Branding Agency for Startups

In a world where startups must brand or fail, Josh Meah & Company can help you build a formidable brand from the ground up. 

We are a branding agency for startups with a brilliant track record of turning new businesses into brands. Before moving to the startup branding agency services that we offer, let’s briefly discuss what branding is.

What is a Brand?

Branding has several definitions, depending on who you ask. 

• The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or services as distinct from those of other sellers. 
• Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy defined brand as the intangible sum of a product’s attributes. 
• Marty Neumeier, the author of The Dictionary of Brand, says a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.

At Josh Meah & Co, we prefer the modern definition, which says a brand is the sum of all the experiences you deliver to customers. 

Branding and Customer Experience

Your customers have an experience whenever they interact with your business, products, services, and people. The experience may be good, bad, ugly, or – ideally – awesome. A prospective customer may have many such experiences during their buying cycle with you. The points where these interactions take place are called customer touchpoints. 

Your customer’s buying journey passes through several touchpoints before they are ready to pay for your product or service. To build a great brand, you have to ensure that the customer has a great experience at every touchpoint. Here’s an example to illustrate this process:

Let’s say a prospect customer views your ad on Facebook. That ad evokes certain feelings – it delivers a certain experience. That customer is motivated to click your ad and go to your website. They decide to call your office and talk to a sales person. After evaluating alternatives (that is, your competitors), comparing prices, and reading your reviews, they are finally ready to go to your sales page and make a purchase.

The above example illustrates several touchpoints that a customer goes through on their way to a purchase. While they are on their buying path, they perceive no boundaries between channels. They want to have a consistent, smooth, and predictable experience from start to finish. And that’s what we deliver as a branding agency for startups.

Why Create a Brand?

In the words of Peter Drucker, “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”. So, how do you acquire and retain customers?

To make a customer, a business must establish an emotional connection between its goods or services and its audience, a bond of trust and relatability that encourages people to try your product or service. And to keep a customer, you must grow and strengthen that emotional connection. The emotions your customers have about your product or service depends on the experiences they have with your business; in other words, your brand. Therefore, it can be said that the purpose of all businesses, including yours, is to brand.

The Role of a Startup Branding Agency 

At Josh Meah & Co, we love working with startups because they are willing to take risks. We help you stand out and create a unique and memorable brand by delivering a comprehensive brand experience. 

We identify the emotional connection between your brand and its audience and reinforce that connection by providing compelling design at each customer touchpoint. 

Branding involves knowledge of marketing and expertise in multiple areas including research, design, advertising, and more. As a branding agency for startups, we have the complete skill set ranging from research and strategy to brand experience design and from digital marketing to brand activation. 

Startup Branding Agency Process

We work with clients who have bright ideas backed by solid business plans and the will to make them work. A variety of tactics need to be applied to transform their vision into a thriving brand. Here’s the typical process that we follow:

Research and Discovery

We start building your startup brand by working with you to discover your business, products, customers, and competitors. Using data analytics, we deep dive into your customer’s behavior, buying journey, and media habits. We conduct a thorough competitor analysis and carve out a unique niche for you to position your brand. 

Brand Strategy 

Based on the learning from the research, we create a comprehensive brand strategy that covers areas like your ideal customer’s persona, a description of their buying journey, media and channel selection, brand positioning, creative strategy, content strategy, communication strategy, and more.

Brand Naming

The brand name needs to be distinctive, simple, original, and easy to recall. It should reflect your brand’s personality and resonate with your audience. As a startup branding agency, we present multiple options based on the brand strategy, along with the reasoning for selecting each of the options. 

Brand Identity Design

The brand identity is a visual depiction of your brand. It includes the wordmark or logo, brand font and typography, look and feel, tag line, and other visual elements. Our strategists and graphic designers create a clean and compelling brand identity document based on the brand strategy. 

Brand Voice

Just like a real person, a brand also has a tone of voice that makes it unique and different from other brands.The tone of voice can be formal, semi-formal, or casual, depending upon the desired personality of your brand and the line of business you’re in. For example, the tone of voice of a healthcare brand would probably be more formal than that of a food or apparel brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Based on the data gathered during the research and discovery phase, we create a map of your customer’s buying journey. The map includes the digital channels your customers use and the touchpoints where they interact with your business. This helps us brainstorm ideas for the marketing content that we need to serve them at each step and create a memorable brand experience.

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Brand Experience Design

We work out the key messages of your brand, making sure the content corresponds to the channels, touchpoints and journey of your audience. We create channel-specific yet consistent design to amplify the impact of your message and deploy the concept of integrated marketing communication to establish a robust omnichannel brand presence.

Brand Communication Campaigns 

Brand communication is a combination of various activities such as advertising, social media, and customer reviews that we use to communicate with your customers. The goal of brand communication is to inform, persuade, teach, and remind customers and stakeholders about your brand. The messages that are communicated can pertain to the brand’s strengths, values, propositions, and offerings of products and services.

Here are some of the things we do to promote and strengthen your brand:

• Google, Bing and YouTube SEO to make more people discover your website and brand
• Pay-per-click advertising on Google, Facebook and Bing
• Display and programmatic advertising campaigns
• Content marketing via social media and blogs
• Influencer marketing to build trust and prompt trial
• Conversational marketing via messaging apps to answer your customer’s questions
• Email marketing to keep your brand in their inboxes and minds

Toward 360-Degree Branding

Creating a robust brand is about creating a 360-degree experience for your customers. And to deliver a great experience, advertising or marketing must be backed by each employee. This calls for building a company-wide culture of branding. The brand values need to be communicated internally to all stakeholders, particularly those whose work directly impacts the customer experience, such as sales and customer service employees. As a startup branding agency, Josh Meah & Company provides the technical and professional bandwidth to help entrepreneurs create a culture that supports the brand in the long term. Do not hesitate to contact us and schedule a free strategy session to discuss your startup branding.