accept it? Do they understand it? Can we learn anything from them? What can we do better? What’s the most important feedback on the idea to include (or remove) from the development roadmap? And most importantly, is the idea both commercially and culturally viable!
Feedback
During the MVB launch, we dig through the data in real time and prioritise what’s most important to build on next. Is it product development? Is it brand awareness and growth? Where’s the most potential to turn this venture, this blessing of an idea into a revenue generator as quickly as possible? Did we actually find product-market fit like we originally thought? Is the timing right?
The process is simply: Strategise, design, launch, adapt, repeat. Nothing fancy. The approach to each one of those steps is what’s important.
Moving on.
It’s important to note that the purpose of this process is to get you to market as quickly as possible to test, iterate and further define your idea, product or service before you invest truck loads of time and money into product development.
It’s not a concrete set of deliverables or a polished brand book, and it’s sure as shit not something to craft, hand over and simply forget about. It’s a constant process and must evolve and grow in tandem with your business. A big word for that would be concurrently or simultaneously, but I like metaphors.
In summary
They say business is a marathon. If that’s the case, my question is why are we still briefing agencies to build strategies, craft identities and give us back a few documents to go and implement. With absolutely no room built in for the brand to evolve, to find it’s own feet as your business grows beside it. Rebrands are a totally different ballgame – remember, this is for startup ventures.
At the end of the day, strategy, design and craft are all signifiers for the brand your customers are building around our business. A brand needs room to grow and evolve. Our approach to branding does exactly that. It’s been built directly into our process from the very start all those years ago.
If you’re building the next best thing or have an amazing idea you’d like our help to build, I’d love to hear from you. You can catch me at the studio on +61 7 3556 5329 or reach out to us directly at studio@mkrst.co and remember, it costs nothing say hello.
Brand Storytelling 101: Think Before You Speak
Once upon a time in an agency far, far away, a team of creatives built a brand so beautiful and the business lived happily ever after. It’s a story so sweet you might want to spit it out – and that’s because it’s nothing but sugar.
When crafting a brand’s story, it’s only natural to tell the sweet tales of success. Sharing the struggles that a business faces will only put a sour taste in the audience’s mouth, right? Well, not exactly.
If social media has taught us one thing, it’s that constant highlight reels are exhausting. Watching people constantly talk about success and smooth sailing is nothing if not eye-roll inducing. So how do you stop those eyes from rolling over to the next business? How do you engage your audience? And no, a few likes on a tweet doesn’t count as engagement.
So let’s start from the beginning
What is storytelling in branding?
Storytelling is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot but what really makes a story worth telling?
Storytelling is about honest communication and an appreciation for what makes you unique. It’s the culmination of the highs, lows, conflicts, and barriers that define and drive your purpose as a brand.
It’s the consistent narrative that connects your brand to your audience and underlines the values shared between the business and the customer. It’s ever-evolving and so much more than your about page.
So what?
In an internet-driven world of instant gratification and constant communication, authentic connection has become increasingly scarce and coveted. As a result, businesses can no longer coast by as faceless entities. They’re now expected to build relationships with their customers. A business needs to build a personality, tug on the heartstrings, and connect with an audience on a deeper level.
Storytelling has become a crucial component of modern marketing because it allows a brand to share their values, ethics, and motivations with the customer.
How do you craft an engaging story?
Engaging and effective storytelling demands more than a polished sequence of success stories. With the world flipped on its head and locked inside, 2020 marked the death of social media as a highlights reel. Self-indulgent stories about success reads as inauthentic and fabricated, which hinder the transparency and trustworthiness of the brand. What a reader wants to find in a story is themselves, something they can relate to that proves there are humans behind a business.
To evoke a compelling response, storytelling requires four components: character, conflict, action, transformation. Most importantly, you need conflict. Conflict is the single most important aspect to an engaging story. Without it, there’s no room for action or transformation. It’s Film School 101, the very first lesson you learn in scriptwriting class, and marketing should be no different.
Let’s take the story of The Three Little Pigs as an example.
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs who decided to move out of their parent’s home. They each built their own house; one from straw, one from sticks, and one from bricks. They moved next door to a wolf who baked them an apple crumble to welcome the pigs to the neighbourhood. The three little piggies each insured their home and contents and have family dinners together every Sunday.
Sounds charming but leaves plenty to be desired, right? Maybe your belly grumbled at the thought of apple crumble, but it’s hardly an evocative tale because it lacks emotional appeal. The story has no relevance because it lacks reality. Life is unpredictable and no matter how determined or informed you are, it will throw obstacles at you. In the real world, there is a big bad wolf and he doesn’t bake apple crumbles. At least not often.
Championing your obstacles is a show of strength for your brand and helps you form your story. It helps your audience empathise with the business and form their own relationship with it.
Denying conflict is denying authenticity
Time and time again we see businesses try to prove they’re flawless, faultless, fantastically perfect brands. In an attempt to gain and maintain the customers trust, brands deny themselves conflict and therefore deny themselves authenticity. And authenticity is exactly what the modern customer is looking for in a business. Why should they trust you?
Customers interact with their favourite brands on the same platforms as they interact with their friends, mothers, grannies, and cousins. This has changed the way in which we, as brands, communicate with an audience. It’s created an environment where ‘brand personality’ takes on a new and more literal meaning.
Brands need to work out who they are, why they’re here, and what they’re bringing to the table before marketing to an audience that demands so much more than what you sell. What’s our advice, you might ask?
Focus not on telling, but crafting the story.
You’ll forgive me for sounding like a primary school teacher; but think before you speak. Craft and draft the story before you tell the story. Crafting a compelling, relatable, and appealing brand story has become one of the greatest necessities (and accomplishments) for the modern brand. It serves as the North Star guiding the rest of the communications to tell a cohesive and consistent narrative. Now that businesses have dozens of two-way communication channels directly with their audiences, storytelling transcends far beyond a meaningless brand story that a bunch of dudes dropped in your brand book all those years ago and never told you what to do with it.
Storytelling encompasses everything from Instagram DMs to the primetime TV slot. Once the foundational values are established, the relationship between business and customer will grow.
So before you start a dialogue with your customers, ask yourself one question: What makes you human?
Design serves a much higher purpose than it’s form. Here’s why…
Have you ever thought about why things are, the way they are?
Why do all cars take a similar form and shape regardless of their shared function of simply moving us around. Why are all hammers the way they are and why do we still carry loads of keys around, when technology could help us completely eliminate the unwelcoming anxiety from our lives when they suddenly disappear.
Mostly, it’s because we tend to design things to serve a specific function and the form, or the shape they take, directly responds to the function they serve no matter how complicated, or simplified that function may be.
Don’t get me wrong, as a designer inspired by the bauhaus movement, an enthusiast of classic mid-century styles and an unparalleled love for swiss design, I still very much believe in and practice the philosophy that form follows function which is a design principle historically defined by American Architect Louis Sullivan as;
“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”
As referenced in an article by Smashing Magazine
To paraphrase in our own words. Form is traditionally referred to as how something looks, how it feels, its characteristics, it’s uniqueness, can we make it more appealing through design, can we make it easier to use, can we design it so the user doesn’t even have to think about how to use it. This is design, in form.
Function is all about how it works, what makes it work and what makes it useful which is part of the entire design process. If we can use design thinking to improve functionality in the development of products, objects and their core characteristics rather than simply the use of design in form, we are presented with the opportunity to build far superior products that are both easier to use and to understand.
To summarise, if a product or piece of commercial design looks beautiful, but is unusable or lacks purpose, it does not follow the philosophy and is a complete waste of time. For example, giving a flying bat the form of an arm instead of a wing does not follow the function of a flying bat.
So, if the development of a product’s functionality directly influences it’s form, would it not make sense to allow a team of designers to assist in the development of its functions in the first place? From the very beginning?
The answer is yes. And a resounding yes!
And not just for objects or products, I believe you can apply these principles to design better businesses and of course, better brands.
History has already proved that this approach works and you’ll almost always get a far better, simpler and more purposeful product as a result by applying good design practices, earlier in the lifecycle of a product. Bringing designers into the conversation at the beginning allows you to shift from the chronological process we drift toward when building something to a more lateral thought process and approach to the problem.
When you work in this way (more laterally), you begin to unlock opportunities to co-design the solution, or the function with the form. You create the ability to design beauty and experience while building functionality at the same time. The result? A recipe for successful design.
Next time you’re working on a new venture, a new product or your up against a new challenge that needs solving. Try and bring your designers in as early as possible. It’ll do you (and your product) the world of good.